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Home , Blithe Spirit (play), Duchess Theatre, Gertrude Lawrence, Hay Fever (play), Joyce Carey, Kay Hammond

PROGRAM GUIDE TABLE OF CONTENTS

SYNOPSIS 3 HISTORY OF 5 COWARD LETTER REGARDING THE OPENING 8 NOËL COWARD 9 THE FIRST NOËL 13 WHY NOËL NOW? 16 NOËL COWARD CAREER HIGHLIGHTS 18

RESOURCES 25

2014 West End Revival. Photo by Johan Persson

TABLE OF CONTENTS 2 SYNOPSIS

Written in 1941

First presented by H.M Tennent Ltd. and John C. Wilson at the Opera House, , on 16 June 1941. Subsequently presented at the , , on 2 July 1941. Transferred to the St James’s Theatre, 23 March, 1942. Transferred to the , 6 October 1942 (1,997 performances). ACT I In the living room of her pleasant house in Kent, Ruth Condomine and her husband, the writer Charles Condomine, have planned a séance in order to get copy for Charles’ next book. They have invited their friends, Dr and Mrs Bradman, and have enlisted the local medium, Madame Arcati, for the job. After the guests have arrived and dined, they sit down for the séance. Soon the table is moving and Arcati announces that someone wishes to speak to Mr Condomine. Charles reacts flippantly before Arcati goes into a trance and, with a scream, she falls to the floor. Out of the chaos, Charles’ previous wife, Elvira, is inadvertently conjured but only Charles can see or hear her. After their guests have left, Charles’ attempts to shut Elvira up, which Ruth takes as being addressed to herself, cause an argument between husband and wife. Ruth goes upstairs in a temper leaving Charles and Elvira alone together. ACT II At breakfast next morning Ruth is still annoyed with Charles, fully convinced that he had been very rude to her the previous evening. When Elvira enters with a bunch of roses and begins to talk to her, Ruth can stand it no longer and bursts into tears believing her husband is out of his mind. She finally believes him when Elvira smashes a vase into the grate. She immediately appeals to Madame Arcati, who comes over to tea. When Ruth asks her to exorcise Elvira, Arcati has to admit that she does not know how. Meanwhile, the Condomine’s maid Edith has fallen down the stairs and Charles has hurt his arm on account of a ladder breaking leading Ruth to become convinced Elvira is trying to kill him so she can have him to herself on the astral plane. She drives over to Madame Arcati for desperate help not realising that Elvira has indeed tampered with the car in the hope that Charles would drive her to a cinema in Folkestone and 2014 West End Revival. Photo by Johan Persson he would be killed. Instead, Charles receives a telephone call – it’s Ruth who has crashed and been killed. ACT III A few days later, Madame Arcati has come to call on Charles confessing that had she not walked out in a huff the tragedy might not have happened. She offers to help him dematerialise the spirits. Meanwhile, Elvira is very much upset after several days of Ruth’s company and declares she wants to go home after arguing with Charles over events in their marriage. Madame Arcati proceeds to the exorcism. Elvira, enjoying the spectacle hugely, nevertheless remains unaffected. Suddenly the window curtains part and Ruth enters. The two spirit-wives find their situation intolerable and wish to get away. However, one séance after another has failed to shift them. Arcati soon realises that they are not materialising through her but through someone else in the house and she immediately alights on the Condomine’s maid, Edith. She sends Edith into a trance and gradually the voices of Ruth and Elvira disappear. After advising Charles to go away for a voyage, Madame Arcati leaves. However, the blithe spirits have not disappeared and Charles insists that he is going to get out of their reach meanwhile adding some difficult home truths about both of them. Their reaction is an outbreak of chaotic poltergeist activity – Charles exits the house just as the overmantel crashes to the floor and the curtain pole comes tumbling down.

Taken from The Theatrical Companion to Coward (2000) Raymond Mander and Joe Mitchenson, updated by Barry Day and

SYNOPSIS 3

HISTORY OF BLITHE SPIRIT

BLITHE SPIRIT (written for the programme for the West End Production, 2014)

“IF LOVE WERE ALL, I SHOULD BE LONELY” – It all began with the actress . On May 2nd 1941 she took a train for Portmeirion in North Wales. She’d had one of her plays, Sweet Aloes, produced in the West End and was now working on another based on Keats and Fanny Brawne. As a travelling companion, she took her great friend Noël Coward. When they returned to London six days later, Joyce was still wrestling with Fanny Brawne. Coward had the completed manuscript of Blithe Spirit. “For some time past an idea for a light comedy had been rattling at the door of my mind, and I thought the time had come to let it in and show it a little courtesy…. Beyond a few typographical errors, I made no corrections, and only two lines of the original script were ultimately cut.”

The play opened only a month later on 16th June in Manchester, and then at London’s Piccadilly Theatre on 2nd July. It ran for 1997 performances, outlasting the War (a West End record until overtook it). Some early critics were sceptical of the subject matter. How could audiences be expected to find death amusing in the middle of a war? Yet, clearly they did. The Daily Mail summed it up as “fantastic fun” and, paraphrasing Shelley, concluded: Hail to thee, Blithe Spirit, Bird thou’ll never get.

And it never has, even though it’s one of the most revived of his plays.

Coward gave the play the subtitle “An Improbable Comedy” but sensed a deeper meaning, common to many of Coward’s major plays. When he directed a revival of Blithe Spirit at The National Theatre in 1976, Pinter insisted to his cast at the start of rehearsals that he considered the play to be neither improbable nor a comedy. He had already realised from a study of that “a character could stand on a stage and say one thing and the audience would know he actually meant something else!” Pinter would elaborate on that insight in his own work ever 2014 West End Revival after. So, when anyone claims that Coward was Pinteresque, the appropriate Photo by Johan Persson response is that Pinter is Cowardesque.

Comedy was always Coward’s way of making a serious point. “I am light-minded. I would inevitably write a comedy if – God help me! – I wanted to write a play with a message.” Perhaps it was his deliberate intention to appear trivial, never to wear his heart anywhere near his sleeve. What he might have said was that he realised that Comedy and Tragedy are essentially two sides of the same coin. With the twenty-twenty clarity of hindsight, however, it becomes clear that beneath the brittle carapace of witty words, much of his work had as its unifying theme the tragic Impossibility of Love.

HISTORY OF BLITHE SPIRIT 5 In Private Lives, Elyot and Amanda cannot live with each other or without each other. In their struggle, which will go on after they steal away and the play ends, they leave the debris of everyone who comes near them, and will go on doing so, for this is not an ending but an intermission. They are unconscious killers.

