A Talent to Amuse: A Life of Noel Coward

by Sheridan Morley

  On this final stage of the journey, having brusquely refused the inevitable deck tennis and quoits invitations, Noël shut himself up in his small, stuffy and deeply uncomfortable cabin to begin another play. At the time, Sherriff’s Journey’s End was still very much in his thoughts, not because of his own performance as Stanhope which he was rapidly trying to forget, but because the general theme of the play had moved and impressed him deeply. Left to himself on the ship he wrote what might almost have been a sequel: a look at life in 1930 seen through the eyes of a dying soldier who could well have been a character in Journey’s End. The play was Post-Mortem, a strange, angry polemic about the betrayed promises and false illusions that came after the war to end all wars; it is a play unlike any other that Noël has ever written, and one that has still not been professionally produced on the stage. As a vilification of war and of some contemporary attitudes to it, Post-Mortem offers some of Noël’s best writing as well as a fair amount of his worst; its technique of jumping forwards and backwards in time, together with a tendency for every scene to turn rapidly into a discussion with no visible action, has apparently made it an impossibility for a professional stage director, though there was once a suggestion that Guthrie McClintic would attempt it. It has since been staged by captured British soldiers at a prison camp in Germany in 1944 and more recently by a school in Thame in 1966. As a play it would seem to be ideally and almost uncannily suited (in form if not now in content) to the confines and altogether different demands and possibilities of a television production; realizing this, the producer Harry Moore included a shortened version of Post-Mortem as one in a series of plays called ‘The Jazz Age’ on BBC television in the autumn of 1968.

  In Post-Mortem Coward does not so much write as explode on to paper; the play has a violence that is to be found nowhere else in his work, and he wrote it to release some evidently pent-up furies that could hardly have been allowed to escape into light comedies or period musicals. The result of all the rage in Post-Mortem was much the same as the effect created by Noël’s performance as Stanhope: underprepared, hastily conceived, hysterical, often chaotic but frequently very powerful nonetheless. In the fury of his play Coward hits out wildly at the church and state in general and at press barons and socialites in particular; one is aware yet again of the didactic moral preacher in Coward, occasionally fighting its way to the surface and having here a field day. In one tremendously long speech Perry, a character who survived the trenches but is now about to commit suicide (and who perhaps owes a certain amount to Noël’s friendship with William Bolitho), describes the England of 1930:

  ‘There are strides being made forward in science and equal sized strides being made backwards in hypocrisy. People are just the same, individually pleasant and collectively idiotic. Machinery is growing magnificently, people paint pictures of it and compose ballets about it, the artists are cottoning on to that very quickly because they’re scared that soon there won’t be any other sort of beauty left ... Religion is doing very well. The Catholic Church still tops the bill as far as finance and general efficiency goes. The Church of England is still staggering along without much conviction. The Evangelists are screeching as usual and sending out missionaries. Christian Science is coming up smiling, a slightly superior smile, but always a smile. God is Love, there is no pain. Pain is error. Everything that isn’t Love is error ... Politically all is confusion, but that’s nothing new. There’s still poverty, unemployment, pain, greed, cruelty, passion and crime ... The competitive sporting spirit is being admirably fostered, particularly as regards the Olympic Games. A superb preparation for the next War, fully realized by everyone but the public that will be involved. The newspapers still lie over anything of importance, and the majority still believes them implicitly. The only real difference in Post War conditions is that there are so many men maimed for life and still existing, and so many women whose heartache will never heal ... The War is fashionable now, like a pleasantly harrowing film. Even men who fought in it, some of them, see in it a sort of vague glamour, they’ve slipped back as I knew they would ...’

  It is tempting to dismiss Post-Mortem and its conclusion that ‘life is a poor joke’ with the thought that the artist and craftsman in Coward have here been defeated by the man with a message, but there is perhaps rather more to it than that. When the play was first published in 1931 with a dedication to Bolitho, The Times felt that ‘an overpowering theme has trapped Mr Coward into losing his style and his head’; and technically it is true that Post-Mortem is unsatisfactory, as a stage play. But its theme (‘if the men who died in the trenches could only come back now and see how little we have done to justify their sacrifice’) was a perfectly valid one and the fault seems to lie with Coward’s choice of medium, not with that of his message.

