One does not usually think of the late Sir Noël Coward, that ubiquitous eminence of the British theatre for five decades, as being particularly a "political" dramatist…. Even critics and students of the theatre appraising his career generally begin by acknowledging his wide-ranging versatility and then tend to concentrate their attentions on his major, most frequently staged comedies. Those plays (Hay Fever, Private Lives, Blithe Spirit, Design For Living, and Present Laughter) are characterized by their clever dialogue, a lightning-fast repartee, and the sparkling, yet blasé, sophistication with which they dispatch the stylish indulgences of the clever, such little pleasures of life as a menage à trois, adultery, spiritualism, or general Bohemian non-conformity. Even his final play, the three-part Suite in Three Keys …, which dealt in part with homosexuality, was voted by the Outer Critics Circle as the "best comedy" of the 1974 season. Although Coward achieved his first great success in the 1920's with a controversial play about mother fixation and drug addiction (The Vortex), the critical propensity in the years since has been to categorize him as a comic playwright of superficial concerns.
Yet, an examination of the dramatist's total canon of work reveals him as an author who frequently questioned, and often set himself against, the prevailing social and political tides of his times. For example, Coward commented unfavorably many times about those in British political life who, through their policies, reduced his nation's power and influence in international affairs. Indeed, this writer of sophisticated comedy also wrote often commending nationalism, endorsing patriotism and tradition, praising the class system, and favoring the "common sense" approach of an enlightened middle class to that of pretentious intellectuals of the progressive Left in solving social ills. He also saluted bravery in battle in an era when most influential voices in the theater (and the arts, generally) were becoming increasingly anti-military. His views, coming when the world's theater espoused one school after another of despair and nihilism—from the Marxist-oriented social realism of the 1930's through the Existentialists up to the Absurdists—mark Coward as either a brave eccentric among the fashionable playwrights of his time or as a writer with a distinctly individualized, but nonetheless conservative, point of view. (p. 95)
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