by Noel Coward
The Dublin opening was preordained by Noël's offshore tax status. Having failed to see South Sea Bubble this way, he was determined to have this production where his beady author's eye could scrutinize it. Much as he admired and liked Johnny G., he did not entirely trust his sense of contemporary comedy.
On June n, 1956, Noël had his first meeting with Gielgud, who wrote the following day to say:
I did so enjoy seeing you and talking over the play … I hope you didn't find it all too vague and problematical and I do wish you could be on hand when the time comes. You must just trust me to do my best and keep my powder dry—which, as you know, is very difficult in this revolting climate … Let me know if you have any more ideas and good advice from time to time.
My love as ever and thank you for being so sweet.
Gielgud's traditional diffidence did nothing to calm Noël's unease. He wrote whimsically to Cole:
And with regard to Ould Ireland, if it's me whisht heart you're thinking of, it's after being in me boot, with dread and suspicion and may the blessed Virgin have pity and keep his nibs away from the cottages [a homosexual term; Gielgud had been convicted of soliciting a few years before] and prevail upon the poor spalpeen to play divil a bit of comedy and not fuck up the whole blathering enterprise.
And more rationally, to Joyce, who was to appear in the play:
I do hope hope hope all goes well. I have immense faith in Johnnie as a director and I know it will all be done in perfect taste. I pray he doesn't become self-conscious, but even if he does I shall have ten days to snap him out of it. He is wonderful about listening and taking direction, so all should be well …
I am bringing a lot of “Happy” pills with me from New York which I shall munch incessantly during the performance.
16 Cowley Street
Westminster S. W. 1.
18.7.56
Dear Noël,
We have begun auditions for the play and two or three people read the reporter very well. I hope we will get Peter Sallis for this part, who played for Gar Kanin, as an American, last year and was brilliant, though the play was no good. We have Patience Collier, Joyce and Kathleen Harrison, and David Home for Jacob, but now there is the difficulty of the family.
Anne Castle [sic], whom you so warmly recommended, read Jane, and is, I agree, very skilled, very charming, with plenty of variety and obviously good technique. But she seems to me lacking in any sort of pertness or a lively kind of originality. Also I do feel that she is too old. True she might be Joyce's daughter, but she lacks the contrast which, it seems to me, Jane should be to her Mother. Surely she must have a twinkle in her eye, and some of the original quality of her father; which makes her Sebastien's ally?
I am having some more readings later in the week, and will try and cast Colin, Pamela and Jane together. I will also ask Joyce to come down so we can judge about the sort of ensemble we are getting.
… I do think that Jane and Pamela being the only non-character parts should both be very attractive, and Jane the younger of the two. Is this right? I know she cannot be a “teen-ager” because of the time factor, but do feel she should be a bit of an original, and a rebel. Anne Castle to me is a sort of leading lady, with graciousness and style.
I hate to go against your wishes in the matter because I can see what a good actress and very charming woman she is. But I do feel she would not be right in balance, and that we should try to get somebody a little more mischievous and unusual in personality. What would you think of Annie Leon?
My love to you,
Johnny
From Joyce, on July 21: “It's a very funny play and I am madly looking forward to it. Of course, John will drive us cuckoo … I imagine he is writing to you constantly?”
To Joyce, on July 30:
Oh dear, Oh dear, how you would have loved to see my reaction when Johnnie G's letter arrived explaining that Ann Castle, whom I have always wanted for Jane, was distinguished etc., etc., but not pert enough nor mischievous enough and, added in ink, poor fool, “What about Ann Leon?” I went right through the roof and had to have my laces cut. Since the acid cable I sent immediately I haven't heard from Johnnie but I have just had a lovely letter from Binkie telling me how wonderfully the reading went and enclosing a list of the cast. I noted, oddly enough, the name of Ann Castle
… I do so hope he isn't going to make a bollocks of it.
