Point Valaine

It was written as a vehicle for Alfred Lunt and his wife Lynn Fontanne, who starred together in the original Broadway production in 1934.

Coward's biographer Philip Hoare writes that Point Valaine was the only failure of the Lunts' joint career.

Despite a highly favourable review in The New York Times by the influential critic Brooks Atkinson (see below), the play closed after 55 performances.

She was a missionary's daughter, brought up locally; to escape the oppressive religious environment she married a Frenchman, though not in love with him, and went to live in Lyons.

Quinn asks her about the life story of her interesting and mysterious Russian head waiter, Stefan, but she tries to change the subject.

He found Stefan's suicide, "the climax of a vague, mounting fever in the detached life of Point Valaine and Mr Coward is ingenious enough to capture the fullness of the evil".

[6] Atkinson's fellow critic Percy Hammond enjoyed the piece, but thought it "a little play and a big show" chiefly remarkable for the performances of the Lunts.

[7] Burns Mantle in The Chicago Tribune praised Coward for breaking away from his high society manner but regretted his choice of so "ugly and forbidding" a theme, and criticised the Lunts for undertaking their roles.

"[11] When the play was revived at the Chichester Festival in 1991, the reviewer in The Guardian thought it "a theatrical bolt from the blue … a rare find".

"Never before or after did [Coward] write about sexual politics and of an erotic relationship which vaults the frontiers of class and rank with such power and such conviction".