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Title: The Plays of Mr. Noel Coward
Alternative title [U.S.]: The Plays of Noel Coward
Author: Macdonell, A. G. [Archibald Gordon] (1895-1941)
Author [introductory paragraph]: Anonymous
Date of first publication: November 1931
   [London: London Mercury, No. 145, November 1931]
Edition used as base for this ebook:
   New York: The Living Age, January 1932
Date first posted: 27 September 2014
Date last updated: 27 September 2014
Project Gutenberg Canada ebook #1205

This ebook was produced by Al Haines


PUBLISHER'S NOTE

Italics in the original printed edition are indicated _thus_.






  At the age of thirty-one, Noel Coward
  seems destined to equal if not surpass
  the achievements of Bernard Shaw.
  Here is a record of his career up to now.



  The Plays _of_
  Noel Coward

  By A. G. MACDONELL

  From the _London Mercury_
  London Literary Monthly



No sooner had Great Britain finished dealing with the German Empire,
the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the Turkish Empire, and the Bulgarian
Kingdom, than it was called upon to face a problem of a different
nature, some might say of lesser magnitude, but unquestionably of a
baffling character.  It was the sudden appearance of a young man--he
had been just too young to be a soldier when hostilities came to their
abrupt, in the eyes of the armchair school of warriors a deplorably
abrupt, conclusion--who was prepared to act, sing, dance, compose
music, write lyrics, stage-manage, produce, and turn out one comedy per
fortnight, separately, in pairs, or all at once.

It was not at all the sort of thing to which London, and especially the
London theatrical world, is accustomed.  Versatility is not looked upon
favorably in the neighborhood of Shaftesbury Avenue.  A man who has
written a play that centres round, let us say, the discovery by a
husband that his wife loves another, has usually got to go on writing
plays that centre round that discovery.  After ten years he may vary
the theme by making the wife discover that the husband is the guilty
party, but if he ventures further than that he is almost certain to be
accused of levity, insincerity, and dilettanteism.  When Mr. Noel
Coward, then, shot, with the disconcerting precocity of Athena fully
equipped from the head of Zeus, into the heart of the British Empire
and displayed his shop-window dressed with his varying talents, half
the people said it simply could not be true and the other half said
that they had predicted from the very beginning that the War would
bring changes.

But it was true.  Mr. Coward really could do all these things and some
of them he could do really well.  But not all.  That is a mistake that
has been made by many, especially by the very young.  It is the purpose
of this essay to consider only the dramatic work of Mr. Coward and to
try to sift the good from the less good and determine what Mr. Coward
has done well and what he has done less well.

It is seldom that the writings of a man who is only one-and-thirty
years of age can be divided already into three distinct periods.
Heaven knows how many more periods there may be before Mr. Coward
'writes himself out' at the age, say, of eighty-five, but so far there
are three.  The first period consisted of a swift succession of
comedies and farces.  These were hailed with ecstasy by the younger
generation and tittered at doubtfully by the older, and they rushed
their creator up to a dizzy pinnacle of notoriety.  From that pinnacle
his popularity as a playwright steadily declined into an eclipse of
boos and failures.  Alliance with Mr. C. B. Cochran forms the second
period.  A revue and a comic operette have been phenomenally
successful, and another musical piece has just appeared.  The third
period has only just begun.  It is Mr. Coward's new attack upon the art
of play-writing and it contains one farcical comedy in his old style
and one serious play in a style quite different to anything he has
hitherto attempted.



Let us begin with the first period.  Mr. Coward's earliest play, _The
Rat Trap_, has not been produced on the stage but it has been, for some
obscure reason, published.  In his preface to the volume in which it
appears, Mr. Coward says: 'I can still perceive some good moments in it
... The great fault of the play is a desperate desire to be witty at
all costs, but when the would-be pyrotechnical frills are torn away and
a few pieces of untidy but real psychology emerge it is n't so bad.'