To Binkie on the same day:
Dearest Bink,
I am absolutely delighted that you were so pleased with the reading. The whole cast sounds fine to me. I am a teeny bit worried about David Home being slow but he is an excellent actor and Johnny must just get after him …
I am more than delighted that you are pleased with Ann Castle. She was beginning to haunt me. I thought so very highly of her in Worthing, as you know, and was tremendously anxious for her to play something of mine, in fact, I made a promise to her and myself that one day this would happen. When, the other day, I got a letter from Johnnie saying that she was distinguished, charming, technically good and with a leading lady quality BUT that she wasn't pert and rebellious and mischievous enough, I gave a loud cry like a wounded lion, threw the rhubarb pie upon which I was engaged into the air and had to have feathers burned under my nose. When, later, I noted that Johnnie had written in, in ink, “What about Anne Leon?” my rage became really terrible to witness and Cole and Graham had to hide under the kitchen table. Dear John, of course, happens to be unaware that Anne Leon happens to be my greatest bete noire in the entire English theatre. She is cute, defiant, mischievous, rebellious, arch, debonaire and to me, entirely nauseating. She also, in my opinion, suffers from a staggering lack of talent. If by any fearful hazard she had actually been engaged, I should have been unable to look at the stage during the hideous time she was on it, all of which would have made my visit to Dublin a great waste of time. From the foregoing you may have gathered by now that I DO NOT CARE for Anne Leon.
27.7.56
Dear Noël,
Many thanks for your cable. I only found out too late that Anne Leon was a bete noire of yours.
Anyway, Anne Castle has now been engaged, and read the part extremely well yesterday when we had the entire company for the first time. It all seemed to balance very well, and Kathleen Harrison and Patience Collier were both extremely funny. David Home is not over skilled and inventive, but a wonderful type for the part, and I am sure I can get a good performance out of him
We have only three weeks rehearsal and I think that will give urgency to the work, and I have told them all to learn their words before we begin. I wish you could have been here to hold the reins, but shall look forward with some trepidation, but also with great pleasure, to seeing you in Dublin.
Fond love to you, Graham and Coley.
As ever
John
P.S. I am rather in favour of the family changing after the first act and a half. Not necessarily complete changes, but say a white blouse for Jane, a tweed suit for Colin and possibly a discreet black and white number for Joyce. Binkie is inclined to think that, as a strict Catholic, Joyce particularly should stay in black throughout the play, but I think it would gay it up a bit to give them at any rate minor changes, if only to indicate the lapse of time. Once the funeral joke is over in the first act, so many black dresses on the stage might become monotonous, don't you think?
Noël duly arrived in Dublin and found, as he had anticipated, that there was much to be done. John, unsure of himself in light comedy, had given everyone too much distracting comic business so that many of the lines were lost. Noël also realized that he had his own problems as the playwright. There was cutting to be done and some rewriting, but the play was genuinely funny.
In his Diaries he wrote, “I wonder why it is that my plays are such traps for directors … Nobody seems capable of leaving well enough alone and allowing the words to take care of themselves.”
When Nude with Violin opened on November 7 at London's Globe Theatre�
��renamed many years later The Gielgud—it received the usual scathing Coward notices but settled in for a steady run. Noël wrote tc Joyce: “I am really thrilled about darling ‘Nuders’ being such a wonderful success, on account of I still believe, in spite of Brecht, Peggy Ashcroft. Arthur Miller, etc., that the Theatre is primarily a place of entertainment.’
After the opening night was well behind him, Gielgud sent Noël a progress report:
Nov. 20th 1956
I know I have been very bad about writing but somehow it seemed absurd to put down detailed accounts of ups and downs while we were on tour. After each performance one's reactions are so instantaneous and they so often change from day to day—I didn't really want to put them on paper for you to receive a week later and perhaps fidget and fume because you were not here to correct or modify them—so I didn't write at all …
The Queen came with a private party. She sat in the front of the dress circle, and they tell me she seemed very amused. Fortunately, her presence did not seem to inhibit the audience at all and the play has never gone better. The company did not know until the end, which was a good thing too, as they didn't underplay—and I hope / didn't overplay.
