"He is the Congreve of our day," Arnold Bennett remarked of Noël Coward after seeing the first production of Private Lives in 1930. Coward, who was never really at ease with either Elizabethan or Restoration comedy, may not have welcomed this judgement-yet it seems, now, to be the right one. The reviews Bennett contributed to the New Age and the London Evening Standard testify to his skill as a predictor of literary survival; his valuations of Swinburne and Chekhov being particularly farsighted. Bennett treated Private Lives with respect, unlike most of the critics, who complained of its "brittleness" and "thinness." Ivor Brown set the tone in the Observer: "Within a few years the student of drama will be sitting in complete bewilderment before the text of Private Lives, wondering what on earth those fellows in 1930 saw in so flimsy a trifle."
The "trifle" is now almost 70 years old, its beguiling flimsiness intact, and the strictures of Ivor Brown, along with his name, belong with buried history. Drama students who assume the roles of Amanda, Elyot, Victor and Sybil soon realise what a challenge they have taken on, not least in the matter of comic timing. The play, gossamer as it is, looks indestructible. Bennett understood that Coward is at his most serious when he is flippant. His characters may be superficial, but they are real. And that is why the comparison with Congreve is just.
Noël Coward was born on 16th December 1899, in a small house in the quiet suburb of Teddington-on-Thames. An elder brother had died at the age of six, 18 months before his arrival, with the result that Mrs Coward worshipped her second child. Violet Coward was the archetypal theatrical mother, a woman determined that her talented little boy should outshine all the other talented little boys and girls. Noël's professional career began when he was ten, playing Prince Mussel in The Goldfish. His very first words on the stage were "Hello, Dolly" and his next line was "Crumbs, how exciting!" He also sang in a duet with a girl called June Tripp: "School, School-Goodbye to school/Now we are always playing..."
"Goodbye to school" indeed, for Coward was to leave one school after another during his formative years. He famously bit a teacher's arm, and often played truant. He enjoyed telling strangers about his wicked father, drunken mother and starving brothers and sisters. He gave the startled men and women a false name and address, just in case they reported his parents to the police. Perhaps these early adventures were a protest against the "refined gentility" of life in Teddington, and subsequently in Battersea and Clapham. He craved glamour and excitement, and he must have felt that both were coming his way when the family crossed the river-that great divide-and moved to Chelsea. Although Violet continued to take in lodgers, Noël was now better placed to "come up in the world," which was as much her ambition as his.
Coward received almost no formal education; throughout his teens he was regularly employed as an actor, singer and dancer. He appeared with Charles Hawtrey and Gerald du Maurier, two of the biggest stars of the Edwardian stage, from whom he learned how to control an audience. He watched their every move; listened to the vocal nuances they used to make people laugh. At Christmas, 1913, he played Slightly in Peter Pan, at the generous salary of ?4 a week. His performance was noticed favourably in the national press. (In "A Tribute to Mr Coward," written in 1953, Kenneth Tynan wrote: "Forty years ago he was Slightly in Peter Pan, and you might say that he has been wholly in Peter Pan ever since.") The precocious boy journeyed back and forth to the West End from Clapham, reading his favourite books on the train. His devotion to E Nesbit, author of The Railway Children, was lifelong, and when he discovered the stories of Saki he recognised a kindred spirit behind the elegantly turned dialogue.
He was still living in Clapham when, in 1914, he met (in circumstances that remain obscure) a painter named Philip Streatfeild, who had a studio in, of all magical places, Chelsea. Noël was the same age as the century, Streatfeild was 30. A nude called Doris was being painted on one of Noël's visits, and he was delighted when she calmly got up and made the tea. Here was La vie de Boh?e, English style. Violet Coward must have approved of Streatfeild, because she agreed to let Noël go on holiday with him to the west country. If the juvenile actor and the artist were lovers, the subject was never discussed. What is certain is that Streatfeild, with his connections in society, profoundly influenced Coward's future, both as man and dramatist. It was Streatfeild who arranged for Noël, then 15, to stay with Mrs Astley-Cooper at Hambleton Hall, her grand house in Rutland. Mrs Cooper was mildly eccentric, prone to hanging scarves over the mirrors so that she couldn't glimpse her decaying features. The ageing aristo and the young social climber revelled in each other's company. He was perfectly at home at Hambleton Hall, where a valet laid out his dinner clothes for him. His weekends in Rutland, mixing with the county set, were a foretaste of the life he aspired to and would eventually attain.
