Design for Living
Design for Living is a comedy play written by Noël Coward in 1932. It concerns a trio of artistic characters, Gilda, Otto and Leo, and their complicated three-way relationship. Originally written to star Lynn Fontanne, Alfred Lunt and Coward, it was premiered on Broadway, partly because its risqué subject matter was thought unacceptable to the official censor in London. It was not until 1939 that a London production was presented. Design for Living was a success on Broadway in 1933, but it has been revived less often than Coward's other major comedies. Coward said, "it was liked and disliked, and hated and admired, but never, I think, sufficiently loved by any but its three leading actors." The play was adapted into a film in 1933, directed by Ernst Lubitsch, with a screenplay by Ben Hecht, and starring Fredric March, Gary Cooper, and Miriam Hopkins. The play was first seen in London in 1939 and has enjoyed a number of stage revivals. Background and first production Coward had known Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne since his first trip to New York in 1921, when he was penniless, and they were scarcely better off. Dreaming of future stardom, they resolved that when all three were famous, Coward would write a play for them all to star in. In the following decade, Coward became one of the world's most famous playwrights, with a succession of popular hits. These ranged from the operetta Bitter Sweet (1929) and the extravaganza Cavalcade (1931), to the intimate comedies Hay Fever (1924) and Private Lives (1930). Lunt and Fontanne too had achieved fame, and by the early 1930s the time was right for Coward to write their star vehicle. The Lunts' marriage was devoted and long-lived, but there were triangular relationships in their private lives which Coward could draw on for his plot. Coward recorded that while he was refining his original ideas for the play, "Alfred had suggested a few stage directions which if followed faithfully, would undoubtedly have landed all three of us in gaol". Of the three principal characters, Coward later commented, Design for Living previewed in Cleveland, Ohio on 2 January 1933 and opened in New York on 24 January, at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre on Broadway to popular and critical acclaim. In The New York Times, Brooks Atkinson described it as a play of "skill, art and clairvoyance, performed by an incomparable trio of comedians. ... Miss Fontanne with her slow, languorous deliberation, Mr Lunt with his boyish enthusiasm, Mr Coward with his biting, nervous clarity. ... Skill, art, even erudition of a sort have gone into this gay bit of drollery." The New York Sun called it "as happy a spectacle of surface skating as one might see," adding that the skaters were "sometimes on very thin ice." For the opening night, the price of tickets more than quintupled, and the three stars were reported to be receiving record salaries for a Broadway production. Design for Living was such a success that