Written by Noël Coward First performance 1922 Genre One-act play | Date premiered 1922 (1922) Playwright Noël Coward Original language English language | |
Similar Nude with Violin, The Vortex, Present Laughter, Private Lives, Blithe Spirit | ||
The Better Half is a one-act play by Noël Coward first performed in 1922 by the Grand Guignol theatre company. It was never published and thought to be lost until Richard Hand and Mike Wilson, researchers writing a book on the theatre company, discovered it in the British Library in September 2007, where it had been deposited as part of the Lord Chamberlain's Plays collection. According to Wilson, the play is about a "husband and wife [who] are in an unhappy relationship and he is about to embark on an affair, but he is an honourable man and refuses to consummate it... They are trying to keep it away from the wife but unknown to him, she already knows and is trying to encourage it because she knows they are unhappy." [1]
The Sticking Place theatre company revived the play at the Union Theatre in Southwark in London, in a production that opened on 16 October 2007. It was broadcast as a radio play on BBC Radio 4 on 25 May 2009, starring Federay Holmes, Samuel West and Lisa Dillon, and directed by Martin Jarvis.[2]