Home Chat 20012001 Thethe Newsletternewsletter Ofof Thethe Noëlnoël Cowardcoward Societysociety
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OCTOBEROCTOBER HOME CHAT 20012001 THETHE NEWSLETTERNEWSLETTER OFOF THETHE NOËLNOËL COWARDCOWARD SOCIETYSOCIETY THE SOCIETY’S 3rd YEAR BECKONS On November this year the Society will enter its third year of existence. During this formative period it has been very successfully led by Michael Imison as Chair and Gareth Pike as Secretary and General Manager. Michael is to retire from his role in November but will remain on the Society’s committee and stay as a director of Noel Coward Ltd., the charitable company that has responsibility for the Society. Gareth Pike who retired from his post last month will also stay with us on the committee. The Society owes a great deal to their efforts in establishing and directing its work over this period - we thank them both! The new Chair for the next year is to be Tracy Cutting who has been a member of the committee during this last year and is the representative of Warner Chappell the music publishers. Tracy’s incisive, imaginative style and dedication will bring opportunities to develop further the work of the Society. John Knowles has taken on the role of Secretary and General Manager and has a brief to develop and share the work of the Society amongst its members. He and other committee members are keen to see the establishment of new Society groups and events across the globe, regional groups in the UK and activities that involve members in the work of the Society. We wish them both well! John Knowles and Robert Gardiner have also become directors of Noel Coward Ltd. Society Events for the Autumn/Fall Private Lives, Star Quality, AGM and December 16th Our visit to see the West End production of Private Lives may well have happened by the time you receive this newsletter. There are still some seats left for this visit at 8pm on Wednesday Oct 3. The cost is £30-00 which guarantees you a £35-00 seat in the stalls for the last preview before the press opening of this limited run, which is predicted to be a total sell out. You will also get a free drink in the interval and we are hoping to have programmes autographed by the cast available for you to buy. The Society has also booked a room at Café Flo in St Martin's Lane (diagonally opposite the theatre) for dinner at 6 pm before the performance. This will be a special pre-theatre menu offering two courses and coffee for £11-50. At this price you get a main course with either starter or desert. During the dinner Philip Hoare will talk about the play and we will raffle a signed copy of the original hardback of Philip Hoare's definitive biography of Noel Coward. If you would like to add your name to the list of those coming to the performance please phone Michael Imison on 020 7689 0493 or email him on [email protected] If you would like to come to the dinner please ring or email with your choice from the menu (as shown in a recent letter to you). This includes those who have already indicated that they intend to come to dinner. This will speed up service. Our Annual General Meeting on November 17th will be combined with a theatre visit to see Star Quality starring Penelope Keith. The meeting is likely to be held at the Theatre Museum, Covent Garden and be followed by a meal before attending the theatre. We are also arranging our annual flower-laying ceremony on Sunday, December 16th, the Master’s birthday, at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane. This will be followed by a meal at ‘The Ivy’ restaurant, the haunt of the ‘Bright Young Things’ the group of hedonists - that became a vital part of Coward’s young life in the 20’s - led by Lordships Napier Alington and Ned Lathom with Tallulah Bankhead and many other rising stars! We will keep you posted on all our events - trying wherever possible to bring together as many interesting A member writes … HOME CHAT CHANGES From next month Home Chat will include an insert on … from Sallyann Wilson: I have been researching for a night coloured paper featuring original material from members, of dramatised ghost stories I am performing on Halloween. Coward devotees, historians, actors, invited authors and I came across this tantalising quote, in reference to a haunted others. These will provide a collectable resource of unique house and wonder if anyone can put me any the wiser? papers for members. “Sir Noel Coward was a frequent visitor at one time - a man who was no stranger to ghosts.” The diaries are of little help. If any member would like to contribute to this new series of (Ed: Does anyone know the