Easy Virtue

Easy Virtue is a three-act play by Noël Coward, written in 1924 when he was 25 years old. The play depicts the conflict that arises within a conventional upper-middle-class household when the only son of the family marries a glamorous divorcée. The play had a successful first run in New York in 1925 and then opened in London in 1926. It has been revived several times since and made into a film twice – in 1928 and 2008. Background Easy Virtue was produced at a time when Coward was riding a wave of success. The Vortex (1924) had been a controversial sensation on both sides of the Atlantic with its portrayal of recreational drug taking and veiled references to homosexuality; his comedy Hay Fever (1925) achieved box-office success in the West End. In his autobiography, Present Indicative, Coward said that his object in writing the play was to present a comedy in the structure of a tragedy "to compare the déclassée woman of to-day with the more flamboyant demi-mondaine of the 1890s". Easy Virtue was the first of his plays to have its world premiere outside England. It was first given in the US, on 23 November 1925, at the Broad Theatre, Newark, New Jersey, before opening in New York in December 1925, where it ran for 147 performances. In 1926, after a week's pre-London try-out in Manchester, it opened at the Duke of York's Theatre in the West End, where it ran for 124 performances, from 9 June to 2 October. Both productions were directed by Basil Dean, and starred Jane Cowl as Larita, Mabel Terry-Lewis as Mrs Whittaker, and Joyce Carey as Sarah. Coward wrote that the London run ended only because Cowl had to return to America. Her performance in the lead role was more melodramatic than he thought ideal, but it was popular with audiences, and he admitted that the box-office success of the play owed much to her. Roles and original casts