Coward was just a promising playwright, with two comedies already staged, when Streatfeild died in 1922. One of these, The Young Idea, takes place in a country house, and has characters similar to the hunting and shooting types he met at Mrs Cooper's. In 1924, he returned to the country house setting in Hay Fever, a masterpiece of inconsequentiality. It's safe to assume that Mrs Cooper is the model-in part-for Judith Bliss, the batty actress failing to exercise control over her guests. The play contains several non sequiturs but few witty lines in the Wildean manner. When it was revived, under his own direction, at the National Theatre in 1964, Coward observed in a letter to Laurence Olivier after the successful first night: "To me, the essence of good comedy writing is that perfectly ordinary phrases such as 'Just fancy!' should, by virtue of their context, achieve greater laughs than the most literate epigrams. Some of the biggest laughs in Hay Fever occur on such lines as 'Go on,' 'No there isn't, is there?' and 'This haddock's disgusting.' There are many other glittering examples of my sophistication in the same vein... I would add that the sort of lines above mentioned have to be impeccably delivered and that in the current performance they certainly are."
Edith Evans was Judith in that production, and about ten years too old for the role. During rehearsals, she exasperated Coward by adding the word "very" to the line "You can see as far as Marlow on a clear day." When she repeated the mistake once too often, he snapped: "No, no, Edith. The line is 'You can see as far as Marlow on a clear day.' On a very clear day you can see Marlow and Beaumont and Fletcher."
Coward had acted in the The Knight of the Burning Pestle in his youth, playing a Cockney rogue with an impossibly upper-class accent. The experience put him off the classic English comedies for ever. By then he had travelled a long way from Teddington, and had lost his ear for ordinary speech. The working-class men and women who feature in the scripts he wrote in the 1930s and 1940s are sentimentalised stereotypes, touching their forelocks to gentry and showing those proper "salt of the earth" qualities. Coward was happiest as a writer among the people of his adopted-and adoptive-class, not with the "h"-dropping lower orders, whom he patronised insufferably. He passionately believed in the feudal system, having found his niche at the top of it. He mingled with all kinds of queens, including the sovereign variety.
It has become a commonplace to write that The Vortex, which caused a sensation in the 1920s, was the Look Back in Anger of its period. Nicky Lancaster is as angry as Jimmy Porter, but in plusher surroundings. He has an Oedipal-fixation on his silly mother, with her penchant for men as young as her son. The piece is dated now, for all its concern with drugs; and the final confrontation between Nicky and Florence is a reminder that Ibsen achieved something finer and infinitely more affecting with Oswald and Mrs Alving in the last act of Ghosts. The serious Noël Coward was merely the frivolous writer taking himself seriously. He rarely knew when he was out of his depth.
But oh, how refreshing he was in the shallows. Design for Living, which he worked on in the months after the death of his younger brother, Erik, shows Noël at his lightest and, paradoxically, most perceptive. Its three characters, a mange a trois, laugh and joke together, squabble, agree not to bicker, then start all over again. If the actors speak all at once, that is what they ought to be doing, because it was Coward's intention to depict a three-way relationship of such intimacy that the two men and the woman often don't hear what their partners are saying. The sexual chemistry which underlies the friendship is implicit, and the more powerful for being understated.
Coward at his best had no patience with rhetoric. The shrewd Mrs Patrick Campbell, with whom he sustained an edgy friendship, said of the plays that brought him fame that they "seemed to be written by a typewriter." The staccato exchanges, the one- or two-word sentences, have an automatic sound and feel to them, as if Coward had ordered the machine to do his work for him. In his earliest experiments, Coward was cocking a snook at the inflated language of the pieces he had acted in for a decade. The long, explanatory speech has been banished, as has the melodramatic rejoinder, like "May God forgive you, Blanche Westermere, for I never shall!", which Coward heard in his boyhood and remembered in his old age, when he would suddenly drop it into a conversation.
