Noël Coward

The Playwright's Craft in a Changing Theatre

Russell Jackson

• Publisher: Methuen Drama
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN: 9781350246102
• eBook ISBN: 9781350246072
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Littérature
• Subtopic: Théâtre britannique

This is the first book-length work to draw extensively on unpublished archive material to document the composition and reception of some of Noël Coward's most significant plays. It examines his working practices as a playwright, from manuscript to performance. This study argues that, while he did not embrace any of the more radical theatrical 'isms' of his time, Coward experimented with both form and content. He adapted the familiar 'well-made' formulas, while also emphasizing theatrical self-consciousness and an exploration of radical social and sexual relationships. After an overview of Coward's career and the reception of his plays, the work discusses selected texts from successive phases of Coward's career, including some unproduced or uncompleted work and perennially popular plays such as The Vortex, Hay Fever, Private Lives, Design for Living, Blithe Spirit and Present Laughter. This study also explores how, in the aftermaths of two world wars, as major changes in social and political circumstances suggested new approaches to dramaturgy, Coward's post-1945 work failed to achieve the same success he had enjoyed in earlier periods. The final chapter examines Coward's approach to his craft in response to the new theatrical and cultural environment, and the new freedom in the treatment of homosexuality represented by Suite in Three Keys and his final, uncompleted play, Age Cannot Wither.

1

The 1920s: From the ‘best side of youth’ to the international set

Olive Do you think his work is really clever?

Sheila He has a wonderful sense of the dramatic, which of course is most important, and his dialogue is exceedingly witty. He may fail a bit in construction, but that won’t matter a bit if he shows sincerity.

The Rat Trap, PP3, 372

The order in which Coward wrote (or in some cases, revised) the plays staged in the mid-1920s did not correspond to the order in which they were produced, suggesting not so much a traceable line of development as the work of a playwright trying out different approaches, variously comic and/or serious, to material that challenged dramatic and social convention. The Rat Trap, written in 1918, was not published until 1924 and was first performed in 1926. By then, he would already have read comments on his own plays resembling these on the work of the play’s aspiring dramatist Martin Keld. ‘Wit’ would often be praised above the ‘construction’ that Coward was so anxious to achieve, while ‘sincerity’ – or, more generally, seriousness – would prove problematic throughout his career. The range of themes – sometimes touched on, sometimes central to the plays – included some pervasive topics of post-war culture: the shift in moral attitudes, generational conflict, and the very rapidity of change. ‘Living modernly’s living quickly’, says Lucy in Aldous Huxley’s Point Counter Point (1928): ‘You can’t cart a waggon-load of ideals and romanticism about with you these days. When you travel by aeroplane, you must leave your heavy baggage behind’.¹ In a Spectator article in 1929, Evelyn Waugh wrote that ‘the social subsidence that resulted from the War’ had divided Europe ‘into three perfectly distinct classes between whom none but the most superficial sympathy can ever exist’. He enumerated them as ‘(a) the wistful generation who grew up and formed their opinions before the War and who were too old for military service; (b) the stunted and mutilated generation who fought; and (c) the younger generation’.² As well as being in itself a topic for discussion within plays, the generational question also provided the terms of comic or dramatic confrontations essential to the well-made play, in which crises would be precipitated, questions left in the air at the end of each act and scene, and resolution sought or denied. The plays of the 1920s show Coward trying new variations on the formula; capitalizing on the ‘younger generation’ theme (including depictions of a decadent older generation); and, in the case of the unproduced Semi-Monde, combining the sense of social modernity with a complex plotting of intersecting lives.

Beginnings: ‘Making scenes’

Coward’s debut in the West End was a determinedly ‘light’ comedy with ‘youthfulness’ to the fore. I’ll Leave It to You was first presented at the Gaiety Theatre in Manchester before its London transfer to the New Theatre (now the Noël Coward) in St Martin’s Lane. He was reported in the local press as having written it ‘in three days, transcribed direct from his brain to his typewriter’.³ An eccentric family, with artistically gifted children and a somewhat scatter-brained mother, has been dependent since the father’s death on remittances from a rich uncle in America. He arrives in due course, supposedly mortally ill, and promises to leave his fortune to whichever of the children makes the most effort to turn their talents to the family’s material advantage. Hence the proposition, ‘I’ll Leave It to You!’ They take up the challenge, but at the end of the second act he reveals that in fact there is no money, and the promise was a ruse to energize them. The play might well have ended here, with the achievement of Daniel’s stratagem and the family now able to support itself by its collective talent and initiative. In the third act Daniel, unwilling to face the children’s hostility, decamps to the local inn, but Mrs. Dermott insists that he be brought back, and they are reconciled. She still believes his impoverishment was a hoax, and opportunely Daniel receives a telegram announcing that his mine has struck gold. Just before the final curtain Sylvia, the aspiring actress who has always been the most sympathetic of the children to Daniel, asks him quietly whether he sent the telegram himself, and he answers ‘Yes!!!’ as the curtain falls. Apart from the reconciliation between the family members, the unfinished business left for this act is the resolution of the meagre love interest: Bobbie’s intended, Faith, having been told by her mother that he is no longer likely to inherit a fortune, decides life with a songwriter is not for her.

