Claim: Easy Virtue was released 80 years after a play was written.

Easy Virtue is a three-act play by Noël Coward . He wrote it in 1924 when he was 25 years old , and it is his 16th play . The play had a successful first run in New York in 1925 and then opened in London in 1926 . It has been revived several times since and made into a film twice -- in 1928 and 2008 .   In tone and style , Easy Virtue is essentially a drawing room melodrama , with flourishes of the signature wit which would later be identified with him . The central characters of the play are John Whittaker and Larita , the American divorcée he has just married to his mother 's great disapproval .