Home Chat (play)

It depicts the domestic affairs of a married couple and their family and friends, and revolves around an unjustified suspicion that the principal female character has committed adultery.

Returning, alone, she has offered the spare sleeping berth in her compartment on the train to an old friend, Peter Chelsworth, who had chivalrously given up his seat to an old lady.

Friends and family assume she is with Peter, but in fact, although he is in Paris, he is accompanied by a female companion, Valerie Marshall, whom he marries before coming back to London.

In The Saturday Review, Ivor Brown called Home Chat "only the shadow of a play" and the character "witless fragments of negativity".

[3] The Manchester Guardian commented, "It was not easy to sustain even the slightest interest in the ultimate couplings of such human rolling-stock as this" and said that the play "lacked any proximity to an abstract comic idea or to some lustrous elegance of speech and manner".

[8] The Illustrated London News called the play "an amusing little trifle on the whole – but it is thin in its material and there are signs about it of hasty and careless composition".

[9] In The Observer, St John Ervine took a similar view: "Had Mr Coward spent another week in writing his play it would have been a much wittier one than it is.

The reviewer in The Daily Telegraph wrote, "By no means a classic, this is still a powerful production of a forgotten feminist piece with … a woman taking control of her sexual and intellectual destiny.

[12] The Times commented, "The tone slides awkwardly from bright, brittle comedy to over-earnest Ibsenite naturalism, and there never seems to be quite enough at stake, the relationships too thinly drawn for us to care which of them survives".