Thwarted love is preferred.At the end of a play on some quite different subject- religion, perhaps, or politics- it is customary for the two to say, as he does in : ‘I was deeply in love with a fine woman’ and for the wife to reply: ‘My dear, dear husband!’ but there should be no hint elsewhere in the text that they have as much as brushed lips. Full-blooded physical relationships engaged in mutual delight are theatrically tabu. “The English, as their drama represents them, are a nation endlessly communicative about love without ever enjoying it. “The drama of today, through the influences of modern science, of contemporary democracy, of shifting moral values, of the critical rather than the worshipful attitude toward life, of an irresistible thrust toward increased naturalism and greater veracity, has become bourgeois, dealing with the world of every day comic, verging upon the tearful, or serious, trenching upon the tragic unheroic, suburban, and almost prosaic, yet intensely interesting by reason of its sincerity and its humanity essentially critical in tone, proving all things, holding fast that which is good” (Henderson, 1914 p 309). In consequence, the faculty upon which the modern play tends to rely more and more in the spectator is no longer the power of following the indications of a complex story, but of seizing and remembering shades of character and emotion and the spectator's pleasure depends now not so much on being unable to guess what is going to happen next as in being able to recognize that what does happen next is true and interesting' (MacCarthy, 1907 p 18-19). The characters in consequence are not merely presented during the early scenes, but go on developing till the end of the play, so that the spectator may have to alter his first impressions. 'The tendency of modern dramatic art is now to make the characters and the emotional and moral significance of the situations the most important elements, and to reduce the plot to a minimum. The realistic mode prevalent at the end of the past century prevailed at the start of the 20th.

The Edwardian drama refers to the reign of King Edward VII (1901-1910). The Phoenix Theatre opened in 1930 with Coward's Private Lives

Indecent Infatuation by Rory Ireland