Relative values
By: Noël Coward
Contributors: Coward, Noel, 1899-1973
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Published: 2013
Place of publication: London]
Language: eng
Description: Miranda Frayle is an actress who has risen, she says, from poverty and cockney squalor to acquire a higher station in life: a station she intends to consolidate by her marriage to the wealthy Nigel Marshwood, son of Felicity, Countess of Marchwood. What Miranda does not know is that her future mother-in-law's maid, Moxie, is in fact Miranda's sister, a sister she was raised with not in squalor, but in bourgeois and ordinary surroundings in Sidcup. When Moxie hears Miranda romanticising and slandering her family, she cannot help but reveal the connection. An upstairs-downstairs satire of the complexities of snobbery and reverse snobbery, 'Relative Values' was first performed in November 1951 at the Savoy Theatre, London.
Notes: Previously issued in print: in Plays five. London: Methuen Drama, 1999.