Fallen Angels (play)

[1] His comedy Fallen Angels had already attracted the interest of Gladys Cooper, who wanted to produce the piece and co-star with Madge Titheradge, but the contractual commitments of the two actresses precluded it.

[2] It was not until the success of The Vortex that other managements became eager to stage the playwright's existing works, which, as well as Fallen Angels, included Hay Fever and Easy Virtue.

[3] Fallen Angels was taken up by Marie Lohr and her husband Anthony Prinsep, who were jointly in management at the Globe Theatre in Shaftesbury Avenue.

[n 1] There was initially some difficulty in obtaining a licence from the theatre censor, the Lord Chamberlain, whose approval was required for any public theatrical presentation.

[n 2] An official in the Lord Chamberlain's office recommended that a licence should be refused on the grounds that the loose morals of the two main female characters "would cause too great a scandal".

Presently the voices of all three are heard singing a sentimental love song; the husbands exchange panicked glances and rush upstairs.

[23] and the reviewer in The Observer, though rating the piece "neither a great nor a good play" on account of its overt theatricality and lack of depth, declared himself "vastly amuse[d]" by it.

If the second act of this piece, which shows two English wives waiting for their mutual lover and getting mildly drunk while he dallies, had been condensed into a ten-minutes sketch for a revue, little more would have been heard about it.

If Fallen Angels had been written by Sacha Guitry and brought over here as part of the family luggage, it would have been acclaimed as witty, airy, deliciously Gallic and all the rest of it.

If its plain-speaking had been wiped out, its central situation had been softened, and its hard, crisp dialogue had been reduced to the language of leers and winks, it would have been acclaimed as a jolly English farce.

[13][16] By the time of the 2000 West End revival, critical opinion had shifted in Coward's favour; Variety found the play "deliciously featherweight",[27] and The Observer called it "a fine piece of Coward writing: witty, trenchant, superficially frothy but actually questioning the empty lives led by these indolent privileged people".