Although some London reviewers suggested that comic effect was supplied as much by the vivacity of the younger cast members as the writing, there was applause for the ‘bright, nippy dialogue, interesting characters, and the breezy wisdom of health, optimism and the best side of youth generally’.⁴ There was also rather avuncular advice for the ‘boy playwright’. The Daily Telegraph asked why he left himself ‘absolutely no material out of which to make his last act’.⁵ The most encouraging notice was Rebecca West’s in Time and Tide), which pointed to what would become a vital element of Coward’s dramatic strategy in years to come: the refashioning of existing dramatic modes. Unlike many of the young writers who had emerged from the war with imitations of the decadents of the nineties, ‘as if the intervening quarter of a century in which Shaw and Wells and Bennett came to their own had not existed for them’, Coward was among those ‘who have run about among their elders and picked up all their most useful tricks and set about their own pretty wits to find new uses for them’.⁶

The Young Idea, ‘a comedy of youth in three acts’ written in 1921 and produced at the Savoy Theatre in 1923, was chosen by J.W. Marriott for his collection of Great Modern Plays as representative of one of the ‘standard-bearers in the modern British drama movement’.⁷ A brother and sister return from their mother’s home in Italy to rescue their father from a faithless second wife and her frivolous social world, and reconcile him with their mother. The crucial turn in the plot, freeing the ex-husband to seek a reconciliation with his first wife, is the revelation of the second wife’s flagrant adultery. The third act is a humorous celebration of the artistic life, and the appeal of Italy as a place of greater freedom. George Bernard Shaw did not fail to notice the play’s indebtedness to You Never Can Tell (1897), with its theme of young people bringing about the reconciliation of their estranged parents. Returning a copy of the script ‘scribbled all over with alterations and suggestions’, he advised Coward that he ‘showed every indication of becoming a good playwright, providing that [he] never again in [his] life read another word that he, Shaw, had ever written’.⁸

Coward told reporters that his next play to be produced in London would be The Rat Trap. This was written in 1918 but did not appear in print for another four years, receiving its first production (12 performances) in 1926. The marriage of Keld Maxwell and Sheila Brandreth – he a playwright, she a novelist – falls apart as their careers diverge. Their friend Olive Lloyd-Kennedy has warned that they will be like rats in a trap. By the second act he is working on his new play while Sheila is suffering from his selfishness, being left to cope with household matters, and Keld is being snared by an ambitious actress, Ruby Raymond. In the third act, his play has been successful, but as they celebrate, Sheila, who has learned of his flirtation with Ruby, tells him she never wants to see him again. In the short fourth act, Olive brings Keld down to the cottage in Cornwall where Sheila has been living for four months. She has been writing hard, and her publisher is pleased with the completed novel. The play ends with her asking ‘Why aren’t we ordinary, normal people without these beastly analytical minds?’ (A question Gilda, Otto and Leo would address, with refreshing insouciance, in Design for Living.) Although she no longer loves Keld, she will return to him because she is going to have a baby and is ‘so alone – and so dreadfully frightened’ (PP3, 458). The main interest of this semi-conventional play – with no actual adultery, a chain of more or less predictable events, and a sentimental ending Ibsen’s heroines would have scorned – lies in its self-referential elements. In Act Two, when Sheila and Keld have their ‘scene’ over his involvement with Ruby, he comments that it is ‘a pity that there isn’t a stenographer here to take all this down in shorthand, it would have made an excellent scene in a domestic comedy’ (PP3, 397). In the corresponding ‘obligatory scene’ in Act Three, Sheila tells Keld that she realizes that they have ‘to face facts, beastly, incredible facts – this situation we’ve so often refused to write about because it was too hackneyed. Now we’re living it and we can’t get away’ (PP3, 424).

In several plays the social necessity of ‘making a scene’ is itself an issue of contention. As Dan Rebellato has pointed out, ‘by making a scene out of not making a scene, Coward reveals the rules of etiquette as little more than scripts, guideli...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title Page
• Dedication
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Notes on references and play extracts
• Introduction
• 1 The 1920s: From the ‘best side of youth’ to the international set
• 2 The 1930s: Old and new designs for living
• 3 The 1940s: Wartime entertainment, post-war discontent
• 4 The 1950s: Keeping a public, losing the critics
• 5 The 1960s: A ‘rendezvous with the past’ and new directions
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• Copyright