"This was a man" — Reading Notes

Brittle Repartee and Subtext

The opening exchange between Carol and Harry is a masterclass in Coward’s signature style: short, clipped lines that carry emotional weight beneath their surface. Carol deflects Harry’s declarations of love with “What a silly question!” and later answers “Yes, it has rather” to his romantic summary, her qualification undercutting the sentiment. The stage directions reveal the physical tension—Carol holds her glass at arm’s length to avoid spilling it during an embrace—while the dialogue remains polished. This technique recurs throughout the play, as characters use wit to mask anxiety or aggression. When Evelyn later confronts Carol, the repartee sharpens into insults: “Pompous ass!” and “Fatuous prig.” The rhythm accelerates, with lines overlapping and interruptions, until Carol’s sudden fury breaks the pattern entirely.

Shifts in Pace and Power

Coward manipulates tempo to mirror shifts in control. In Act I, Scene i, the dialogue is leisurely, punctuated by pauses for drinks and cigarettes. The confrontation in Evelyn’s flat (Act II) begins with controlled sarcasm—“How discerning you are!”—but escalates into a physical struggle. Evelyn’s command “Shut up” and Carol’s scream “Help! Help!” mark a violent departure from the earlier banter. The stage directions become more detailed: Evelyn intercepts Carol, grasps her wrist, and drags her to the sofa. This abrupt change from verbal sparring to physical force underscores the collapse of social decorum. Coward uses these tempo shifts to expose the fragility of the characters’ composure, particularly Carol’s, who moves from flippant to hysterical within a single scene.

Setting as Emotional Barometer

The three-act structure is anchored by two distinct settings: Edward’s studio and Evelyn’s flat. The studio, described with “mingled opulence and good taste,” initially feels intimate and safe, but its darkness and closed doors (Edward sleeps in the adjacent room) create a sense of hidden threat. By contrast, Evelyn’s flat is the site of open confrontation, where Carol flings a glass of brandy into the fireplace—a gesture of defiance that also shatters the room’s order. The return to the studio in Act III, “the following morning,” suggests a restoration of normalcy, but the earlier violence lingers. Coward uses these spatial shifts to chart the characters’ emotional trajectories: from secrecy to exposure, and finally to an uneasy return.

Readers should attend to Coward’s stage directions, which often reveal more than the dialogue. The characters’ physical actions—tiptoeing, listening at doors, flinging drinks—carry the subtext that their polished lines deny. Note also how the play’s title, This Was a Man, echoes through Evelyn’s moral posturing and Carol’s defiance, though the excerpts offer no resolution. The comedy’s tension lies in the gap between what is said and what is done.

That rainy afternoon, Coward's razor-sharp couple wore me down with their polished cruelties, and afterwards I sat thinking about how exhaustion often masquerades as wit. Somehow my hand drifted to the shelf and pulled down a book about King Henry IV, Part 2 — Background and Themes. Hal’s weary London, its taverns and its politics, felt startlingly close to that drawing-room — both worlds, I realized, were just people negotiating what remains after the bright, careless beginning fades.