The same thing happens in for Gilda, Otto and Leo. The secondary characters who cross their paths are irrelevant to their selfish needs and casually discarded as they work out the variations in their romance-à-trois. Others must clean up the emotional mess. In Fallen Angels, Julia and Jane have settled for predictably boring marriage until the prospect of a visit from the Gallic lover they had once shared suggests the possibility of an old flame rekindling the odd ember.

In Blithe Spirit, Charles Condomine is, for the purposes of the play, a bigamist. As played by Cecil Parker in the original production, he is a conventional middle-aged man, comfortable, if not ecstatic, in his second marriage to Ruth. Then the shade of his first wife, Elvira, returns, reminding him of the lows and also a few of the highs of what once was. He is initially intrigued by having two women fighting over suburban old him. Before long however, this unquiet life rapidly palls an essentially quiet man and soon his only ambition is to be rid of them both. This was the intrinsic element that Parker’s interpretation brought to the story, and which has often been lost in subsequent productions. Blithe Spirit is only incidentally about and the hereafter. It’s really about marital discord in the present continuing for all time. The Impossibility of Love, doubled.

When directed the film version of Blithe Spirit in 1944, was cast as Charles. Harrison was reluctant to play the part and insisted that if he did, he would play it as his fans expected to see him, as “sexy Rexy”. His characterisation missed the point but ironically, thanks to the requirements of the Film Censor, he ends up in the cinematic afterlife with both wives to nag him for all eternity.

Coward’s expressed view of love and marriage was consistent from very early on. It may end in tragedy as in The Astonished Poster of the 1944 film production Heart or Bitter Sweet, or in futility, as in Easy Virtue. At its most romantic, love is something that nearly but never was and now never will be, as in . Never was and therefore able to endure as romance unsoiled in the minds of Laura and Alec. In the minds of the audience too, which is presumably why recently placed Brief Encounter at the top of its poll for the most romantic film of all time. Casablanca and Gone With The Wind were second and third respectively. Over the years and through his plays, poems and songs, Coward conducted a constant debate about love through his characters.

“Tell me, tell me, tell me, what is Love?” asks the young Sari in Bitter Sweet. “Is it some consuming flame / Part of the Moon, part of the Sun / Part of a dream barely begun?”

HISTORY OF BLITHE SPIRIT 6 Later in the same 1929 play, Manon, the café chanteuse, expresses what has come to be seen as Coward’s considered conclusion: I think if only - Somebody splendid really needed me, Someone affectionate and dear, Cares would be ended if I knew that he Wanted to have me near. But I believe that since my life began The most I’ve had is just A talent to amuse. Heigh, ho, if love were all. A later verse captures a more realistic, if more disappointing, realisation. I am no good at Love. My heart should be wild and free I kill the unfortunate golden goose, Whoever it may be, With over-articulate tenderness And too much intensity. I am no good at Love. I betray it with little sins, For I feel the misery of the end In the moment that it begins And the bitterness of the last good-bye Is the bitterness that wins.

In Blithe Spirit, Charles Condomine lives to love again. But what are his chances? In a double divorce he leaves both Ruth and Elvira – but will they leave him? Does anyone in a Coward play live happily ever after?

In a late life television interview, Coward is asked to sum up his life in one word.

“Well, now comes the terrible decision as to whether to be corny or not. The answer is one word. Love. To know that you are among people you love and who love you. That has made all the successes wonderful – much more wonderful that they’d have been anyway. And that’s it, really.”

So perhaps the answer is not Romantic Love, but Loving.

Barry Day EDITOR OF THE LETTERS OF NOËL COWARD

Barry Day has written and compiled a number of books on Noël Coward including Star Quality: The Treasures of Noël Coward (Andre Deutsch), The Letters of Noël Coward (Knopf/Methuen) and The Complete Lyrics of Noël Coward (Overleaf/Methuen).

HISTORY OF BLITHE SPIRIT 7 THE LETTERS OF NOËL COWARD

Taken from THE LETTERS OF NOËL COWARD, page 430 Writing to Jack Wilson after the opening night of BLITHE SPIRIT in July 1941:

17 Gerald Road S.W.1

July 18th 1941

Dearest Dab:

We have been very remiss in not writing before to tell you all about everything. The first night was terrific... oddly enough a really good audience. At the end our old friend in the gallery shouted “It’s rubbish – take it off”, which convulsed everybody, and of course, was used ad nauseam by my admirers in the Press, the Daily Mirror even going to so far as to have “Noël Coward Booed” as a headline. The notices were marvellous on the whole and the business terrific even through heat waves. The performance is excellent. Fay is better than she has ever been and was lovely and easy to direct. I’ve cured her of all her bad mannerisms and she looks charming. Cecil is really first rate and very charming too in a pompous hen’s bottom sort of way. The best performance is Kay Hammond, who is absolutely bewitching and a much finer actress than I suspected she was with a wonderful sense of timing. Edward {Molyneux} made her as simple and lovely a dress as I have ever seen and she looks a vision. She uses dead white make-up with a little green in it, green powder on her face, hair and arms, scarlet lips and nails and ordinary dark eye make-up. She is covered from each side of the stage by a following green spot, almost imperceptible, wherever she goes. The great disappointment is , whom the audience love, because the part is so good, but who is actually very, very bad indeed. She is indistinct, fussy and, beyond her personality, has no technical knowledge of resources at all. She merely fumbles and gasps and drops things and throws many of my best lines down the drain. She is despair to Fay, Cecil and Kay and mortification to me because I thought she would be marvellous. I need hardly say she got a magnificent notice. So much for that.

THE LETTERS OF NOËL COWARD 8 NOËL COWARD BY SHERIDAN MORLEY

COWARD

Sir Noël Coward, play boy of the West End world, jack of all its entertainment trades and Master of most, was born on 16 December 1899, just before the last Christmas of the 19th century, hence the name Noël. The second son of an unsuccessful piano-tuner-cum-salesman and a doting, dominant mother, he grew up in suburban, lower middle-class South London in what he would later describe as ‘genteel poverty’.

NOËL COWARD 9 When he was ten, his mother answered a Daily Mirror advertisement for ‘a star cast of wonder children’ to appear in a fantasy play called The Goldfish at the Little Theatre. He auditioned successfully, singing ‘Liza Ann’ to his mother’s la-la accompaniment, and within a few weeks was on the stage he seldom left thereafter. Two years later he was Slightly in Peter Pan (Kenneth Tynan was to say that he was Wholly in it ever afterwards) and, like his beloved friend and partner , he then settled through World War I into the life of a fairly successful touring child actor around the British regions: Michael MacLiammoir (then Alfred Willmore and later co-founder of Dublin’s ) was another of the ‘wonder children’ of the time.

