Biography of Noel Coward

Few writers waste invested as oft care into the personal image they publicly project as did Noel Coward. As a result, within touristed culture the name Coward has become synonymous with a certain English style the elegant silk dress gown, the cigarette holder, charm, wit, clipped phrases, upper-class accents, and sex appeal. His plays reinforced this image, and Coward was non averse to audiences confusing him with his leading piecely heterosexual characters.Cowards oddity is now well understood, as is the fact that his public persona was a paying at disco biscuittion construction designed to hide his homosexuality from the general public. He was, for example, unimpressed with Oscar Wilde, calling him a silly, conceited, curt creature . . . a dreadful self-deceiver (The Noel Coward Diaries, 135). Although by the 1960s Coward was writing openly about the Homosexual government note in Parliament in twain his diaries and his play Shadows of the Evening, he failed to realize t hat his whole mannerismthe silk dress gown, the cigarette holder, the raised eyebrowwas deeply artificial and camp.In addition to the creation of an immensely enjoyable persona, Cowards homosexuality may have similarly led him to the acidly witty exposure of society characteristic of so umteen of his plays and the comedy of manners ( Lahr). He well understood societys double standards and knew exactly how they might best be exposed through voice communication. However, his success lay not with the epigrammatic phrase, and rather with the timing so that ordinary phrases become witty, hilarious, hysterical, or loaded with desperation. The recent revival of Coward in London, labeled by approximately critics as Coward for the nineties, attests to Cowards curiouring qualities.To a certain extent he ignored modernism and sweeping changes in the theater, preferring instead to perfect the comedy of manners. Yet his sparse nevertheless witty dialogue that relies on bunk and moment, his consciousness of linguistic communication as a weapon that can damage, and the gap between the grace of the language and what people actually do to one some other ensure that Coward is more than merely an entertaining period of time comedy writer. Even Cowards birth date of 16 December 1899 seems suspiciously auspicious, falling at the end of an old century, and early on Coward appeared determined to embody the new century.He was born into a middle-class suburbia in Teddington, Middlesex, and not into the world of cocktails and dressing gowns that his plays were to celebrate. His devoted mother Violet had married a sonant salesman, Arthur, from a musical family, and she adored the theater and certainly passed that on to her son. With her encouragement, Noel took acting lessons at the age of ten in Miss Janet Thomass Dancing Academy, and in September, 1911 he auditioned for his first part in The Goldfish.The year 1911 apothegm the beginning of his relationship with Charles H awtrey, one of the great Edwardian actor-managers, when Noel first appeared in Hawtrey The Great Name. Hawtrey cast him in a series of plays The Great Name, Where the Rainbow Ends, A Little Fowl Play, and The Saving Grace. Between 1911 and 1917 Coward appeared in a number of plays and quickly learned to appreciate the pleasure of an audience, which, he claimed, launched him on his writing career. He was at last drafted into the army in 1918, but his tubercular tendency and neurasthenia ended his army career after a few short months.Between 1918 and 1920 Coward survived by acting in a few small roles and writing stories for magazines and variant lyrics. Early success came with Ill Leave It to You, a vehicle he wrote for himself and Esme Wynne-Tyson staged in Manchester and London. Critics agreed that a new talent had emerged. At the age of twenty-four, Coward confirmed this with The Vortex. Coward was hailed as a sensational talent. He shock audiences with the subject matter of the play, but those who got beyond shock appreciated Cowards talent for writing. He seemed to epitomize the ages call for to live life at a fast rate.His early success was confirmed with Hay Fever, produced in 1925, and Easy Virtue. Cowards finest play, secluded Lives, written, like so many others, at high speed and as a vehicle for his dear friend Gertrude Lawrence, opened the 1930s. During this decade Coward wrote his finest work. In 1931 he wrote Cavalcade, in 1932, Design for Living, in 1935, ten one-act plays in Tonight at 830, and in 1939, This Happy Breed. During this decade he also acted as a somewhat unsuccessful spy and more successful patriot. In 1940 he toured Australia for the arm forces and in 1941 toured New Zealand.In that same year Blithe Spirit was produced, and he wrote the screenplay for In Which We Serve. During the early forties Coward enjoyed success with films. In 1943 he produced This Happy Breed in 1944 he produced Blithe Spirit also in 1944 he wrote the s creenplay for Brief Encounter, based on Still Life, a play from the ten in Tonight at 830, and the film was produced in 1945. With the end of the war Cowards popularity declined. His musical Pacific 1860 was not successful and was followed by the equally unsuccessful Peacein Our Time in Our Time, written in 1946 and produced in 1947.These failures keep through the mid-fifties with the musical Ace of Clubs in 1950 and the plays Relative Values in 1951 and Quadrille in 1952. In 1953 his career took a new shift when he performed as a cabaret entertainer at coffee bar de Paris. In 1954 he wrote Nude with Violin and moved first to Bermuda and then in 1959 to Switzerland. During the late 1950s and 1960s Coward once more enjoyed success with a production