The odd thing is that the desperate desire to be witty at all costs
does not succeed at all.  The first act, which contains most of the
would-be frills, is full of this sort of thing: 'She says she could n't
live without the classics, and seems to imagine that the classics could
n't live without her,' and 'Love should be free, absolutely free
always, like the National Gallery'; 'It's an ill wind that blows
somebody something,' and 'Marriage nowadays is nothing but a temporary
refuge for those who are uncomfortable at home.'  With the help of
these pyrotechnics, Act One tells us that a dramatist is going to marry
a lady novelist and that they adore each other.  Six months later, in
Act Two, they are bickering their heads off.  The dramatist is also
inconceivably offensive to their housekeeper; and the curtain descends
on the lady novelist getting home with a quick hook to the dramatist's
left ear.  Act Three is a mass of padding that discloses the
dramatist's infidelity with a chorus girl, and the 'curtain' again is a
slashing row.  Then, oddly enough, the fourth act comes to the rescue
with a queer little touch of sincerity.  There is a reconciliation
between the pair, not, as might have been expected, on the basis of
true love misunderstood and a sop to the gallery, but on the much
braver lines that the wife no longer loves her husband but is prepared
to rub along as best she can.  The last few pages of _The Rat Trap_
might be considered as a justification for reprinting it.

The next play chronologically is _The Vortex_, and it was the first of
Mr. Coward's plays to be produced on the stage.  _The Vortex_ also
contains writing of real sincerity.  The final desperate scene of
reconciliation between the drug-taking son and the lover-taking mother
contains a sort of groping after power and emotion, even if the
language employed is not of this life or of any other.  There is no
pandering to the conventions of the commercial theatre in _The Vortex_.
As in _The Rat Trap_, there is no final hostage offered to the
sentimental patrons of gallery and pit.  Nobody can accuse Mr. Coward
of sacrificing his early ewe lambs on the altar of the happy ending.
Apart from this artistic integrity there is not very much to praise in
_The Vortex_ except its precocity.  It is a remarkable play for such a
young man to have written, but it is not a remarkable play.  The first
act consists of an almost unbelievable amount of padding out of which
emerges, at the last moment, the fact that Nicky is engaged to Bunty,
and that some years ago Bunty knew Tom, who is now the lover of Nicky's
mother, Florence.  In Act Two, Tom kisses Bunty; Florence is furious;
Bunty and Nicky part.  The last act is the 'big scene' between mother
and son.  The scene is powerful, the language incredible.  Do sons,
even when they have lost their heads and are incipient dope fiends as
well, really say to their mothers: 'All your so-called passion and
temperament is false--your whole existence had degenerated into an
endless, empty craving for admiration and flattery--and then you say
you've done no harm to anybody,' or 'You're not young or beautiful; I'm
seeing for the first time how old you are--it's horrible--your silly
fair hair--and your face all plastered and painted,' or 'I've seen you
make a vulgar, disgusting scene in your own house, and on top of that
humiliate yourself before a boy half your own age'?

A great difference is in the next play, _The Young Idea_.  Here Mr.
Coward had the old idea of borrowing and he helped himself to a loan of
Mr. Shaw's jolly pair of young things in _You Never Can Tell_.  With
his initial loan to assist him, Mr. Coward did all the rest himself and
produced a really capital bit of nonsense.  There is a high-spirited
swing about _The Young Idea_ that is most attractive, and there is
genuine satire in the characters of the intolerable, and so typical,
hunting folk who talk nothing but dreary gossip and dreary hunting
shop.  Gerda and Sholto, the young pair whose ambition is to reconcile
their divorced parents, are very amusing and gay, and, even if the
machinery does begin to creak in the last act and an irrelevant and
elderly American has to be dragged in to keep the play going, it is all
done with high good humor and bounding spirits.

By this time Mr. Coward is beginning to get off the mark.  He is
launched upon the first phase of his career.  There follows a series of
comedies, the chronological sequence of which does not matter, for they
are more or less identical in form, plot, and treatment.  Technically
they are all an advance on _The Young Idea_ and not one of them is an
advance on any of the others.