In Noël’s own view, he was ‘when washed and smarmed down a bit, passably attractive; but I was, I believe, one of the worst boy actors ever inflicted on the paying public’. Nevertheless he survived, and by 1917 had already made his first movie, DW Griffith’s wartime epic Hearts of the World, for which he was paid a pound a day for making up his face bright yellow and Noël Coward and Gertrude Lawrence in Private Lives wheeling a barrow on location down a street in Worcestershire with Lillian and Dorothy Gish.

There followed a brief, uneventful and unhappy spell in the army, for which he was summoned to the Camberwell Swimming Baths for training, another five years in the touring theatre with the occasional very minor West End role, and then an unsuccessful trip to Broadway where he hoped to sell some of the early scripts with which he had already failed to impress London managements.

This plan did not work out too well, not least because nobody had bothered to inform Noël that, in those days before air conditioning, managements were virtually all closed for the summer. Until taken in by Gabrielle Enthoven, whose theatre collection later became the basis for the Theatre Museum, he was reduced to the prospect of a park bench, but even then Coward’s luck did not run out entirely. One evening he was invited to dinner at an apartment up on Riverside Drive by the eccentric actress Laurette Taylor and her husband, the playwright Hartley Manners.

After dinner it was the custom of the Taylor clan to play games of charades which grew increasingly acrimonious as the guests began to wish they had never come, let alone joined in; although countless other theatre writers had been to the parties, it was Noël who first realised there might be a play here, and 80 years later the result was still seen in 2006’s with Dame — a resounding hit at the Haymarket. Then, in 1924 at the tiny Everyman Theatre in Hampstead, one of the very first London fringe theatres, came the overnight success of , a play about drug addiction written at a time when even alcoholism was scarcely mentioned on the stage. The roughly equal amounts of interest, indignation, admiration and money generated by the play, which Noël had written, directed and starred in and for which he had also helped paint the scenery outside the stage door on Hampstead High Street, meant that at the age of 24 he went from being a mildly unsuccessful playwright, actor and composer to being the hottest theatrical figure in London – a change that came about so fast even he took several months and one nervous breakdown to come to terms with it.

NOËL COWARD 10 On transfer, The Vortex was joined in the West End by Hay Fever, Fallen Angels and the On with the Dance, thereby giving Noël a four-hits-in-one-season triumph only rivalled in the 20th-century London theatre by and Somerset Maugham. But there followed a year of total critical and public reversal, when boos greeted the opening of Sirocco and Noël was actually spat upon in the street by disappointed theatregoers, happily not a practice which caught on along Shaftesbury Avenue. Within the next two years however, as the 1920s ended and the 1930s began, Noël wrote and staged three of his greatest successes –the operetta Bitter Sweet, the definitive Cowardly comedy Private Lives and the epic Cavalcade, so that by 1931 the boy wonder of the 1920s had settled into an altogether more stable pattern of theatrical triumph, one which was best characterised by the partnership he had formed with Gertrude Lawrence. For her he had written Private Lives, redolent of Riviera balconies, filled with the potency of cheap music and shot through with the sadness of a couple who could live neither together nor apart, a couple who were in many incidental ways Noël and Gertie themselves. Six years later they played the West End and Broadway together again, though for the last time, in the nine short plays (among them , and the that became the movie Brief Encounter) which made up the three alternating triple bills of Tonight at 8.30. Gertrude Lawrence & Noël Coward in WeWere Dancing from Tonight at 8.30 Between those two towering landmarks of their relationship, Coward also found the time to write Design for Living for and , the revue Words and Music for the producer Charles Cochran, Conversation Piece for and soon afterwards for Fritzi Massary. ‘Throughout the 1930s in fact,’ he wrote later, ‘I was a highly publicised and irritatingly successful figure, much in demand. The critical laurels that had been so confidently predicted for me in my 20s never graced my brow, and I was forced to console myself with the bitter palliative of commercial success. Which I enjoyed very much indeed.’ Just before the outbreak of World War II, Coward had been sent to to set up a propaganda operation, and when hostilities broke out he toured the world extensively doing troop shows which incidentally taught him a new art, the one that was to rescue him in Las Vegas and elsewhere when, in the 1950s, theatrical fashion turned against him – that of the solo concert.

By now he had found a place in the sun in Jamaica where he could indulge his late-life love for painting, but his writing output was still prodigious: plays, films, poems, short stories, musicals, even a novel poured out of him, and increasingly he found character-acting roles in movies as varied as The Italian Job and Bunny Lake Is Missing. The truth is that, although the theatrical and political world had changed considerably through the century for which he stood as an ineffably English icon, Noël himself changed very little. He just grew increasingly Cowardly, and well into his sixties was ever quick to find new ways to market himself: in 1955 he and starred alone in Together with Music, the first-ever live 90-minute colour special on American television.

NOËL COWARD 11 Noël Coward died, peacefully in Jamaica, on 26 March 1973 but (as John O’Hara said of ) I don’t have to believe that if I don’t want to, and in any case he lives on in constant revival – not only the Haymarket Hay Fever but with and, at Chichester, several of the plays from Tonight at 8.30. It would be difficult if not impossible to summarise his success, the way he caught the mood of the 20th century’s successive but often very contrasted decades, the sheer energy of the workaholic output of a man who believed that work was always so much more fun than fun. I’d be happy to leave the last words though with the man many thought of as Noël’s polar opposite, writer of the play which many believed (wrongly, as it turned out) would destroy him, but who in fact was always among his greatest fans. As John Osborne memorably once said, ‘The 20th Century would be incomplete without Noël Coward: he was simply a genius, and anyone who cannot see that should kindly leave the stage’.

Sheridan Morley was drama critic of the ; he wrote the first Coward biography, A Talent to Amuse, and devised the stage show Noël and Gertie; he was also a trustee of the Noël Coward Foundation.Further information about Noël Coward may be found at: www.noelcoward.co.uk

From top: Noël Coward and with Pat Kirkwood in front of the cloth for , 1950; Noël Coward and Mary Martin; with Noël Coward (photograph by Alan Davidson)

NOËL COWARD 12 THE FIRST NOËL BY AL SENTER

Thirty-six years after his death, the Noël Coward brand is as powerful and as evocative as ever. The sparkling quips, the clipped delivery, the silk dressing-gown, the cigarette-holder, the elegant languor of a moneyed world where it’s always cocktail hour – all these are integral elements of the Noël Coward image. It’s an image that was manufactured for the 1920s and which we are still eagerly buying today. As Coward himself was well aware, a writer who speaks eloquently to one era is likely to be ignored by the next.