An unspoilt Eden. During the 1930s, Anthony Eden (later the Earl of Avon) (1897—1977) was a frequent guest at Goldenhurst. Seen here with Jack and Noël. There was not too much for Eden to laugh about in years to come.
Of course, I am much more fluent and certain of myself with practice and I think you would hear no more Terry tones.
Quite early in the run they had to adjust to a theatrical crisis of a more than usually serious kind. Britain attempted to take over the Suez Canal, triggering what became known as the “Suez Crisis.” Gielgud reported:
We removed “Cairo” and “Port Said” last week. I felt the audience chill as we uttered them. (We have already had to change “Cyprus” in The Chalk Garden, first to “Suez” and then—hastily—to “Potsdam,” so you see how tricky geographical references can become in a matter of hours.) “Gibraltar” and “Tangier” are not so good but the laughs still come all right.
I am very grateful for everything. Your help and advice in Dublin was quite invaluable to my performance.
As ever,
JOHN
Even at a distance Noël experienced the backwash of the Suez debacle for himself. His old friend Sir Anthony Eden, having lived in Churchill's shadow for so long, finally became prime minister in 1955. It was he who ordered the Suez invasion, only to have to backtrack in the face of Russian and American diplomatic pressure. The “defeat” broke him in spirit and health.
Then, to everyone's surprise, at the height of the global political fallout, he and his second wife, Clarissa, arrived in Jamaica to recuperate in total seclusion at Ian Fleming's Goldeneye.
Noël wrote to Lorn:
November 29th
Darling Lornie,
I haven't clapped eyes on either of the Edens yet although I had a very pleasant note from Clarissa thanking me for a small basket of goodies I left for them. She said in the note that he was feeling much better already, although he was rather fretting at being out of England!
That I expect sums the situation up fairly accurately. It really is molto molto curioso to think of our Prime Minister fretting away at Goldeneye while the Egyptians and the Arabs and the Israelis and the Iranians and the Syrians and the Russians are frigging away in the Middle East. I am afraid that what I once wrote in a bread and butter poem to Beatrice [Eden's late first wife] years ago is only too true. The verse finished with the gaily prophetic phrase, “The answer's a Lebanon.”
I have said to myself repeatedly that all this persecution he is getting from the Press MUST prove that they are wrong and he is right, but oh dear, I am not sure at all at all and very very puzzled. The Governor, who I lunched with just after he had met them at Montego and deposited them at Goldeneye, said that Anthony looked tired but quite definitely not ill. On the other hand there are fairly well authenticated rumours that he has wakened in the night screaming several times and sent for the Guard. This of course might be accounted for by the acute discomfort of Ian's bed and the coloured prints of snakes and octopuses that festoon the peeling walls. Try as I may I CANNOT believe that he has come traipsing all the way out here in the middle of a tremendous international crisis just to REST? There must be something more than that behind it. My personal guess is that he is planning to resign and is giving himself three weeks to think it over from every angle before he takes the plunge. But of course this is only wild surmise and I may be quite quite wrong.
I am convinced that the decision to bash the Egyptians and knock Nasser for six was a good one but it should have been done much much sooner. As you said and Little Bill [Stephenson] said, a monumental example of mis-timing. The real blame, of course, lies much further back when we were idiotic enough to allow ourselves to withdraw our troops from the Canal Zone. We had a perfectly good treaty to hang on to which was valid until 1968 and with our usual misguided passion to prove to the woolly-minded Americans and the rest of the world what wonderful guys we were, we just let go our hold as we have done, with disastrous results, in so many other parts of the world.