name of the house - the articles please write to: reference must be to Blithe Spirit ?) John Knowles, 29, Waldemar Avenue, Hellesdon, Norwich, Any ideas? Email: [email protected] NR6 6TB, UK email [email protected] Page 1 I’ve Been To A Marvellous Party ... for good early on. This boded well, since major English By Kenneth Tynan playwrights do not, on the whole, make a habit of acquiring This review of Cole Lesley’s book ‘Remembered a university education. Poets and novelists often thrive on it, Laughter’ was first seen in the New Yorker. It provides but aspiring dramatists, practitioners of a vulgar art that one of the best summaries of Noel Coward’s talents demands nightly contact with popular audiences, seldom that we have ever seen. flourish in the bookish enclaves of Oxford and Cambridge. Throughout his teens, Coward immersed himself in bad In 1936, COLE LESLEY, a stage- struck youth who could popular theater, annexing the more outrageous lines, usually not cook and had never been a valet, went to work for Noël spoken by flamboyant leading ladies, for subsequent use in Coward as a sort of cook-valet. Several weeks passed before his conversational repertoire. Once, in the 1950s, after I had the ice of the master-servant relationship was broken. One given his latest play a tepid review, he greeted me at a party morning, discussing plans for luncheon, Mr. Lesley with the daunting remark, “May God forgive you, Blanche inquired, "What would you say to a little fish?" "I should Westermere, for I never shall!” I had no idea, until I read say, `Good morning, little fish,"' Coward briskly replied, Mr. Lesley's book, that this resounding threat was first and Mr. Lesley rejoiced, sensing that he had been admitted uttered by Madge Titheradge at Drury Lane in 1916. to his employer's confidence. This was the first, though far By the time Coward was 17, a certain presumption was from the best, of the innumerable Coward jokes that were to already apparent. Playing a bit part in D. W Griffith's keep him happily enslaved for the 37 remaining years of his Hearts of the World, he convinced the great director that it master's life, during which time he rose from the ranks to would be wiser to photograph him walking toward, rather become Coward's major domo, confidant, companion, and than away from, the camera. Aged 18, he was summoned to Boswell. In writing Remembered Laughter, he had access dinner at an august literary club that numbered Galsworthy, not only to the boss's previously unpublished letters and Maugham, Wells, and Arnold Bennett among its members; journals but also, of course, to his own flypaper me mory. turning up in full evening dress, he found everyone else in He quotes extensively from all these sources, and the result ordinary suits but generously let them off the hook by is to establish Coward, in his private manifestations, as the declaring, “Now, I don't want anybody to feel funniest eminent Englishman of the 20th century. Not the embarrassed.” At 19, he was lunching almost daily at wittiest: He never regarded himself as a wit, and said he London's smartest theatrical restaurant, and he was only 20 would have hated to hear Oscar Wilde (whom he thought when his first play, I'll Leave It to You, opened in the West witty but humorless) spouting prefabricated aphorisms by End. It failed to click, and some dark times followed, the hour. What he relished were tributes like that of Nancy among them a near-penniless sojourn in New York, but in Mitford, tearful after broncho-spasms of lunchtime laughter: 1923 he was back on the London playbills as star and author "Oh Noël, you do make such jolly good jokes." of The Young Idea, which contains the first line that Mostly at breakneck speed and without significant revision, distinguishes Coward from all his predecessors in English Coward wrote five classic comedies - Hay Fever, Private comedy: “I lent that woman the top of my thermos flask and Lives, Design for Living, Present Laughter, and Blithe she never returned it. She's shallow, that's what she is, shal- Spirit - that have entered the English-language repertoire low.” Despite warm praise from the critics, the play folded and show no signs of moving out; he composed a large after eight weeks. By now, however, Coward had begun to number of durable songs, both comic and romantic, most of build a cult audience based on his own personality, and a them best remembered when sung in what he called “my year later he gave them the scandalous success they thin, feathery voice.” Time has decisively confirmed two expected of him: The Vortex, about a dope-sniffing boy and verdicts on Coward's dramatic prose.