_Hay Fever_ is the story of the impact of respectability upon a family
of Bohemians.  Judith is a celebrated ex-actress and the centre of what
is best described as a _mnage_ of Sangers straight out of _The
Constant Nymph_.  Each one of the Sangers invites, unbeknown to the
others, a respectable guest for the week-end.  The result is incessant
bickering and quarreling, carried on in language of astonishing
offensiveness, and in the end the respectable guests go away unnoticed
and unsped by their hosts and Judith announces her intention of going
back to the stage.  _Hay Fever_ is a play that is very amusing to see
and intolerable to read.  It is a classic example of Mr. Coward's
method of writing dialogue.  In the third act there are two speeches of
five lines apiece, four of four lines, and three hundred and seventeen
of three lines or less.  In the first act there are a hundred and
fifty-eight consecutive 'speeches' of three lines or less.  The whole
thing is simply rattle, rattle, rattle.  Judith is an excellently
written character, the rest are nowhere.



_Fallen Angels_ is the story of the impact of Continental manners upon
English respectability.  Two English husbands go off to play golf.  Two
English wives await the coming of Maurice Duclos with whom each had
conducted a violent pre-marriage love affair--one at Pisa and one at
Venice.  They pass the time of waiting by dining together and becoming
what Mr. Coward describes in his preface to the play, rather navely,
as 'faintly intoxicated.'  During the dinner, which is prefaced by a
strong cocktail, accompanied by a bottle of champagne, and topped up
with a liqueur, the two 'faintly intoxicated' ladies bicker, then
quarrel, and end up with a terrific set-to which includes such passages
as:--


JULIA: I thought you had a nicer mind than that.

JANE: Mind!  What about yours?  I suppose you imagine it's a lovely
gilt basket filled with mixed fruit and a bow on the top.

JULIA: Better than being an old sardine tin with a few fins in it.


And again:--


JULIA: You're utterly, completely contemptible!  If it's true, you're
nothing but a sniveling hypocrite!  And if it's false, you're a
barefaced liar.  There 's not much to choose between you.  Please go at
once.

JANE: Go--I'm only too delighted.  You must curb your social sense,
Julia, if it leads you to drunken orgies and abuse.


The husbands return and are duly horror-struck at the revelation of
their wives' pasts.  Maurice drifts in and the play peters out.

_Easy Virtue_ is on exactly the same theme.  A conventional youth
marries a divorce, Parisian, older than himself, and brings her home
in triumph to his truly appalling mother and sisters.  She is called
Larita and she is described as


tall, exquisitely made up, and very beautiful--above everything she is
perfectly calm.  Her clothes, because of their simplicity, are
obviously violently expensive; she wears a perfect rope of pearls and a
small, close traveling hat.  She speaks with the faintest possible
foreign accent.


This elegant lady is plunged into a circle of tweed skirts, sport
coats, tennis players, girls like Miss Nina Vansittart


attired in a strikingly original rose taffeta frock, with a ribbon of
the same shade encircling her hair the wrong way--giving more the
impression of a telephone apparatus than of a head ornament, and young
men like the Hon. Hugh Petworth, a healthy young man, whose unfortunate
shape can be luckily accounted for by his athletic prowess.


Naturally, Larita does not go down very well with the ladies of the
district, and when her young husband tactlessly stands up for them
against her, they bicker.  And then Larita and one of the sisters
bicker, and Larita calls her a disloyal and nauseating hypocrite, which
does not tend to restore harmony.  Then another sister finds a
newspaper cutting about Larita's past and that leads to a first-class
row during which Larita is actually made to say to her elder
sister-in-law:--


All your life you've ground down perfectly natural sex impulses until
your mind has become a morass of inhibitions--your repression has run
into the usual channel of religious hysteria.  You've placed physical
purity too high and mental purity not high enough.  And you'll be a
miserable woman until the end of your days unless you readjust the
balance.


This bowls out the home team and Larita goes back to Paris.  There is
one human character in _Easy Virtue_ and that is Colonel Whitaker,
Larita's father-in-law, a charming and sympathetic picture of a husband
who finds wife and daughters too much for him.  Certainly the Whitaker
females would be too much for most people.

