Noël Coward
(1899–1973)
Peace in Our Time by Noël Coward
Theatre Royal Bath, 1995
Actor, producer, songwriter, dramatist, wit, raconteur and all-round good companion Noël Coward was dubbed by his peers ‘the Master’, not simply because he could do so many things well, but because he could do all of them with a unique sense of grace, style and elegance. “He is,” Maurice Chevalier, a friend of fifty years once said, “a great everything.”
Noël Pierce Coward was born in Teddington, Middlesex on 16 December 1899 and first appeared on stage at the age of twelve. Later he worked with Charles Hawtrey at the Prince of Wales theatre and took on the role of Slightly in the 1913 revival of Peter Pan. (Eminent critic Kenneth Tynan later wrote of Coward that he “was Slightly in Peter Pan, and you might say that he has been wholly in peter Pan ever since”.) His own earliest plays, which included The Young Idea (1921), The Vortex (1924) and Fallen Angels (1925), aroused controversy for their turgid depiction of a society left disaffected and cynical by the First World War, and Coward quickly became the unofficial voice of the brittle twenties. By the middle of the decade he was the most successful playwright of his generation with five shows running concurrently in London. These included the revue On With the Dance for which he had supplied both words and music.
There was a temporary hiccup in 1927 when the first night of Sirocco starring Ivor Novello nearly caused a riot (“I’d set a standard for myself,” Coward said later, “and the audience had felt let down”) but subsequent shows like This Year of Grace (1928), Bitter Sweet (1929) and Private Lives (Laurence Olivier’s big break in 1930), easily restored his fortunes and his fame.
Throughout the thirties he produced a body of work which for sheer variety and staying power stands unique in the history of the British theatre – Cavalcade (1930), Words and Music (1932), Conversation Piece (1934), the nine one-act plays which make up Tonight at 8.30 (1935), Operette (1938) and Design for Living (1939).
During the war the intensely patriotic Coward worked briefly in Paris at the Bureau of Propaganda, acted as a kind of ambassador in America for the Ministry of Information and travelled in Australia, broadcasting and raising money for the war effort with a series of concerts. Then, dismissing as impractical Churchill’s advice to “get into a warship and sing to them with guns firing”, Coward instead wrote the plays Blithe Spirit (1941), Present Laughter and This Happy Breed (1942) and the films In Which We Serve (1942) and Brief Encounter (1945, an adaptation of Still Life from Tonight at 8.30).
Wartime conditions had obviously done nothing to blunt the Master’s astonishing facility. Present Laughter and Blithe Spirit each took a mere six days to write, the latter passing from page to stage in just six weeks with barely a word being changed, and setting up a record for the longest-running non-musical play in England with 1,997 performances. In Which We Serve, which also starred Coward and was directed by him and David Lean, earned the author a special Oscar for his “outstanding production achievements”. Shortly after the war, when Present Laughter was produced in Paris under the title Joyeux Chagrins, Coward calmly took the lead once again, playing in French to “the most chic, smart, glamorous and truly awful audience” he had ever known.
Peace in Our Time, first produced in Britain in 1947, shows Coward’s less familiar serious side, but in the postwar period both author and audience seemed to agree the gloom needed to be relieved. Coward duly obliged, writing, directing and performing on both sides of the Atlantic, frequently with Lynn Fontanne and Alfred Lunt, and Gertrude Lawrence whom he had first met in 1913. In the fifties he also began a lucrative series of cabaret appearances in London and Las Vegas, and oversaw the first adaptations of his works for television, while adding to his oeuvre the shows Ace of Clubs (1950), Quadrille (1952), After the Ball (1954), Nude With Violin and South Sea Bubble (1956), Sail Away (1962) and Suite in Three Keys (1966).
Apart from the plays and show scores, his other published works include three volumes of short stories, two of the autobiography (Present Indicative and Future Indefinite), a novel, and various travel writings. In 1969 he appeared successfully with Michael Caine in the film The Italian Job which made up for a somewhat ill-advised outing the previous year as the Witch of Capri opposite Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor in Tennessee Williams’s Boom. In 1970 he was knighted in the New Year’s Honours List and in 1972 the compendium revue Cowardy Custard opened in London.
Noël Coward died on 26 March 1973 at his home in Jamaica.
