The Entertainer

Evidently Coward’s achievement is more than his public persona suggests; there is theatrical skill, acquired by experience when he was young, extending to construction, character, dialogue and subtext. Responsive to currents in social life, he explores sexual and psychological themes, cocks a snook at convention, and in his large-scale dramas of British and colonial life celebrates the crises and achievements that defined a nation. At the same time he has some room in several later plays for the American experience. His career shows a development, effecting a transition from Edwardian theatre to that of Osborne and Pinter.