  The play when published attracted some surprised reviews, mainly from critics who were forced to withdraw Coward from the pigeon-hole marked ‘superficial satirist’ or ‘playboy of the west-end world’ and to reconsider him in the light of Post-Mortem; but most came out in firm favour of it as a treatise if not as a play, and one man thoroughly impressed by it was T. E. Lawrence, then passing as 338171 Aircraftsman Shaw, a disguise that Noël sent up sky high in his reply (‘Dear 338171, or may I call you 338 ...’). Lawrence of Arabia found Post-Mortem ‘a really fine effort, which does you great honour as a human being ... you had something far more important to say than usual, and I fancy that in saying it you let the box office and the stalls go hang ... as an argument it is first rate ... people won’t like you for being quite so serious as you are in this, but it gave me a thrill to read it.’

  15

  1930–1931

  ‘Private Lives was described variously as ‘tenuous, thin, brittle, gossamer, iridescent and delightfully daring’. All of which connotated to the public mind cocktails, evening dress, repartee and irreverent allusions to copulation thereby causing a gratifying number of respectable people to queue up at the box office.’

  Early in the summer of 1930 Noël was back at Goldenhurst after his travels, and arrangements for the production of Private Lives that autumn were already in hand. To his amazement he had discovered when he got home that all the problems surrounding Gertrude Lawrence and her intricate commitments to André Charlot had vanished, and that she was not only available to play Amanda but was already over from America, staying at Edward Molyneux’s luxurious villa at Cap d’Ail in the South of France, learning the lines. Noël decided to join her there, and wrote accordingly to Miss Lawrence:

  ‘Mr Coward asks me to say that there was talk of you playing a small part in a play of his on condition that you tour and find your own clothes (same to be of reasonable quality) and understudy Jessie Matthews whom you have always imitated. Mr Coward will be visiting the South of France in mid-July and he will appear at Cap d’Ail, whether you like it or not, with Mr Jack Wilson on the 20th. If by any chance there is no room at the rather squalid lodgings you have taken, would you be so kind as to engage several suites for Mr Coward and Mr Wilson at the Hotel Mont Fleury which will enable same Mr Wilson and Mr Coward to have every conceivable meal with you and use all your toilets for their own advantage. Several complicated contracts are being sent to you by Mr Coward on the terms you agreed upon – i.e., £6. 10. 0. a week and understudy.’

  On the way to Cap d’Ail with Jack, Noël stopped in Paris to see Sacha Guitry, the playwright and actor to whom he is still most frequently compared; the two men discovered reluctantly that they did have a fair amount in common, in their approach to the theatre in general and to light comedy in particular, and there was even a suggestion that after its London run Coward should do Private Lives in translation at Guitry’s Théâtre de la Madeleine in Paris. Guitry also volunteered to write a play for Noël which he would then act in French in Paris, but this association of two actor-authors never came to anything, though three years later Coward did write Conversation Piece as a vehicle for Yvonne Printemps, the second of Guitry’s five wives
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  Leaving Paris for the South of France, Noël and Jack arrived at the Molyneux villa and there, with Gertie Noël began to rehearse the main scenes of Private Lives. Writing later about that summer, Miss Lawrence remembered ‘every evening we arranged and rearranged the furniture in the drawing-room for a rehearsal. My other guests – among them G. B. Stern and William Powell – wandered in and out, amused themselves as they wished, and looked on Noël and me as two quite pleasant but quite mad creatures.’