If anything, Coward was too successful in establishing himself as the voice of a generation, once the sensation of The Vortex in 1924 had made him the darling of the chic and the fashionable. And once that generation had passed into middle age and Coward himself moved from yesterday’s radical to tomorrow’s reactionary, the tide that had flowed in his favour left him stranded, post-1945, in particular, as public taste ebbed in the opposite direction.

There were many critics even in Coward’s heyday who predicted that such a dazzling talent, composed, as they saw it, entirely of superficiality, would soon fall to earth, like a firework that soars into the night sky, only to peter out in a few paltry shards of light. In his more introspective moments, Coward was inclined to wonder if his adversaries did not have a point. In Present Indicative (1937), his first volume of autobiography, he considers the case for the Prosecution:

‘Was my talent real, deeply flowing, capable of steady growth and ultimate maturity? Or was it the evanescent sleight-of- hand that many believed it to be; an amusing, drawing-room flair, adroit enough to skim a certain immediate acclaim from the surface of life but with no roots in experience and no potentialities.’

Prey to such doubts, perhaps Coward would have been surprised by the tenacity with which is best works have clung on to the repertoire.

Of the plays, Hay Fever, Private Lives, Blithe Spirit and Present Laughter always seem to be in production, closely followed by The Vortex, Design for Living, Easy Virtue and . The and the musicals that gave birth to the Noël Coward Songbook may not have survived changing tastes, although his epic Cavalcade was handsomely served by a recent revival at Chichester Festival Theatre. Yet Poor Little Rich Girl, I’ll See You Again, If Love Were All, Twentieth Century Blues, Mad Dogs and Englishmen and Mad About the Boy are only a few of his popular standards. Since the National Theatre’s revival of Hay Fever in 1964, orchestrated, no doubt, by , Coward’s co-star from Private Lives, restored Coward to critical and public approval, his position has been secure in the pantheon of English-speaking drama ever since. The recent film ofEasy Virtue, revival of Blithe Spirit and Kneehigh’s production of Brief Encounter all underline his continuing vitality. Yet are we not in danger of making the same mistake as Coward’s contemporaries in equating the man with the characters in his plays?

THE FIRST NOËL 13 To be fair to the mass media of 1924, it was a connection which the wily Coward, always aware of the value of publicity did everything to encourage in the public mind. In The Vortex Coward, a moralist even in his mid-twenties was fiercely attacking the pleasure-seeking frivolities of Florence Lancaster and her weakling son. Yet, in an anatomising social decadence Coward himself was stigmatised in the same way he condemns the Lancasters. Equally his own assurance in high society gave the impression that he was a lifelong member of this exclusive club rather than an arriviste from the suburbs. There is surely some truth in Sheridan Morley’s suggestion that work took of religion for the atheist Coward and so there was no greater sign in his mind than an indolent and parasitic existence. Coward’s apparent effortlessness, whether in acting, music or writing was actually a product of sustained and dedicated craftsmanship. And his work ethic drove him to several nervous collapses like so many high-achievers, Coward shows all the signs of a bi-polar disorder that could only be cured in his case by long, often solitary, sea voyages across the Pacific and through the Far East.

To judge from Coward’s smooth penetration into the highest reaches of society, it’s easy to compose an upper-middle-class background for him, complete with nannies and butlers, public school and Oxbridge. But Coward’s origins were suburban rather than smart-set, Middlesex not Mayfair. In fact, he was born during the final weeks of the nineteenth century on December 16, 1899 in the unassuming Thameside village of Teddington. Coward’s maternal grandfather had been a sea-captain and there is the sense that his beloved mother had slightly come down in the world by marrying Arthur Coward. From working in a music publishers, Mr Coward became a travelling salesman for a piano business. Unlike Willy Loman, he’s unlikely to have taken his samples on the road with him and unlike Willy he does not seem to have been very passionate about his trade. In fact, Coward’s father appears to have been a rather colourless personality, not dissimilar from Mr Lancaster in The Vortex, content to fit in with his wife’s plans and apparently relaxed about the exceptionally close bond between his wife and their elder surviving son. Holidays were taken at Brighton, Broadstairs and Bognor rather than the Riviera and until Coward hit the jackpot with The Vortex, family finances were often strained. From Teddington, the Cowards moved to Sutton in Surrey and thence to Battersea, Clapham Common and at length to Ebury Street on the fringes of Belgravia, where Mrs Coward ran a lodging-house.

His parents had met through their shared love of music and Coward fully inherited their interest but with added skills. Mrs Coward does not appear to have been the archetypal showbiz mother but she seemed to sense that her elder son’s talents might lead to something special. Although Coward’s formal education was at best haphazard, he received a thorough schooling in the theatre from his mother who would take him to as many West End productions as the family finances could permit. And it was Mrs Coward who entered him for auditions forThe Goldfish, a children’s play, which marks Master No. 1 Coward’s first professional engagement on the stage. Among his fellow actors was Alfred Willmore, later to reinvent himself as the very Irish Michael MacLiammoir who remembers a boy very much older than his years, possessed with boundless self-confidence. Certainly, with an insouciance that might appal today’s generation of mothers, Mrs Coward allowed her son to roam on his own through the West End. In the wake of The Goldfish, young Noël became a reasonably successful boy-actor, both in London and on tour through the provinces, and his earnings were an invaluable addition to the family exchequer.

Even at this tender age, Coward had acquired the knack of making useful connections. As he admits in Present Indicative, he could behave with brattish grandeur backstage but he was wit and charm personified to the outside world. There was never any shortage of invitations to addresses that were much smarter and more comfortable than the lodging-house in Ebury Street and with his networking skills he was soon amassing a formidable array of famous friends and acquaintances. In Present Indicative he reels off an impressive list of His New Best Friends in 1919, including Maugham, HG Wells, Rebecca West, and future Hollywood star Ronald Colman. But his earnings, either from acting or the writing which he was fast developing, were sporadic and he was forced to work for a music publisher and as a professional dancer. In order to present a façade of substance to his grand connections, Coward was often forced to borrow money from friends. If he was a snob, it was a snobbish desire for celebrity than blue blood. If it was success that he craved and strove so

THE FIRST NOËL 14 hard to achieve, it was only for the kind of financial security that had eluded him and his family. It was as if he felt he had a destiny which he was bound to fulfil.

Yet for all the self-assurance he could muster when frequenting the stately homes of England or the smart Park Avenue mansions when both London and New York lay prostrate at his feet, the private Coward still felt something of an interloper in these charmed circles. With the loosening of social conventions that came post 1918, the upper classes and the performing classes rubbed shoulders more easily; it was as if Debretts had merged with the spotlight. Coward found himself both an observer and a participant. In Present Indicative, he refers to himself several times as a performing beast, never wholly accepted, doing tricks to justify his admission. In Robert Altman’s Gosford Park (2002), the Oscar-winning screenplay by imagines , Coward’s friend and rival, a valued guest at a country house weekend but one who is expected to sing for his supper. Coward must have fulfilled a similar role at many such gatherings.

