Noël Coward wrote The Rat Trap when he was 18—the first play he authored on his own. This remarkably mature drama tells the story of a newlywed couple looking towards a bright future together, two promising writers vowing to support and love each other through the challenges of creative and professional endeavor. Things go even worse than you might imagine. Of course, The Rat Trap shows flashes of Coward’s brilliant, brittle wit, but this play is not so much a dry martini as it is a bitter stout, dark and foamy. “When I had finished it,” he wrote in 1937, “I felt, for the first time with genuine conviction, that I could really write plays.”
The Rat Trap languished for a few years before being published in 1924. It was not produced until 1926, riding on the coattails of Coward’s success with The Vortex, Fallen Angels, and Hay Fever. Audiences expecting the scandalous decadence and high farce of these other works must have been surprised by Coward’s psychological realism. It only ran for two weeks; Coward, away from England, never even saw it. The first-ever revival came 80 years later at the Finborough in London, where it was exclaimed by the Evening Standard as “an absolute revelation.”
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