The subject of _Home Chat_ is infidelity, pure and simple, and for once
there is no wicked, romantic, Continental, glamorous wrecker of homes.
An innocent pair are compromised in a _wagon-lit_ accident.  Everyone
believes the worst.  The wife, magnanimously forgiven by her husband
for an infidelity that she has not committed, revenges herself by
pretending that she is guilty.  In the end she is really unfaithful and
again no one believes her.  _Home Chat_ is a very poor example of
stagecraft.  The wife's pretense is explained over and over again to
each new character, and the dialogue is very weak and careless.
Nothing, for instance, can forgive such lapses as:--


Peter behaved like a gentleman.

How disgusting of him--I must speak to him seriously.


or:--


You must be feeling very uncomfortable inside.

My digestion has always been superb.


And


I don't understand you, Mrs. Chilham.

Then I must be right, must n't I?


is well-worn Oscar Wilde.

By this time the first phase of Mr. Coward's career is at its dazzling
zenith.  London and New York have been stormed, and his name is a
household word.  But triumphant youth became impetuous.  A play was
announced as having been written in a week.  Discerning critics, after
its first night, said that two days ought to have been ample for such a
production.  There were boos and hisses.  Mr. Coward tried again.  More
boos and more hisses.  The first phase was rapidly tumbling to the
ground.  One of the failures was called _Sirocco_ and its theme was the
same old one trotted out again--the impact of Bohemia, this time an
Italian painter, upon dear, respectable old England.  A heavy husband,
high-speed vamping with the help of a lot of Asti Spumante, a studio in
Florence, a scene of crude offensiveness and abuse, and a final curtain
on a free fight ('they fall on to the floor themselves, rolling over
and over, fighting madly').

Another was a period play, _The Marquise_, which contained a charming
heroine, a badly forced ending, and reams and reams of what the Greeks
called 'stichomuthia,' which is dialogue by one line at a time.

Another 'romantic' play of this period was _The Queen Was in the
Parlor_.  Nadya, about to be married in Paris to M. Sabien Pastal, is
suddenly told that, owing to the assassination four days earlier (for
some reason unreported, apparently, in the newspapers of Paris) of the
King of Krayia, she is now queen of that country.  Like all good queens
of romance she abandons her Rudolf Rassendyll and follows the stern
call of duty.  Sabien in turn follows her and penetrates right into the
royal bedchamber and is duly shot for his pains by the local Colonel
Sapt.

So ends the first phase of Mr. Coward's career.  A brilliant opening
campaign had gone steadily into eclipse.



But our hero was undaunted.  With a talent for music that he had
exploited upon the revue stage, he tried a different branch of his
profession and the result was a revue, _This Year of Grace_, music,
lyrics, and book all written by himself.  I rather think he produced it
as well.  Mr. C. B. Cochran, the Napoleon of Piccadilly, flung his
dashing young Murat into the battle and a resounding victory was won.
_This Year of Grace_ ran for a long time; _Bitter Sweet_, its
legitimate successor, although an operette and not a revue, was even
more successful, and a third musical production, _Cavalcade_, is
packing Drury Lane.

This is the second period--musical entertainments and a complete rest
from 'straight drama.'  Of _Bitter Sweet_ there is little to be said.
It succeeded completely in what it set out to do, to catch the fancy of
those ladies who visit matines, read stories about sheiks in the
desert, and thoroughly enjoy a good cry.  There is, of course, no prize
at all for anyone guessing its main theme.  Mr. Coward simply
transferred his now famous plot from the 'straight' into the musical
line.  An English girl is swept off her feet by a foreign musician, the
idea of _Milestones_ is added, and there you are.  As for the lyrics,
if Mr. Coward had not himself published the libretto of _Bitter Sweet_
I should have played the game and not quoted a word of them.  But, as
it is, Mr. Coward cannot blame me if I reprint what he has printed, as,
for instance:--


  Tho' life buffets me obscenely
  It serenely
  Goes on.
  Although I question its conclusion,
  Illusion
  Is gone.
  Frequently I
  Put a bit by
  For a rainy day.
  Nobody here can say
  To what indeed
  The years are leading.
  Fate may often treat me meanly
  But I keenly pursue
  A little mirage in the blue.
  Determination helps me through.


You don't believe me?  I did n't suppose you would, but it is there all
right, on page 64 of Messrs. Heinemann's handsome edition.  Or:--


  Life is very rough and tumble
  For a humble
  Disease;
  One can betray one's troubles never
  Whatever
  Occurs.