  At the end of July Noël and Gertie returned from Cap d’Ail and went into full rehearsal of Private Lives in London with Noël himself directing and Gladys Calthrop designing the sets. The rest of the casting was now complete: Victor was to be played by a young, moustached Laurence Olivier and Sibyl, the other protagonist in Coward’s mixed doubles, by Adrianne Allen; Everley Gregg played the only other character, a maid with one brief appearance in Act III, but to all intents and purposes there were anyway only two people in the entire play – Elyot Chase, played by Noël, and Amanda Prynne, played by Gertrude Lawrence. For Miss Allen and Mr Olivier were playing parts that, by Coward’s own admission, existed solely as ‘extra puppets’, feeds to supply himself and Miss Lawrence with the motivation they needed to launch into lengthy duologues, one of which lasted for the whole of the second act. Victor and Sibyl were considered by their creator to be ‘little better that ninepins, lightly wooden and only there at all in order to be repeatedly knocked down and stood up again’. That Coward was aware of this from the very beginning explains the casting of Olivier in what must seem one of the more unlikely parts in Sir Laurence’s long and distinguished career. Victor had to be attractive enough for Amanda to have married him, and from Noël’s point of view to have a bad part played by a bad actor would have been too great a risk; on the principle that only exciting actors can ever play bores successfully, Coward approached Olivier whom he’d seen a year before in Paris Bound, knowing that he was sufficiently in need of a success (he had given up the chance of playing Stanhope in the original West End production of Journey’s End to go into a disastrous Beau Geste) to accept the part of Victor.

  For Olivier it was to be an instructive time; Noël sent for him to come to Ebury Street, where he found Coward sitting up in bed having breakfast.

  ‘He told me I could ill afford to turn down the shop window of a London success at this point in my career; and he was, not arrogantly but in a matter-of-fact way, quite certain that Private Lives would be a triumph. I went away, read the play, and returned to tell Noël in all seriousness that I’d rather play Elyot – he nearly died with laughter. Then he told me not to be a bloody fool, that he’d get me fifty pounds a week for playing Victor, and that we’d start rehearsing in a fortnight.

  ‘In rehearsals, in his own practical way, Noël was a great mind-opener and very inspiring to work for ... he was probably the first man who took hold of me and made me think ... he taxed me with his sharpness and shrewdness and brilliance, and he used to point out when I was talking nonsense which nobody else had ever done before. He gave me a sense of balance, of right and wrong. He would make me read; I never used to read anything at all. I remember he said, “Right, my boy, Wuthering Heights, Of Human Bondage and The Old Wives’ Tale by Arnold Bennett. That’ll do, those are three of the best. Read them.” I did ... Noël also did a priceless thing; he taught me not to giggle on the stage. Once already I’d been fired for doing it, and I was very nearly sacked from the Birmingham Rep. for the same reason. Noël cured me; by trying to make me laugh outrageously, he taught me how not to give in to it. My great triumph came in New York when one night I managed to break Noël up on the stage without giggling myself.’

  With Olivier cast and rehearsals well under way, the Lord Chamberlain (still Lord Cromer) announced that he was unhappy with the love scene in the second act, which by the standards of 1930 and considering that the participants were technically divorced and remarried to other partners seemed altogether too risqué. Noël repaired instantly to St James’s Palace where he read the play, acting out all the parts in front of His Lordship who was then persuaded that with some dignified direction the scene would after all be passable without any cuts. Rehearsals continued until, on August 18th 1930, Private Lives had its world première presented by Charles Cochran at the King’s Theatre in Edinburgh. It was the first time that Coward and Gertrude Lawrence had appeared together in a straight play since Hannele at the Liverpool Rep. in 1913.

  Private Lives almost certainly represents Coward’s greatest claim to theatrical permanence; though it is the lightest of light comedies it has about it a symmetry and durability that have assured it near-constant production in one language or another from that first tour to the present day. It is in many ways a perfect light comedy, arguably the best to have come out of England in the first half of the twentieth century; and though at the time of its first production it seemed to many critics that Private Lives could only survive for as long as Gertrude Lawrence and Coward himself played it, the comedy has in fact been almost consistently successful ever since, a guaranteed copper-bottomed audience-puller that has temporarily rescued countless reps, from the throes of a bad season. Suitably enough Private Lives was also the play which, given a 1963 London production by the Hampstead Theatre Club, launched in his own lifetime a ‘Noël Coward Renaissance’.

