Have we forgotten the real Noël Coward?
The playwright was an enfant terrible who shook up British theatre. It’s time to give him his due again, says Dominic Cavendish
By the time Noël Coward died in 1973, aged 73, he had written more than 50 plays, numerous films, hundreds of songs. He had mixed with the great and the good of his day, achieved international renown and, thanks not least to his morale-raising efforts during the Second World War, been hailed as a national treasure. At a West End gala in 1970 to mark his 70th birthday, 150 stars, led by Princess Margaret, gave him a standing ovation. “Success took me to her bosom like a maternal boa constrictor,” this wittiest of men quipped.
That he is still part of the theatrical in-crowd would seem to be incontestable. He has a theatre on St Martin’s Lane named after him and we’re seldom more than a few years away from revivals of the plays that are regarded as his masterpieces: Hay Fever, Private Lives, Blithe Spirit and Present Laughter – a revival of the latter by Sean Foley starring Rufus Hound as the egotist actor-playwrightstar Garry Essendine has just opened at Chichester, launching a new season.
An arch self-portrait of Coward – who first took the role in 1942 – it regularly attracts actors of a certain (early middle) age and star wattage: Albert Finney, Peter O’toole and Ian Mckellen to name but three. In casting Hound, best known for his work as a stand-up, Foley has taken a risk – and pushed the boat out further by accompanying the play’s fleet verbal wit with physical knockabout.
This has already annoyed some critics – The Guardian has denounced it as “an orgy of stylised exaggeration” – and on Friday, there were mutterings of annoyance from audience members. The farce-like approach works better in the second-half but even so, there’s oddly a strange feeling of déjà vu about it all and a lurking sense that while Coward may be “in”, he’s far from hot.
Is he in the repertoire but out of fashion? Some of our most innovative directors shun him. He hasn’t been given a look-in at the Almeida under Rupert Goold and Robert Icke. Josie Rourke’s regime at the Donmar has been a Coward-free zone. “There aren’t many directors of the Nick Hytner generation of directors who do the plays,” notes Alan Brodie, literary agent to the Coward estate. The National Theatre hasn’t touched him in a decade. “How much do we really remember him?” Philip Hoare, his biographer, asks.
According to Tom Littler, whose production of Tonight at 8:30, a cycle of one-act plays from 1935 (including Still Life, the source for Brief Encounter) is currently at Jermyn Street, Coward has an image problem. “I think he’s his own worst enemy,’ he suggests. “He projected a personality and invented a way of speaking which sounded like the upper classes but was its own language – that whole “terribly terribly” thing – which can now sound awful and dated and potentially hold an audience at arm’s length so they feel they can’t emotionally connect to the work.” Yet in his youth, Coward was an enfant terrible, and shook up British theatre with galvanising force, paving the way for John Osborne and Harold Pinter – and even, according to the American critic John Lahr, prefiguring Samuel Beckett.
“He took the fat off English comic dialogue”, the critic Kenneth Tynan observed. More than that, though, the surface sparkle of the dialogue allowed for the insinuation of thoughts more troubling. “Very few people are completely normal really, deep down in their private lives,” says Amanda in Private Lives.
Coward – guarded about his homosexuality, prone to breakdowns, and a genius at whipping up onstage hysteria – aimed to charm and please but he sent shock waves through polite society, breaking taboos and dragging sexual confusion and relationship angst into the limelight.
Such was the transgressive daring of the play that made his name in 1924, The Vortex – in which a mother consorts with a youth to the consternation of her drug-taking son – that the establishment even feared him. “Looking at the manuscripts he sent to the Lord Chamberlain for approval – and the amount of blue pencil,” Hoare points out, “you see how much he was testing things. Incredible as it sounds, he was seen as someone who might encourage social insurrection.”
Coward made theatre “pop” – a generation rushed to emulate his look, his style. “People I spoke to about him who knew him said it was as if his brain was wired differently,” Hoare marvels. “He picked up on what was happening then filled it with himself. If he was alive today, he’d be a social media whore.”
Coward would yawn at coach party friendly revivals, he argues: “He was always grateful for commercial success but he got bored with it.”
Yet coach party revivals is, these days, largely what Coward gets. When was the last time that a Coward production caused any kind of stir? There’s Emma Rice’s bold 2008 version of Brief Encounter, which fuses together cinema and live performance and which is now back in the West End – but the production is 10 years old, a testament to the dearth of new revivals that might draw in younger audiences and create a buzz. For another Coward production that managed to cause a stir and answer basic commercial dictates, we have to go back more than 20 years.
Ripples of subversive excitement were generated by Sean Mathias’s 1994 revival of Design for Living (1932). This production brought out the full sexual (and bisexual) subtext of the play, and its bohemian love-triangle: Rachel Weisz rubbed herself suggestively with ice-cubes; a steamy seduction scene was inserted after each act.
It came soon after Philip Prowse’s 1989 staging of The Vortex, starring Rupert Everett, acclaimed for locating the play’s glinting, louche power to perturb. But then came Declan Donnellan’s attempt to reinvent Hay Fever in 1999, something of a West End car-crash, derided for wildly overdoing it. It’s been too quiet for too long since then. Yet Rice argues Coward can speak forcefully to us today. “I’d say especially now when we’re thinking, ‘What is England, what is Englishness?’ What’s required is a brave interpretation to bring all that out. There’s no point trying to pander to the nostalgia market.”
Might the tide be turning? “We’re starting to see a lot of requests from younger directors,” reveals Freya Smith, who works alongside Brodie in dealing with performance rights. “They’ve got new ideas about how the characters might be played, whether the genders might be flipped and so on. We want to encourage as many innovative versions as possible. It feels like we’re on the cusp of change.”
Would they even countenance something as a radical as Belgian director Ivo van Hove’s recent marathon mash-up of Shakespeare’s three main Roman plays? “We’d be very open to that.” Smith further points out that there are piles of neglected Coward plays waiting to be rediscovered. One such, Post Mortem (1930), dealing harrowingly and experimentally with the aftermath of the First World War, has just been revived by Lucy Bailey at the Guildhall School of Music & Drama.
To Bailey’s mind, we’re only just beginning to get the full measure of Coward’s genius. “I think he’d be horrified to be thought of as stylised and mannered. You don’t need any of that because he was talking about the real things of life and death – why we’re here and the sadness of being here for such a short time.”
Tynan, writing in 1953, wrote: “Even the youngest of us will know, in fifty years’ time, exactly what we mean by ‘a very Noël Coward sort of person’”. That’s still true, but those connotations are now perhaps more negative than his most fervent admirers might like to admit. Is he good to go for another 50? Bailey is emphatic: “If directors do him justice, I’m convinced he’ll last for far longer than we can possibly imagine.”
‘He’d hate to be thought of as mannered – he was writing about life and death’
Present Laughter runs at Chichester Festival Theatre (01243 781312) until May 12; Tonight at 8:30 runs at Jermyn Street Theatre (020 7287 2875), until May 20; Brief Encounter runs at the Empire Cinema Haymarket (0844 871 7628) until Sept 2