Neville Cardus, reviewing Coward's first play in the Manchester Guardian, deplored the fact that its theme was restricted to the "idle bourgeoisie." I'll Leave it to You began where he intended to go on. This industrious dramatist, lyricist, composer and performer is unequalled when he is dealing with the idle-with people who have enough money and time to indulge their trivial feelings. He never stops to wonder how they came to be rich; they simply are. Sean O'Casey, who grew up in the terrible Dublin slums, recorded in his autobiographies the disgust he felt with Coward's success in the 1930s. The author of The Plough and the Stars was mystified by the theatre-going public's appetite for such heartless stuff. Evening gowns and dinner jackets, cocktails and Abdullah cigarettes-the whole paraphernalia sickened O'Casey. But the heartless stuff endures, or a portion of it-in Private Lives, Hay Fever, Design for Living and Present Laughter, and in many incomparable songs.
Is the stuff really heartless? I suspect not. Coward's flag-waving, tub-thumping heart was on his sleeve in a concoction like Cavalcade, which was filmed, and This Happy Breed, that dubious celebration of ordinary folk, which also became a successful movie at the end of the second world war, but which would inspire derisive laughter today. The heart of an artist is a strange thing, not always easily detected. Coward's was hidden behind the brittle carapace he dexterously created for his martini-drinking socialites and for his own dressing-gowned public persona. He did not satirise these people-he actually liked them, ridiculous as they are. He didn't need to hold them up to ridicule, because their inherent silliness was given free rein, with no authorial comment. When Amanda and Elyot in Private Lives re-declare their love for each other, the moment is touching and true, but even then the next big row is waiting to happen, and it will be about nothing of any importance. The audience is half aware of the imminent explosion, yet succumbs to the scene while it lasts. The "underlying vulnerability" of the couple, to use the phrase of Coward's friend and biographer, Cole Lesley, is briefly revealed before the banter is renewed.
Coward's output was enormous-plays, operettas, revues, novels, stories, two volumes of autobiography-and much of it is destined to vanish. He was out of fashion in his own lifetime, but so were many other more substantial talents. His work was criticised from the very start, but he was sustained by the warmth of the audiences which flocked to shows like Bitter Sweet and bought the records of his songs. For many years he was a national institution, worshipped by the same people who worshipped the royal family. Everyone knew he was gay-Let our affair be a gay thing is the title of one of his best known songs-and nobody really cared. He sang Matelot and Mad about the boy with no sense of embarrassment. But then, in the 1950s, he produced a series of stinkers: the musical After the Ball; the play Relative Values, which ends with a toast to "The final inglorious disintegration of the most unlikely dream that ever troubled the foolish heart of man-social equality." He belonged in the past and appeared to be proud of it. He attacked younger playwrights in three bilious articles for the Sunday Times, forgetting that he had suffered similar attacks when The Vortex was put on in 1924. It was deemed "filthy" and "squalid" by those who wanted the familiar Edwardian pap.
He was embittered, but not totally ignored. He was never one for anonymity. His circle encompassed the very famous, the not-so-famous, and the notorious. He could retreat to Switzerland or Jamaica, and write or paint as the mood took him. He wowed the gamblers in Las Vegas with his cabaret act, singing Mad Dogs and Englishmen and Nina, and changing the lyrics of Cole Porter's Let's Do It -"The Bront? felt that they must do it/Ernest Hemingway could just do it" and "In Texas some of the men do it/Others drill a hole and then do it"-to outbursts of laughter. He is photographed, on the cover of the original LP, in full evening dress, drinking a cup of tea in the middle of the Nevada desert. It captures something of his mischievous, happily snobbish spirit.
Works of art become period pieces, then they either disappear or re-emerge as timeless. Recent productions of Private Lives (in which Amanda and Elyot are played with an intensity worthy of Strindberg) and Hay Fever have proved that they have passed the test of timelessness. Amanda and Elyot, bless their awful tempers, are the Millamant and Mirabell of the years between the two world wars. They deserve each other, and will continue to do so as long as such spiteful, cossetted creatures exist.
Coward himself might be his most consummate creation, the subject of a myriad of anecdotes. "Marvellous isn't the word!" he trilled to actors who had given indifferent or downright bad performances. Perhaps he will survive as Sydney Smith survives, in stories that bear retelling. What is certain is that, in four exquisitely crafted plays, he gave a voice to the skin-deep, who in one form or another are curiously immortal. Much as he loathed Beaumont and Fletcher, Coward has his place alongside them. No, they are neither good enough nor grand enough. It is William Congreve's shadow under which he deserves to stand, as Arnold Bennett predicted.