I mean to say!  Dash it!  There is also a capital song in which Tokay
is described as made from the grapes of a sunlit vine on the banks of
the golden Rhine.  If anyone thinks that Mr. Coward can write a lyric,
let him look at any lyric written by Mr. A. P. Herbert and think again.
So much for the triumphantly successful second phase.



The third has only just begun.  It is the return of Mr. Coward as
dramatist after an interval of rest and a trip round the world.
_Private Lives_ is the first of the pieces in this third phase.  It is
especially interesting as it is a kind of rsum of all that Mr. Coward
did and tried to do when his first phase was at its brilliant zenith.
The swift, hard, rattling farcical comedy, at which he aimed so many
shots, is brought to a glittering perfection in _Private Lives_.  It is
technically a masterpiece--not of the art of writing plays, but of the
art of writing Mr. Coward's plays.  For, as I think we have discovered
by now, Mr. Coward's plot is the contrast between brilliant
cosmopolitanism and stodgy Anglo-Saxondom, his stand-by is infidelity,
and his device of stagecraft is the bicker.  Like Josef Israels, who
alleged that he could paint pictures of a mother and child in his
sleep, so Mr. Coward could write scenes of abuse and invective on the
subject of infidelity for days and nights on end.  _Private Lives_ is
the apotheosis of his first phase.  It contains such gems, spoken on
the first evening of a honeymoon, in the moonlight, as:--


SYBIL: You're hateful and beastly.  Mother was perfectly right.  She
said you had shifty eyes.

ELYOT: Well, she can't talk.  Hers are so close together, you couldn't
put a needle between them.


Or:--


I should like to cut off your head with a meat axe.


Or, in the second act:--


ELYOT: Snap, snap, snap; like a little adder.

AMANDA: Adders don't snap.  They sting.

ELYOT: Nonsense.  They have a little bag of venom behind their fangs
and they snap.

AMANDA: They sting.

ELYOT: They snap.

AMANDA: I don't care, do you understand?  I don't care.  I don't mind
if they bark and roll about like hoops.


The second act of _Private Lives_ is Mr. Coward's own particular
triumph.  Nothing happens from beginning to end except quarreling,
gramophone playing, telephones ringing, struggling, smashing of
records, face slapping, rolling about on the floor, and general
invective, and all of it extremely entertaining.  There is no question
about that.  Mr. Coward at his best is extremely entertaining, and
often quite witty as well.  Indeed, in _Private Lives_ he has more
witty lines than in all the rest of his plays put together.  'Certain
women should be struck regularly, like gongs' has the authentic touch,
and also, in reply to the line, 'It does n't suit women to be
promiscuous,' the retort, 'It does n't suit men for women to be
promiscuous.'  And this little exchange is delicious:--


AMANDA: Do you realize that we're living in sin?

ELYOT: Not according to the Catholics.  Catholics don't recognize
divorce.  We're married as much as ever we were.

AMANDA: Yes, dear, but we're not Catholics.

ELYOT: Never mind; it's nice to think they'd sort of back us up.


And lastly, in this third phase, we have, as we had at the very
beginning, a play published but hitherto unacted.

_Post Mortem_ is Mr. Coward's first serious work.  Is it of any
significance that he wrote it immediately after _Private Lives_?  Has
he deliberately discarded his farcical comedies after reaching
high-water mark, and is he going to aim at greatness instead of
notoriety?  _Post Mortem_ is an attempt to discuss the Great Peace
dramatically, just as so many writers have attempted to discuss the
Great War.  Mr. Coward's question is the one so often asked: 'Was it
all worth while?'  Was the Peace worthy of all the sacrifice that went
to make peace possible?  Mr. Coward's reply is an emphatic no.  The
play opens in a company headquarters in the line in France, and the
talk of the officers is not the talk of any company headquarters that
ever was or will be.  At the end of the scene John Cavan is killed by a
sniper.  The rest of the play is the gropings of the spirit of John
Cavan toward an understanding of what it was all about.  Thirteen years
after his death he visits his mother.  She tells him that his father,
the newspaper magnate, has got a new mistress; that Monica, John's
fiance of the war years, has married a man called Chellerton; that
Perry Lomas, a brother subaltern, has written a war book which is going
to be burnt publicly for being too near the truth.  She implores him to
go back to his spirit world before his eyes are opened, but John
refuses.


