Post Mortem (Coward play)

Post Mortem is a one-act play in eight scenes, written in 1930 by Noël Coward. He wrote it after appearing in, and being moved by, an earlier play about World War I, Journey's End by R. C. Sherriff. As soon as he had completed writing it, however, he decided that it was suitable for publication but not for production.

The play was first staged in a prisoner of war camp in Austria in 1944, and a television version was broadcast in 1968. It was not professionally presented on stage until 1992, two decades after Coward's death. Critical opinion has generally agreed with Coward about the effectiveness of the play onstage, although it includes some techniques that Coward used elsewhere with greater success.

In 1930, Coward briefly played the role of Stanhope in R. C. Sherriff's play Journey's End, set in the trenches of World War I. He did not consider his performance successful, writing afterwards that his audience "politely watched me take a fine part in a fine play and throw it into the alley." However, he was "strongly affected by the poignancy of the play itself" and wrote his own "angry little vilification of war" shortly afterwards. As soon as it was written, he decided that it was for publication only and should not be staged, and he published it in 1931. The press commented on the absence of a production: "Mr Noel Coward, riding on the crest of such a wave of success that it might have been imagined that his least work would be bargained for, published last year a serious play, Post-Mortem, that, so far as we know, no manager made the smallest attempt to produce."

When the first volume of Coward's collected plays was published in 1934, he wrote an introduction commenting on the various plays. Reviewing the volume, the critic St. John Ervine wrote of Post Mortem, Mr. Coward's considered judgment on it is sound, and a sign of his rapidly maturing talent. He now regards it as 'sadly confused and unbalanced'." Reviewing the same volume, James Agate praised Coward's seriousness and reproached avant garde theatres for failing to stage the play. In 1935 a production was planned at a small provincial theatre with a reputation for staging new works, but the plans were not realised.

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Wikipedia