[3] 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.
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.
"[5] Reviewing the same volume, James Agate praised Coward's seriousness and reproached avant garde theatres for failing to stage the play.
[8] The last scene uses the same technique as Ambrose Bierce's "An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge", where, at the end, it is revealed that most of the story occurred only within the protagonist's mind.
Scene One, set in 1917 France during the First World War, focuses on John Cavan, a young British soldier, the son of a London newspaper owner.
The archive at King's College, Cambridge, England, contains "an array of photographs, handbills and programmes from Christmas pantomimes produced between 1940 and 1943, not in a local village hall, but in three POW camps in Austria".
[10] The Germans permitted the production, with as many stage costumes and props as could be devised, only after the entire cast and backstage crew had given an undertaking that they would use nothing to make an escape.
[15] Coward commented on the play: "I wrote it too hot off the grid"[16] and, as a result, produced something that was "shallow", lacking in "real experience", and which "muddled the issues … I might have done better if I had given more time to it, and less vehemence.
However, it bestows some backhanded praise by admitting that "the play is outstanding as a polemical, vitriolic attack on British disregard for World War I victims".
Benedict Nightingale of The Times wrote, "It is the sort of anti-war play you might expect from someone who never swapped a shot in anger and at some level feels guilty for having survived the slaughter: shrill, awkward....
[20] The Independent praised the production, but said, "this rather hysterical anti-war play has been under cover for good reason.... [The] play's shrillness, grandiosity and caricature reflect Coward's remoteness from the battlefield as well as his denial of the contemporary mood.... [It is] a vaporous polemic, which turns oddly sentimental at the end, when John praises the joys of battle.
In particular, he gives Lomas a powerful diatribe attacking the political confusion, economic chaos and press mendacity of Britain in 1930: a speech that is chillingly appropriate today.... What disfigures the play is not Coward's thumping message but the mechanical nature of Cavan's civilian Cook's tour and the easy caricature of soft targets: philandering press-magnates, pleasure-seeking bishops and purblind Lady Bountifuls.
Its first professional production reveals it as a tough, febrile piece, awash with melodrama and blazing up now and again with bitter, glittering humour.... Coward's hatred of this brittle, blasé age, which does not want to understand the horrors of the first world war, is not so surprising as his perception that the second is already in the making: someone actually remarks that the next Olympic games (1932) could be a preparation for it.
The writing is a little mannered, but the young cast handles it as if it was entirely real, and Steven Pacey, as the disillusioned survivor, draws a most subtle sketch of upper-class despair.