Reading Noel Coward's plays encourages the belief that there is a point where Literature and Show Business meet. While it is difficult to know exactly what happens there, these four volumes of his plays [Coward Plays], which take us up to 1941, certainly suggest that it may have provided Coward with the criteria as well as the conditions within which he conceived his work. (p. 46)

Coward's earlier plays prick at the pomposity principles of English life. Modernity, in behaviour, codes of conduct, fashions, and in its encouragement of irresponsibility and self-deception, intrigued him. "One gets carried away by glamour, and personality, and magnetism—they're beastly treacherous things", Bunty says to Tom in The Vortex. "Nothing but the ceaseless din of trying to be amused", Nicky complains as he quizzes his mother about her reckless infidelities. The Vortex establishes an extreme of that kind of irresponsibility which is supported by...