It is fascinating to note how insecure Coward feels in such an 2009 Broadway Revival. Photo by Robert J Saferstein environment – not simply because he’s a parvenu from the wrong side of the social tracks but because he’s a performer, playing a part by invitation rather than by right of birth. He compares his imposing surroundings to a film or stage set and he imagines that the great men and women he meets are all being played by the cream of Equity’s character actors. There is the clear implication that soon the director will call ‘Cut!’ and the curtain will fall and Coward will hand back his costume and be shown out through the tradesman’s entrance. In Present Indicative, he recalls an indifferent reception for his latest play:

“I remembered the chic, crowded first night ofThis Was a Man in New York. Three quarters of the people present I knew personally. They had swamped me, in the past, with their superlatives and facile appreciations. I had played and sung to them at their parties, allowing them to use me with pride as a new lion who roared amenably. I remembered how hurriedly they’d left the theatre the moment they realised that the play wasn’t quite coming up to their expectations; unable, even in the cause of good manners, to face only for an hour or so the possibility of being bored.”

Beneath the epigrams, both Coward’s life and work were infinitely more complicated than the image he projected and still projects today. Among his thirty-six plays, there are at least two curiosities. Post-Mortem (1931) is a blast against those forces in society who failed to deliver a land fit for heroes in the surviving soldiers of the 1914-1918 conflict. InPeace in our Time (1947), Coward imagines what would have happened had Britain fallen to the projected Nazi invasion in 1940. The play was unsurprisingly only tepidly received at its West End premiere. Two years after the end of the war, the euphoria of victory had no doubt vanished with the grim reality in the era of austerity. But it was still a bold move on Coward’s part to question the self-congratulatory pieties of the time. These two plays suggest a Coward who is a bleak and angry social critic and might surprise audiences accustomed to the polished wit, the glittering dialogue and the heady romanticism.

The scale and depth of Coward’s achievements still astonish. His writing career spanned forty-six years from I’ll Leave it To You in 1920 to Suite in Three Keys in 1966; his film career lasted fifty-one years from DW Griffith’sHearts of the World in 1918 via in 1941 to The Italian Job in 1969 in which Coward’s memorable Mr Big plans Michael Caine’s heist from behind prison bars. Forget the clichés. His range was wider, his work more questioning, his talents more diverse than the cravat and the silk dressing-gown would suggest. Coward’s capacity to surprise as well as delight is surely undimmed.

AL SENTER, 2009 FREELANCE THEATRE JOURNALIST AND INTERVIEWER

Acknowledgements: Present Indicative by Noël Coward and A Talent to Amuse by Sheridan Morley First written in the programme for the production of Hay Fever at Chichester Festival Theatre 2009

THE FIRST NOËL 15 WHY NOËL NOW?

When contemporaries such as Maugham, J.B.Priestley, Van Druten, Christopher Fry are busy gathering dust on the theatrical shelf, why all this interest – heightened interest – in someone who supposedly only wrote plays about people who apparently did nothing for a living and exchanged brittle bons mots through the smoke of ceaseless cigarettes? Why, after the revival of interest that gained momentum towards the end of his life in what he gleefully called ‘Dad’s Renaissance’, have we reached what is clearly ‘Dad’s Restoration’?

For the simple reason that young directors – and some not so young! – and through them new audiences are discovering that the apparent superficiality has hidden depths all along. That what Coward’s plays say is not always and only 2009 Broadway Revival. Photo by Robert J Saferstein what they SEEM to say.

Playwright Harold Pinter was one of the first to catch on. Studying the structure and language ofPrivate Lives, he concluded that “a character could stand on a stage and SAY one thing and the audience would KNOW he meant something ELSE.” That insight changed the course of Pinter’s whole career but when today’s critics claim that Coward is ‘Pinteresque’, they’re wrong. Pinter was ‘Cowardesque’.

Pinter was referring specifically to the Balcony Scene inPrivate Lives where Elyot and Amanda talk about anything and everything superficial to protect themselves from admitting that what they are really communicating is that they still love each other – despite the fact that they divorced, have both remarried and will shortly dump their new spouses and run away together.

“Very flat, Norfolk” and “How WAS the Taj Mahal?” aren’t about Norfolk’s lack of hills or the tourist allure of India. They mean – “I still love you. Do you still love me?”

Noël once said – “I am light-minded. I would inevitably write a comedy if – God help me! – I wanted to write a play with a message.” Even that remark is an evasion of the fact that many of his best known plays DO have a message but that message is masked by the laughter. Current productions are only now revealing the existence of a darkness lurking beneath the light. A darkness that we all recognise as a factor in daily life.

Beneath the brilliant and brittle carapace of his words he comes back again and again to the difficult – often the tragic impossibility of Love. And if that isn’t and always has been a relevant theme – what is?

Consider.

In Private Lives Elyot and Amanda can’t live with each other or without each other. In their battle, which will inevitably start again after they steal away and the play ends, they leave the debris of everyone who comes into contact with them and will go on doing so for as long as they draw breath. For this is not an ending but merely an intermission. They are unconscious and unconscionable killers.

WHY NOËL NOW? 16 The same thing happens in Design for Living for Gilda, Otto and Leo. The secondary characters who cross their paths are irrelevant to their selfish needs and casually discarded as they work out the variations in their romance-a-trois. At the end the three of them sit laughing helplessly on a settee. We laugh too, as one always does when something ludicrous, even painful is happening – to someone else. And someone else will have to clear up the emotional mess they’ve left behind.

In Fallen Angels Jane and Julia have settled for predictable boring marriages – until the prospect of a return visit from the Gallic lover they had once shared suggests the possibility of an old flame rekindling the odd ember.

In Easy Virtue the heroine Larita put her hopes in a new marriage to a younger man but his family disapprove and, rather than see him torn between her and ingrained family loyalty, she removes herself from the scene.

In Brief Encounter the would-be married lovers are prevented from ever seeing the cracks in their romantic edifice as life pulls them apart too soon. Theirs is perhaps the happiest outcome of all, since dreams can never fade.

But the most interesting variation of all occurs in Blithe Spirit.

Charles Condomine becomes an involuntary bigamist, when his current, uneventful second marriage receives a visit from the ghost of his first wife, Elvira. This middle-class, middle-aged man is now reminded of the highs as well as the lows of that first marriage and finds himself with two women competing for little old him. In the end he tries to escape from the shades of both of them – but will they let him?

Blithe Spirit is only incidentally about ghosts and the Hereafter. It’s really about the prospect of marital discord in the present lasting for Eternity.

