“It is not without merit,” decided Noel Coward, in 1934, describing The Rat Trap, the first play he wrote on his own. “There is some excruciatingly sophisticated dialogue in the first act of which, at the time, I was inordinately proud.” The play was written in 1918, when Coward was just 18, but not staged until eight years later. It’s about the perils of marrying a writer, and in this case, both the husband and wife are writers. Egos clash, wife walks out, husband gives chase. Coward would later say it was his “first really serious attempt at psychological conflict.” The London-based stage director Alexander Lass helms a production of this very early Coward work. —Jensen Davis