Introduction

Coward is more than just a major practitioner of the drama of the 1920s. He continued a theatrical tradition of well-made plays and contributed to the Ibsen-Shaw theatre of ideas with plays on themes of sexual morality. His dialogue was more colloquial than that of his predecessors. The plays embody awareness of social-political developments reflected in other writers, such as the war issue in the late 1930s, and the sunset of empire after the war.