NOËL COWARD—A NUANCED VIEW

I’VE ALWAYS ENJOYED the wit, whimsy, and artistry of Noël Coward. Indeed, his appearances here at SimanaitisSays include “Noël Coward Says”, “Noël Coward’s Jamaica, and a brief cameo of acting advice in “To Be Or Not To Be a Method Actor.” 

In this last one, Coward advised, “The only advice I ever give actors is to learn to speak clearly, to project your voice without shouting—and to move about the stage gracefully, without bumping into people. After that, you have the playwright to fall back on—and that’s always a good idea.” 

The fact that Coward was also a playwright hints at the multiplicity of his talents. 

Rosemary Hill’s “Mushroom Cameo,” London Review of Books, June 29, 2023, reviews a new book, Oliver Soden’s Masquerade: The Lives of Noël Coward. And the multiplicity of “Lives” suggests that we’re in for more than a monolithic English wit. Here are tidbits from Rosemary Hill’s review, with occasional direct quotes from Soden’s biography.

Named for the Season. “Born on 16 December 1899 and named for the season,” Hill writes, “Coward belonged to the very last Victorian generation…. The Cowards’ vacillating finances saw them move to Surrey and then to Battersea, at which point Violet read an article in the Daily Mirror about Lila Field and her new London Theatre for Children.”

“She took Noël to audition,” Hill says, “and Field, German in origin but now with a ‘devastatingly refined’ English accent and ‘foaming with lace’, accepted him. It was one foot on a shaky ladder.”

A young Noël Coward was anything but suave: “He was an inelegant dancer, excluded from the display which the school put on for a visit by Anna Pavlova after having tripped up his fellow student Edris Stannus (who later changed her name to Ninette de Valois).”

On Becoming Noël Coward. Hill says, “Courage and determination were as important as a natural wit and a cultivated urbanity in getting Violet Coward’s favourite son from an end of terrace in Teddington to dinner at Sandringham, where he joined the Queen Mother in a rousing chorus of ‘My old man said follow the van’. By then Coward had developed into the figure known to his staff—at his insistence—as the Master. Interviewing him for the Sunday Times in 1969, Hunter Davies wondered if he had really met Coward or just a facsimile. ‘Is there anything under the cool, charming mask?’”

A talented artist as well, with a love of Jamaica. Image from Out in the Midday Sun: The Paintings of Noel Coward, assembled and with commentary by Sheridan Morley, Philosophical Library, 1988.

Barrier-Breaking Love Triangles. In Coward’s The Vortex, his first theatrical success, Hill observes, “The dramatic tension is enhanced by Coward’s need to evade the censor’s blue pencil (a threat until the 1968 Theatres Act) so that, as Soden puts it, unspeakable attractions ‘shiver beneath the dialogue’.” 

The play Design for Living, Hill notes, “was considered unproducible on the London stage in 1933 and was put on in New York instead. The extramarital heterosexual relationships are openly discussed, the homosexual love between Otto and Leo before Gilda arrived strongly implied. ‘I know all about that!’ she says. ‘I came along and spoiled everything!’ ”

“But Coward wasn’t a bohemian,” Hill says, “or part of any set that could even retrospectively be seen as countercultural. He absorbed many of the ideals of the lower-middle-class Edwardian England in which he grew up and never repudiated them. Patriotic, enthusiastic about the Empire, mistrustful of intellectualism and deferential to the monarchy – if he made fun of these attitudes from time to time, he held them all the same.”

The War Years. From 1939 to 1941, Hill recounts, Coward “ran British propaganda in Paris and had some success in light espionage and as a goodwill ambassador to the US. Roosevelt liked him, and William Stephenson made use of him in the newly formed SOE, but Churchill was ambivalent about him, as were many MPs and the press. The Daily Mirror’s anxiety that ‘as a representative for democracy he’s like a plate of caviar in a carman’s pull-up’ wasn’t alleviated when he was spotted roller-skating at Rockefeller Centre.”

Ouch.

A Great Coward Line. Hill observed, “Coward even achieved an amicable relationship with [critic Kenneth] Tynan, who was pleasantly surprised to find that Coward’s wit was unrehearsed. They were together when de Gaulle’s death was announced; a journalist asked Coward how he thought the conversation between God and the general would go, to which he replied that it would depend on how good God’s French was.” ds

© Dennis Simanaitis, SimanaitisSays.com, 2023