Which poses another question. Does anyone in a Coward play ever live happily ever after? Is there such a thing?

In a verse he expressed his own personal reservations on the subject... I am no good at Love. My heart should be wild and free. I kill the unfortunate golden goose, Whoever it may be With over-articulate tenderness And too much intensity.

Near the end of his life in 1973 he was asked in a TV interview to sum up his life in a single word. He paused uncharacteristically, then...

“Well, now comes the terrible decision as to whether to be corny or not. The answer is one word. LOVE. To know you are among people you love and who love you. That had made all the successes wonderful – much more wonderful than they’d have been anyway. And that’s it, really.”

So perhaps Romantic Love by its very nature is a snare and a delusion. Perhaps the answer is LOVING.

Which – like the man himself – will never go out of style.

BARRY DAY, 2014

WHY NOËL NOW? 17 NOËL COWARD CAREER HIGHLIGHTS

HIGHLIGHTS OF A LIFE AND CAREER 1899 - 1938

1899 16 December, Noël Peirce Coward born in Teddington, Middlesex, eldest surviving son of Arthur Coward, piano salesman and Violet. His early circumstances were of refined suburban poverty.

1907 First public appearances in school and community concerts.

1908 Family moved to Battersea and took in lodgers.

1911 First professional appearance as Prince Mussel in The Goldfish, produced by Lila Field at the Little Theatre and revived in same year at Crystal Palace and . Cannard, the page-boy, in The Great Name at the and William in Where the Rainbow Ends with Charles Hawtrey’s Company at the .

1912 Directed The Daisy Chain and stage-managed The Prince’s Bride at Savoy in series of matinees featuring the work of the children of the Rainbow cast. Mushroom in An Autumn Idyll ballet, Savoy.

1913 An angel (Gertrude Lawrence was another) in ’s production of Hannele. Slightly in Peter Pan, Duke of York’s.

1914 Toured in Peter Pan. Collaborated with fellow performer Esmé Wynne on songs, sketches, and short stories.

1915 Admitted to sanatorium for tuberculosis.

1916 Five-month tour as Charley in Charley’s Aunt. Walk-on in The Best of Luck, Drury Lane. Wrote first full-length song, ‘Forbidden Fruit’. Basil Pycroft in The Light Blues, produced by Robert Courtneidge, with daughter Cicely also in cast, Shaftesbury. Short spell as dancer at Elysee Restaurant (subsequently the Café de Paris). Jack Morrison in The Happy Family, Prince of Wales.

1917 “Boy pushing barrow” in D.W. Griffith’s filmHearts of the World. Co-author with Esmé Wynne of one-acter lda Collaborates, Theatre Royal, Aldershot. Ripley Guildford in The Saving Grace, with Charles Hawtrey, Garrick. Family moved to Pimlico and re-opened boarding house.

NOËL COWARD CAREER HIGHLIGHTS 18 1918 Called up for army. Medical discharge after nine months. Wrote unpublished novels Cats and Dogs and the unfinishedCherry Pan and lyrics for Darewski and Joel, including ‘When You Come Home on Leave’ and ‘Peter Pan’. Also composed ‘Tamarisk Town’. Sold short stories to magazines. Wrote plays The Rat Trap, The Last Trick (unproduced) and The Impossible Wife (unproduced). Courtenay Borner in Scandal, Strand. Woman and Whiskey (co-author Esmé Wynne) produced at Wimbledon Theatre.

1919 Ralph in The Knight of the Burning Pestle, Birmingham Repertory. Collaborated on Crissa, an opera, with Esmé Wynne and Max Darewski (unproduced).

1920 Wrote and played Bobbie Dermon in I’ll Leave It to You, New Theatre, London 1921. On holiday in Alassio, met for the first time. Clay Collins in American farce Polly with a Past: during the run. First visit to New York, and sold parts of A Withered Nosegay to Vanity Fair and short-story adaptation of I’ll Leave It to You to Metropolitan. House-guest of Laurette Taylor and Hartley Manners, whose family rows inspired the Bliss household in Hay Fever.

1922 Bottles and Bones (sketch) produced in benefit for Newspaper Press Fund, Drury Lane. The Better Half produced in ‘grand guignol’ season, Little Theatre. Started work on songs and sketches for London Calling!. Adapted Louis Verneuil’s Pour Avoir Adrienne (unproduced).

1923 Sholto Brent in The Young Idea, Savoy. Juvenile lead in a musical review for which he wrote book, music and lyrics: London Calling!

Angela Lansbury, Susan Louise O'Connor and 1924 Wrote, directed and starred as Nicky Lancaster Photo by Robert J. Saferstein in The Vortex, produced at the Everyman by Norman MacDermott and transferred to the .

1925 The Vortex moved to the Comedy Theatre. Noël became established as a social and theatrical celebrity. Wrote On With the Dance (a musical revue), with London opening in spring followed by Fallen Angels and Hay Fever (which at first refused to do, feeling it was “too light and plotless and generally lacking in action”). Hay Fever and Easy Virtue produced, New York. Wrote silent screen titles for Gainsborough Films.

1926 Toured USA in The Vortex. This Was a Man was refused a licence by Lord Chamberlain in the UK but produced in New York (1926), Berlin and Paris. Easy Virtue, The Queen Was in the Parlour and The Rat Trap produced, London. Played Lewis Dodd in The Constant Nymph, directed by Basil Dean. Wrote Semi-Monde and The Marquise. Bought Goldenhurst Farm, Kent, as a country home. Sailed for Hong Kong on holiday but trip broken in Honolulu by nervous breakdown.

NOËL COWARD CAREER HIGHLIGHTS 19 1927 The Marquise opened in London while Coward was still in Hawaii and The Marquise and Fallen Angels produced in New York. Finished writing Home Chat. Sirroco produced, London.

1928 Clark Storey in S. N. Behrman’s The Second Man, directed by Dean. Gainsborough Films productions of The Queen Was in the Parlour, The Vortex (starring Ivor Novello), and Easy Virtue (directed by ) released – but only the latter, freely adapted, a success. ! produced, London and, with Coward directing and in cast, New York. Made first recording featuring numbers from this show.

1929 Played in This Year of Grace! (USA) until spring. Wrote and Directed Bitter-Sweet, London and New York. Set off on travelling holiday in Far East.

1930 On travels wrote Private Lives (1929) and song “Mad Dogs and Englishmen”, the latter on the road from Hanoi to Saigon. In Singapore joined the Quaints, company of strolling English players, as Stanhope for three performances of Journey’s End. On voyage home wrote Post-Mortem. Directed and played Elyot Chase in Private Lives, London, alongside Gertrude Lawrence, Laurence Olivier and Adrianne Allen.

