Project Gutenberg 2025-04-14 Public domain in the USA. 104 Coward, Noël 1899 1973 Coward, Noel Pierce, Sir Coward, Noel Whittlebot, Hernia "This was a man" : $b A comedy in three acts $aGarden City :$bDoubleday, Doran & Company, Inc., $c1926. Wikipedia page about this book: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/This_Was_a_Man Hannah Wilson and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This book was produced from scanned images of public domain material from the Google Books project.) “This Was a Man: A Comedy in Three Acts” by Noël Coward is a stage play written in the early 20th century. The play focuses on the entangled relationships and moral dilemmas of upper-class English society, centering around portrait painter Edward Churt, his wife Carol, and their circle of friends and lovers. Likely comedic in tone but rich with social commentary, the play explores themes of fidelity, emotional intelligence, and the superficialities of modern life through witty repartee among its characters. The opening of “This Was a Man” introduces the private world of Edward Churt’s stylish London studio, where Carol engages in a late-night, flirtatious rendezvous with Harry Challoner, signaling early on the play’s preoccupation with marital infidelity and complex desires. As the scenes shift from Edward’s studio to Evelyn Bathurst’s orderly flat, the audience meets various characters, including the candid Margot, the clever Zoe, and the staunchly upright Evelyn. Dialogue-driven scenes reveal strained marriages, brittle friendships, and the characters’ reliance on wit to mask vulnerability and disillusionment. Tensions escalate as Evelyn confronts Carol over her behavior, leading to emotional confessions and reversals of blame between the sexes, particularly when Carol reveals Edward’s own affair. The interplay of honesty, betrayal, and emotional exhaustion in these opening acts sets up the play’s exploration of identity, passion, and the costs of self-awareness in a cosmopolitan, rapidly changing world. (This is an automatically generated summary.) https://books.google.com/books?id=nMtGAAAAYAAJ 20240526092821coward 1926 us Reading ease score: 80.6 (6th grade). Easy to read. en Comedy plays Triangles (Interpersonal relations) -- Drama English drama (Comedy) -- 20th century PR Text Category: Plays/Films/Dramas Category: British Literature 297410 2025-07-30T05:33:16.851283 text/html 272889 2025-04-14T18:06:48 text/html 298497 2025-07-30T05:33:26.497248 application/epub+zip 299130 2025-07-30T05:33:18.792285 application/epub+zip 169626 2025-07-30T05:33:17.728315 application/epub+zip 343893 2025-07-30T05:33:30.233220 application/x-mobipocket-ebook 306260 2025-07-30T05:33:25.682271 application/x-mobipocket-ebook 147741 2025-07-30T05:33:13.314324 text/plain; charset=us-ascii 127827 2025-04-14T18:06:48 text/plain; charset=us-ascii 16890 2025-07-30T05:33:30.401219 application/rdf+xml 7791 2025-07-30T05:33:18.139287 image/jpeg 1736 2025-07-30T05:33:17.895278 image/jpeg 207122 2025-07-30T05:33:16.885288 application/octet-stream application/zip Archives containing the RDF files for *all* our books can be downloaded at https://book.klll.cc/wiki/Gutenberg:Feeds#The_Complete_Project_Gutenberg_Catalog en.wikipedia