  Yet Private Lives, though it has far outlived its original production, is a play that even more than most of Coward stands or falls by the way it is acted. On paper, one discovers, there is almost nothing there: brief lines, the occasional aphorism (‘women should be struck regularly, like gongs’) and duologues that read dully but are designed to be spoken, whereupon, said right, they take on a sparkling life of their own that is quite invisible on the printed page. The dialogue in this comedy of manners is theatrically effective rather than naturalistic; there is virtually no action beyond a fight at the end of Act II and another at the end of Act III; there are no ‘cameo’ characters to break up the duologues except the maid at the end, and there is really no plot to sustain the actors if their own talents start to fail them. It is, in fact, a technical exercise of incredible difficulty for two accomplished light comedians.

  After Edinburgh, Private Lives toured Liverpool, Birmingham, Manchester and finally Southsea where one night Amy Johnson was to be found among the audience. Reviews on the tour had been generally excellent, though in this last week Private Lives ran into some high moral outrage from a local Southsea critic: ‘The play, with the exception of a certain amount of smart backchat, consisted of large buckets of stable manure thrown all over the great audience for two hours ... Twenty years ago such a production would have been impossible; of course these four players in their own private lives may be quite moral and respectable. I know nothing about them and don’t want to ...’

  In London, where Noël’s Bitter-Sweet was now well into its second year at His Majesty’s, Private Lives opened the new Phoenix Theatre with a glittering high-society première. The reviews next morning were mixed, many more good than bad but none exactly raves: most critics offered something of the grudging patronage with which Allardyce Nicoli was later to dismiss Coward in his World Drama: ‘amusing, no doubt, yet hardly moving farther below the surface than a paper boat in a bath-tub and, like the paper boat, ever in imminent danger of becoming a shapeless, sodden mass.’

  One point about Private Lives that went almost entirely unnoticed was that, for a comedy, it is based on a very serious situation: Amanda and Elyot are unable to live apart, yet equally unable to live together – they love each other too much and are only too aware of it. Because of this, there is an underlying sadness about the major love-scenes which belies the general impression of a light and flippant comedy. But what the critics thought of Private Lives was on this occasion a matter of supreme irrelevance; the combination of Coward and Gertrude Lawrence would have filled the Phoenix to capacity for a season in 1930 if they had chosen merely to read The Church Times at one another.r />
  In the brief London run Coward’s partnership with Gertrude Lawrence was widely considered to be the best thing that either of them had ever achieved on the stage. Together they created a potent theatrical magic, and there was an indefinable chemistry in the public meeting of their two personalities which ensured that each inspired the other to be infinitely better. Coward himself, writing of Miss Lawrence a few years later:

  ‘Everything she had been in my mind when I originally conceived the idea (for Private Lives) in Tokyo came to life on the stage: the witty, quick-silver delivery of lines; the romantic quality, tender and alluring; the swift, brittle rages; even the white Molyneux dress ... Gertie has an astounding sense of the complete reality of the moment, and her moments, dictated by the extreme variability of her moods, change so swiftly that it is frequently difficult to discover what, apart from eating, sleeping and acting, is true of her at all ... her talent is equally kaleidoscopic. She is the epitome of grace and charm and imperishable glamour. I have seen many actresses play Amanda in Private Lives, some brilliantly, some moderately and one or two abominably. But the part was written for Gertie and, as I conceived it and wrote it, I can say with authority that no actress in the world ever could or ever will come within a mile of her performance of it ... Yet she can play a scene one night with perfect subtlety and restraint, and the next with such obviousness and over-emphasis that your senses reel. She has, in abundance, every theatrical essential but one: critical faculty. She can watch a great actor and be stirred to the depths, her emotional response is immediate and genuine. She can watch a bad actor and be stirred to the depths, the response is equally immediate and equally genuine. But for this tantalizing lack of discrimination she could, I believe, be the greatest actress alive in the theatre today.’