1931 Elyot Chase in New York production of Private Lives with Gertrude Lawrence. Wrote and directed Cavalcade, London. Film of Private Lives produced by MGM. Set off on trip to South America.

1932 On travels wrote Design for Living (hearing that Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne finally free to work with him) and material for new revue including songs ‘Mad about the Boy’, ‘Children of the Ritz’ and ‘The Party’s Over Now’. Produced in London as Words and Music, with book, music, and lyrics exclusively by Coward and directed by him. The short-lived Noël Coward Company, an independent company which enjoyed his support, toured UK with Private Lives, Hay Fever, Fallen Angels and The Vortex.

1933 Directed Design for Living, New York and played Leo. Films of Cavalcade (which won a ‘best picture Oscar’), To-Night Is Ours (remake of The Queen Was in the Parlour) and Bitter-Sweet released. Directed London revival of Hay Fever. Wrote Conversation Piece as vehicle for Yvonne Printemps and hit song ‘Mrs. Worthington’.

1934 D1rected Conversation Piece in London and played Paul. Cut links with C. B. Cochran and formed own management in partnership with John C. Wilson and the Lunts. Appointed President of the Actors’ Orphanage, in which he invested great personal commitment until resignation in 1956. Directed Kaufman and Ferber’s Theatre Royal at the Lyric and Behrman’s Biography, at the Globe. Film of Design for Living released, London. Conversation Piece opened, New York. Started writing autobiography: Present Indicative.

NOËL COWARD CAREER HIGHLIGHTS 20 1935 Wrote and Directed Point Valaine, New York. Played lead in filmThe Scoundrel (Astoria Studios, New York).

1936 Wrote and Directed and played in To-Night at 8.30 – 9 short plays in which he and Gertrude Lawrence starred – Phoenix theatre London and National Theatre, New York. Directed Mademoiselle by Jacques Deval, Wyndham’s.

1937 Played in To-Night at 8.30, New York, until second breakdown in health in March. Directed (and subsequently disowned) Gerald Savory’s George and Margaret, New York. Present Indicative published, London and New York.

1938 Wrote and Directed Operette, London with hit song ‘The Stately Homes of England’. Words and Music revised for American production as . Appointed adviser to newly-formed Royal Naval Film Corporation.

1939 Directed New York production of Set to Music. Visited Soviet Union and Scandinavia. Wrote Present Laughter and ; rehearsals stopped by declaration of war. Wrote for revue All Clear, London. Appointed to head Bureau of Propaganda in Paris to liaise with French Ministry of Information, headed by Jean Giraudoux and Andre Maurois. This posting prompted speculative attacks in the press, prevented by wartime secrecy from getting a clear statement of the exact nature of his work. Troop concert in Arras with . To Step Aside (short story collection) published.

1940 Visits USA to report on American isolationism and attitudes to war in Europe. Return to Paris prevented by German invasion. Returned to USA to do propaganda work for Ministry of Information. Propaganda tour of Australia and New Zealand and fund-raising for war charities. Wrote play Time Remembered (unproduced).

Angela Lansbury as Madame Arcati 1941 Mounting press attacks in England because of time 2009 Broadway Revival. Photo by Robert J Saferstein spent allegedly avoiding danger and discomfort of Home Front. Wrote Blithe Spirit, produced in London (with Coward directing) and New York. MGM film ofBitter-Sweet released, London. Wrote songs including ‘London Pride’, ‘Could You Please Oblige Us with a Bren Gun?’ and ‘Imagine the Duchess’s Feelings’.

NOËL COWARD CAREER HIGHLIGHTS 21 1942 Wrote, produced and co-directed (with David Lean) In Which We Serve and appeared as Captain Kinross. He also composed the film’s score. Played in countrywide tour ofBlithe Spirit, Present Laughter and This Happy Breed and gave hospital and factory concerts. MGM film ofWe Were Dancing released.

1943 Played Garry Essendine in London production of Present Laughter and Frank Gibbons in This Happy Breed. Produced film of This Happy Breed for Two Cities Films. Wrote ‘Don’t Let’s Be Beastly to the Germans’, first sung on BBC Radio. Four-month tour of Middle East to entertain troops.

1944 February-September, toured , Burma, India and Ceylon. Troop concerts in France and ‘ Concert’ in London. Screenplay of Still LIfe, as Brief Encounter. Middle East Diary, an account of his 1943 tour published in London and New York. The film adaptation ofThis Happy Breed by David Lean, Anthony Havelock-Allan and Ronald Neame showcased in London.

1945  with hit song ‘Matelot’ completed and produced, London. Started work on . Film of Brief Encounter released.

1946 Wrote and Directed Pacific 1860, London. Set of the 1941 Broadway production

1947 Garry Essendine in London revival of Present Laughter. Supervised production of Peace in Our Time. Point Valaine produced, London. Directed American revival of To-Night at 8.30.

1948 Replaced Graham Payn briefly in American tour ofTo-Night at 8.30, his last stage appearance with Gertrude Lawrence. Max Aramont in Joyeux Chagrins (French production of Present Laughter). Built house at Blue Harbour, Jamaica.

1949 Wrote screenplay and starred as Christian Faber in film ofThe Astonished Heart. Wrote Ace of Clubs and Home and Colonial (produced as Island Fling in USA and South Sea Bubble in UK).

1950 Wrote and Directed Ace of Clubs, London. Wrote Star Quality (short stories).

NOËL COWARD CAREER HIGHLIGHTS 22 1951 Deaths of Ivor Novello and C. B. Cochran. Paintings included in charity exhibition in London. Wrote and Directed Quadrille. One-night concert at Theatre Royal, Brighton, followed by season at Café de Paris, London and beginning of new career as leading cabaret entertainer. Wrote and directed Relative Values, London, which restored his reputation as a playwright after run of post-war flops.Island Fling produced, USA.

1952 Charity cabaret with Mary Martin at Café de Paris for Actors’ Orphanage. June cabaret season at Café de Paris. Directed Quadrille, London, starring Lynn Fontanne and Alfred Lunt. Red Peppers, and Ways and Means (from To-Night at 8.30) filmed asMeet Me To-Night. September, death of Gertrude Lawrence.

1953 Completed second volume of autobiography: Future Indefinite. King Magnus in Shaw’s The Apple Cart. Successful Cabaret at Café de Paris. Wrote .

1954 After the Ball produced, UK. July, mother died. September, cabaret season at Café de Paris. November, Royal Command Performance, . Wrote .

1955 June, opened in cabaret for season at Desert Inn, Las Vegas. Played Hesketh-Baggott in film ofAround the World in Eighty Days, for which he wrote own dialogue. Directed and appeared with Mary Martin in a live television spectacular: Together with Music for CBS, New York.

