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Present Laughter (TV) [1981]

Live Performance featuring Donald Sinden, Dinah Sheridan, Gwen Watford, and Elizabeth Counsell.  

Present Laughter is a comic play written by Noël Coward in 1939 and first staged in 1942 on tour, alternating with his lower middle-class domestic drama This Happy Breed. Later Coward's new play Blithe Spirit was added to the repertory for the tour. The play's title comes from a song in Shakespeare's Twelfth Night, which urges carpe diem ("present mirth hath present laughter"), and so the word present in the title should be pronounced as the adjective.

The plot follows a few days in the life of the successful and self-obsessed light comedy actor Garry Essendine as he prepares to travel for a touring commitment in Africa. Amid a series of events bordering on farce, Garry has to deal with women who want to seduce him, placate both his long-suffering secretary and his estranged wife, cope with a crazed young playwright, and overcome his fear of middle-age (he has recently turned forty) and, by implication, his impending mid-life crisis. The story was described by Coward as "a series of semi-autobiographical pyrotechnics".[

In the 1970s Peter Hall wrote "what a wonderful play it would be if – as Coward must have wanted – all those love affairs were about homosexuals". Whether or not Coward would have agreed, in the 1940s the transformation of real-life gay relationships into onstage straight ones was essential. The play nevertheless contains many references to Coward's own life. Monica is unmistakably Lorn Loraine, Coward's long-serving and much-loved secretary. Morris has been seen as Coward's agent and sometime lover Jack Wilson, and Henry as Binkie Beaumont. Liz, played originally by Joyce Carey, is thought to be based partly on the actress herself, who was a member of Coward's inner circle.