Propwatch: the telephone in ‘Present Laughter’

Did you see that video of two teenagers baffled by a dial phone? Nothing is guaranteed to make you feel jurassic like watching the routine technology of your childhood appear irrefutably foreign. But cometh the play, cometh the phone. The defining prop, sound effect and plot device of Present Laughter, Noel Coward’s 1942 comedy of vanity, is an ink-black dial phone. – David Jays