The real doddering, fuddy-duddy Chamberlainesque villain of this gloomy little piece is, of course, John Foster Dulles. All well informed Americans, including Joe Alsop and Walter Lippman [sic], are perfectly aware of this. I honestly think that if we had succeeded in knocking the Egyptians out, grabbing the canal and consolidated our position everything would have been all right and the fartarsing UN could have taken over afterwards and straightened things out to its heart's content. Sadly enough, however, we had, apart from other country's interferences, our own basic English stupidity to contend with. When I read of those idiotic crowds marching about Trafalgar Square and demonstrating themselves to a standstill I felt almost as sick as I felt at the Munich time and for the same reason. I am really very surprised that Nelson didn't do a neat swallow dive from the top of his column and say “Kiss me, Hardy or not as you please but if ever I saw a lot of cunts, you're them.” This might not have been as historically quotable as “England Expects” but it would certainly have been just as much to the point.
I've read the three articles you sent. But what the hell is the use of a few people writing balanced and sensible articles when the bulk of the nation is sodden with uneasy prosperity and incapable of thinking seriously about anything but Marilyn Monroe and the Football Pools. It seems to me, oh sadly, sadly, it seems to me, that we've lost our will to work, lost our sense of industry, lost our sense of pride in our heritage and above all lost our inherent conviction that we are a great race. Old Churchill, with all his personal faults, kept our real spirit alive for us for as long as he could, but look at the damned thing now.
If only if only if only our politicians could not be so unerringly relied upon to make the same mistakes over and over again.
If only we had been able to profit by the hideous experiences of the war as the defeated countries have done.
If only we were not so slavishly eager to bend the knee to our richer American allies and so girlishly prone to tremble with fear at their frown.
If only we were not so humiliatingly determined to uphold the mediocre with all our might, protect the fools and decry the intelligent, elevate the condition of the dear old honest working man to such a point that he becomes thoroughly dishonest and works as little as possible for as high wages as possible, and methodically destroy our prestige which for centuries has been the highest and most respected in the world.
Personally, I am ashamed, more generally ashamed than I have ever been since Munich and most particularly ashamed because I have been forced to leave my own country, not only because of financial reasons, but because its attitude to life and art, and specifically to me, bores me so that I find it no longer comfortable to live in.
Well, my darling, I will now close this little essay and let you know chop-chop double quick pronto if I can
winkle our questionably Prime Minister out of his happy hide-away.
I have an excellent channel for gossip because his temporary secretary who has a fan of teeth, bright opaque blue eyes and is called Cora St. Aubyn, is staying with Blanche Blackwell.
Love love love love
MASTER
Eden duly resigned in January 1957. Noël wrote to Joyce:
With regard to the political situation I am feeling much much happier. Harold Macmillan is highly intelligent and I think will do a good job although he has certainly inherited a bugger's muddle. I am desperately sorry for the wretched Anthony, but I think if he had gone on any longer he'd have fallen dead, so it's just as well he did resign.
Noël had other visitors that winter: Gladys (Blackie) and Winnie (Clemence Dane). He told Lorn:
Winnie and Blackie arrived safely and only three hours late. We had reserved rooms at Sunset in case they might be exhausted but they wanted to press on and so we did. It was a lovely drive with Winnie shrieking with enthusiasm at everything she saw. When we arrived, Blackie looked like paper and was obviously worn out but not our Winnie. Oh dear no. She downed a couple of dry martinis— midnight!—and was all for swimming in the pool. This was discouraged but the next morning she was bouncing about in the pool at dawn and from then onwards. She has already painted a large picture of several oranges, very good, told us the plots of several classic novels, recited reams of poetry, dug a fork in her own neck while illustrating the way Shakespeare stabbed Marlowe, in fact she is being more wonderfully Brittania Galeish than I would have believed possible. Coley will never be quite the same again. He caught Winnie naked on a lilo with her arms outstretched, singing!
And to Joyce:
Winifred I need hardly say was quite quite tumultuous from first to last and of course said some glorious things. For instance when we were discussing harmlessly at lunch (Binkie, John, Terry, etc.) the fact of people having split personalities and secret sides to them, Winifred in her most trilling governess voice said “Of course, of course, the five John Thomases! [British slang for ‘penis’]” This naturally enough reduced the five John Thomases present to dreadful ill-concealed hysteria, Binkie choked, great round tears coursed down Coley's face and I talked very very loudly about something quite different.