Noel Coward's comedy gets a Shanghai homecoming

After more than eight decades, Private Lives, a comedy by the late English playwright Noel Coward is being brought back to the place of its composition by professors and students of New York University Shanghai and Shanghai Theater Academy.

Struck by influenza in 1930, Coward spent his convalescence in Room 314 at the Peace Hotel, then known as Cathay Hotel, by the Bund in Shanghai, finishing Private Lives in only a few weeks.

The play was an immediate success in London in the 1930s. It is still widely performed to this day.