Easy Virtue (play)

Easy Virtue is a three-act play by Noël Coward. He wrote it in 1924 when he was 25 years old, and it is his 16th play. The play had a successful first run in New York in 1925 and then opened in London in 1926. It has been revived several times since and made into a film twice—in 1928 and 2008.

In tone and style, Easy Virtue is essentially a drawing room melodrama, with flourishes of the signature wit which would later be identified with him. The central characters of the play are John Whittaker and Larita, the American divorcée he has just married to his mother's great disapproval.

Easy Virtue was produced at a time when Coward was riding a wave of success. The Vortex had been a controversial sensation on both sides of the Atlantic with veiled references to homosexuality and drug taking. In his autobiography, Present Indicative, Coward said that his object in writing the play was to present a comedy in the structure of a tragedy "to compare the déclassée woman of to-day with the more flamboyant demi-mondaine of the 1890s".

The play was first produced in U.S. at the Broad Theatre, Newark, New Jersey. It moved to New York in December 1925 and ran for 147 performances, with Jane Cowl starring as Larita and Joyce Carey as Sarah. Broadway audiences appreciated Larita as someone who depicted the rise of the individual in society, and the rights of a woman to lead her own life out of the constraints of her husband's opinion. In 1926, Easy Virtue opened at the Duke of York's Theatre in London's West End.

In 1988, the play was revived at the King's Head Theatre and then at the Garrick Theatre with Jane How, Zena Walker and Ronnie Stevens.Greta Scacchi played Larita in a 1999 revival at the Festival Theatre in Chichester.

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