I must know [he says] whether by losing so much we have gained anything
at all, or whether it was just blind futility like Perry said it was.
I must know whether the ones who came home have slipped back into the
old illusions and are rotting there, smug in false security, blotting
out memory with the flimsy mysticism of their threadbare Christian
legend, or whether they've had the courage to remember clearly and
strike out for something new--something different.


In search of this knowledge John visits Monica and finds her in a
cocktail-, gramophone-, dance-mad, loose set of acquaintances.  She
tells him:--


You died young; who are you to judge?  You had n't yet found out about
everything being a bore.


Perry Lomas, next on the list, is about to commit suicide.  Almost his
last words, before he shoots himself, are:--


Fundamental good in human nature?  Bunk!  Spiritual understanding?
Bunk!  God in some compassionate dream waiting to open your eyes to
truth?  Bunk!  Bunk!  Bunk!  It's all a joke with nobody to laugh at it.


The visit to his father's newspaper office is even worse.  His return
from what the managing editor calls 'beyond the hinterland,'
subsequently alluded to as 'b. the h.,' is made into the subject of a
newspaper stunt; and, finally, he dines with his company officers,
middle-aged men who were young in Scene One.  The dinner is a failure;
one of the ex-officers is furious at being reminded that he loved a
subaltern who was killed; another announces that he would sooner shoot
his own sons than see them shirk the 'next war'; and the third says
that war or peace, death or life, it's all the same to him.  He's just
passing the time and does n't care.  So John goes back, and Mr.
Coward's answer to his quest is a bitter one.

_Post Mortem_ is not a great play, but it is interesting in itself and
it is doubly interesting as an indication that Mr. Coward may intend to
forsake the broad and easy path of invective and infidelity, and try to
become a real dramatist.  So far his claim to be a real master of the
theatre is stultified by his fatal gift of amusing padding.  It is not
a sign of technical skill to be able to hold an audience's attention
throughout the second act of _Private Lives_, or the first acts of
almost all his plays.  It is only a sign of a shrewd appreciation of
what can be done by rattling on and on and on.  The great dramatists
use dialogue to unfold the action of the play and display their
characters at the same time.  Mr. Coward cannot be bothered to master
this difficult art, and so when he wishes to draw a character he has to
fill in page after page of irrelevances in order to do so.  It would be
possible to take, for example, the first thirty-three pages, of a total
of thirty-six, of the first act of _The Vortex_, and fit almost any
sort of play on to them without making a single line of those
thirty-three pages any more irrelevant than it is now to the rest of
_The Vortex_.

But if Mr. Coward is really going to turn his attention from his
everlasting attack upon respectability and his everlasting satire
against modernity (it is odd, by the way, how modern youth should hail
as their leader and representative a man who was old at twenty and who
never stops withering them with irony), the next phases of his
development may be of the utmost importance to the theatre.  The
knowledge and the experience of the stage are his already; his, also, a
nimble mind and inexhaustible energy and industry.  If he turns his
mind and his energy and his industry a little more to thought and
study, and a good deal less to producing and lyric writing and song
composing, he may yet live down his colossal success.

Mr. Coward is a strange figure in this post-war England.  He belongs to
no 'school,' he has no 'masters' whom he copies, he writes no newspaper
articles, he is seldom interviewed or photographed.  His name hardly
ever appears in 'social jottings.'  The Lido knows him not, nor
Deauville, nor Le Touquet, nor North Berwick.  He has not written his
reminiscences.  He has not pulverized America in a book of travel.  For
all his immense notoriety he is an aloof and retiring individual.  And,
for all the wealth that he has garnered, he is an indefatigable worker.
In the last hundred years only Disraeli and Wilde and Shaw have started
from nothing and conquered England as Mr. Coward has conquered.  It is
curious that he is the first Englishman to have done so.






[End of The Plays of Mr. Noel Coward, by A. G. Macdonell]
