Last Plays

Waiting in the Wings, considered by Coward one of his best, is a play of old age and theatrical insiders, a smaller world than that of the Twenties plays, but mellowed and more universal. A Song at Twilight, about an elderly famous writer blackmailed for his callousness towards a homosexual friend of his youth, raises questions about whether Coward is thinking of Maugham or himself, and whether he was influenced by Sartre’s Huis Clos. Death is courageously confronted in Shadows of the Evening where a publisher has only a few months to live. His (and presumably Coward’s) life-affirming Stoicism is defined against the more orthodox religious beliefs of his wife and mistress. The American Verner in Come into the Garden Maud sees that his choice between two women, his wife and a new acquaintance, is a choice between two outlooks, the one tough, single-minded, self-centred, the other more ready to dream, more poetic and more human.