1956 Charles Condomine in television production of Blithe Spirit for CBS, Hollywood. For tax reasons took up Bermuda residency. Resigned from presidency of the Actors’ Orphanage. South Sea Bubble produced, London. Directed and played part of Frank Gibbons in television production of This Happy Breed for CBS, New York. Co-directed Nude With Violin with (Eire and UK), opening to press attacks on Coward’s decision to live abroad. Wrote Volcano, not produced in his lifetime.

1957 Directed and played Sebastien in Nude With Violin, New York.

1958 Played Garry Essendine in Present Laughter alternating with Nude With Violin on US West Coast tour. Wrote ballet, London Morning for London Festival Ballet.

1959 Look After Lulu! produced, New York and by English Stage Company at Royal Court, London. Film roles of Hawthorne in Our Man in Havana and ex-King of Anatolia in Surprise Package. London Morning produced by London Festival Ballet. Sold home in Bermuda and took up Swiss residency.

1960 Wrote Waiting in the Wings – produced Eire and UK (Duke of York’s, London). Pomp and Circumstance (novel) published, London and New York.

NOËL COWARD CAREER HIGHLIGHTS 23 1961 Wrote and directed American production of starring Elaine Stritch. Waiting in the Wings published, New York.

1962 Sail Away produced, UK (Savoy Theatre, London).

1963 Wrote music and Lyrics for The Girl Who Came to Supper (adaptation of Rattigan’s The Sleeping Prince, previously filmed as The Prince and the Showgirl) – produced, USA. Revival of Private Lives at Hampstead signals renewal of interest in his work in the UK.

1964 “Supervised” production of , musical adaptation of Blithe Spirit, Savoy. Introduced Granada TV’s ‘A Choice of Coward’ series, which included Present Laughter, Blithe Spirit, The Vortex and Design for Living. Directed Hay Fever for National Theatre – the first living playwright to direct his own work there.Pretty Polly Barlow (short story collection) published.

1965 Played the landlord in film –Bunny Lake is Missing. Badly weakened by attack of amoebic dysentery contracted in Seychelles.

1966 Wrote and starred in Suite in Three Keys at the Queen’s Theatre London, which taxed his health further.

1967 Caesar in TV musical version of Androcles and the Lion (score by ), New York. Witch of Capri in filmBoom , adaptation of ’ play The Milk Train Doesn’t Stop Here Any More. Lorn Loraine, Coward’s manager and friend for many years, died, London. Worked on new volume of autobiography: Past Conditional. Bon Voyage (short story collection) published.

1968 Played Mr. Bridger, the criminal mastermind, in The Italian Job.

1970 Awarded knighthood in New Year’s Honours List.

1971 Tony Award, USA, for ‘Distinguished Achievement in the Theatre’.

1973 16 March, died peacefully at his home in Blue Harbour, Jamaica. Buried on Firefly Hill.

NOËL COWARD CAREER HIGHLIGHTS 24 RESOURCES

NOËL COWARD FURTHER READING

Cole, Stephen: NOËL COWARD A BIO-BIBLIOGRAPHY Greenwood Press 1993

Coward, Noël: THE NOËL COWARD SONGBOOK Omnibus Press, 1980

Day, Barry: MY LIFE WITH NOËL COWARD Applause, 1994

Day, Barry: COWARD ON FILM Scarecrow Press, 2005

Day, Barry: THE LETTERS OF NOËL COWARD Knopf, 2007

Day, Barry: THE NOËL COWARD READER Knopf, 2009

Day, Barry: STAR QUALITY: THE TREASURES OF NOËL COWARD Andre Deutsch, 2012

Day, Barry: NOËL COWARD: IN HIS OWN WORDS Methuen, 2004

Day, Barry: NOËL COWARD: THE COMPLETE LYRICS Methuen, 1998

Day, Barry: COWARD ON FILM Scarecrow Press, 2005

Hoare, Philip NOËL COWARD A BIOGRAPHY Sinclair-Stevenson, 1995 In the US Simon & Schuster, 1995

Mander, Raymond; Mitchenson, Joe THE THEATRICAL COMPANION TO COWARD (SECOND EDITION) updated by Morley, Sheridan and Day, Barry. Oberon Books, 2000.

Morley, Sheridan: A TALENT TO AMUSE Heinemann, 1969

Lesley, Cole: THE LIFE OF NOËL COWARD Cape, 1976. Penguin, 1978 (paperback)

In the US as: REMEMBERED LAUGHTER, THE LIFE OF NOËL COWARD Knopf, 1976

Lahr, John: COWARD THE PLAYWRIGHT Methuen 1982. Reprinted 1999.

Salewicz, Chris; Boot, Adrian FIREFLY, NOËL COWARD IN JAMAICA Victor Gollancz, 1999

RESOURCES 25 LIST OF NOËL COWARD ONLINE RESOUCES AND SOCIAL MEDIA Websites www.noelcoward.com The World of Noël Coward www.noelcoward.org The web home of the Noël Coward Foundation including information on applying for grants www.noelcoward.net The web home of the Noël Coward Society www.noelcowardmusic.com The web home for information on Noël Coward’s music including musicals, operettas and lyrics) www.noelcowardpaintings.com This website contains images of all the known Coward paintings in their historical and geographical context www.ncmi.info The Noël Coward Music index which contains information on every known music and lyric by Coward www.firefly-jamaica.com The website for Coward’s former home ‘Firefly’ near Ocho Rios, Jamaica You can also find Coward on IMDB and Wikipedia

1941 Broadway production with and Mildred Natwick

Clifton Webb

RESOURCES 26 Social Media

Follow Noël Coward on Twitter @NoelCowardSir or find him on facebook: www.facebook.com/noelcowardauthor

Archives

To access more information about the archives of Noël Coward, held by Alan Brodie Representation and the universities of Bristol and Birmingham, please see the links below: www.noelcowardroom.com A website for the Noël Coward Room located at the offices of Alan Brodie Representation containing research material www.bristol.ac.uk/theatrecollection/manderandmitchenson www.birmingham.ac.uk/facilities/cadbury

Publications

Noël Coward playtexts can be purchased from the following vendors: www.samuelfrench-london.co.uk www.bloomsbury.com/uk/academic/academic-subjects/drama-and-performance-studiees

Rights

All professional enquiries should be directed to Alan Brodie Representation www.alanbrodie.com email: [email protected] All amateur/stock enquiries should be directed to Samuel French Inc www.samuelfrench.com [email protected] For any enquiries concerning licensing of Coward’s music please consult Warner Chappell www.warnerchappell.com

RESOURCES 27