of Waiting in the Wings in 1959, the musical Sail Away, and an fervor on the new drama written by Coward himself in 1961 for The sunshine Times. In 1964 Hay Fever was revived and directed by Coward at the National Theatre.His last show on the West End stage came in 1966 with Suite in Three Keys. In 1970 Coward was knighted, and thither followed in 1972 a revue in London named Cowardy Custard and Oh Coward in Toronto, which r to each oneed Broadway in 1973. Coward died of a heart attack in 1973 at his retreat in Jamaica. This play, dealing with a mothers affair with a young man the same age as her son, and a son addicted to drugs, launched Cowards career. Both characters commodious to be adored, and both promise to change at the end of the play and give up their respective vices.Although the Lord Chamberlain intimately refused the play a license, Coward managed to obtain one by persuading the Lord Chamberlain that the play was really a moralistic tract. Agate noted that Coward lifted the play from disagreeable to philosophic comment, but complained that the third act is too long (Mander and Mitchenson, 69). Hastings commented firmly that this was a dustbin of a play (Morley 83). Nevertheless, most critics prais ed the play, especially those in the States such as the reviewers for the New York World, the New York Post, and the New York Tribune, who called it the seasons best new play (Cole 47).Later critics such as Lahr (18-26) and Gray (34-41) still praised the play for the literary leap Coward exhibited. The 1952 revival was set in the 1920s and accepted mixed praise the London Daily Mail complained about its frantic piano-playing at e very crisis but noted that the wit still sparkles and that final hysterical scene between the son and the mother with a lover of just his own age has lost little of its old dramatic sting (Mander and Mitchenson 21-22). Cowards finest play, Private Lives, claims no political message, and each element is fully resolved in this beautifully symmetrical play.Amanda and Elyot have each remarried and meet on their honeymoons with their exceedingly dull spouses. Elyot and Amanda appear in turn on their Riviera balconies, each having a similar conversation with the ir new spouses. The play begins by contrasting balanced scenes in which Amanda and Elyot founder that the only way to pass on with their new spouses is through language, but they are unable to do so. Thus, when Elyot attempts to poke into Sibyls mind and discover her future plans, she responds I havent the faintest idea what youre talking about. She functions on the simplest level of language as talk, of words having a precise and limited meaning. Similarly, Amanda finds passkey equally limited. When she articulates her belief that communication depends on a combination of circumstances and takes place if all the various cosmic thingummys fuse at the same moment, and the ripe spark is struck, Victor can only reply that she is not nearly as complex as she thinks she is. For Elyot and Amanda, language communicates all too well on a literal level, but their feelings do not align with the words or with each others words.They use the language of the commonplace as a weapon. In one o f their most memorable scenes, they display their sophisticated barbs when Amanda asks, Whose yacht is that? and Elyot replies The Duke of Westminsters, I expect. It always is. Amanda, opening herself for the side by side(p) retort, exclaims, I wish I were on it, to which Elyot replies, I wish you were too. None of these lines is especially witty alone, but given their context and the timing, they are funny and sad.This couple cannot live apart, and yet as act 2 reveals, neither can they live in concert. Indeed, in the second act language becomes too effective a weapon, so that periodically Amanda and Elyot must resort to a technique to literally stop communicating. When language threatens to communicate their old jealousies and recriminations too starkly, they resort to using the word sollocks the device fails and language refuses to submit to such control. When Amanda and Elyot discontinue from relying on language, they can communicate.Thus, if they divert themselves with word games such as deciding whether it is a covey of Bisons, or even a school of Bisons, or perhaps the Royal London school of Bisons, they succeed. But when they strive to discuss something meaningful, such as their phoebe bird years apart and the question of other lovers, they find language powerful and disturbing. Amanda says that she would not expect Elyot to have been more or less celibate than she was in their five years apart, but he cannot separate the words from the meaning they imply.He cannot bear the thought that she was not celibate, and in the ensuing argument he concludes, We should have said sollocks ages ago. They should have ceased conversation because language is too destructive. What makes Coward very much a twentieth-century writer is his refusal to restore harmony to this chaos. We must accept that Amanda and Elyot cannot live together without armed combat and there will be no happy ending because their attempts to control language are futile.Moreover, this fut ility infects Victor and Sibyl so that their previous united front disintegrates, and as they echo the arguments of Amanda and Elyot, Amanda and Elyot sneak out to fight another day. Cowards couples find that language communicates only too well so that they can neither live together nor apart, and in this, Coward embodies the awful dilemma of the human condition. Contemporary scholarship should continue to explore Coward to dispel the notion that he is just a period writer. Works Cited Cole Stephen. Noel Coward A Bio-Bibliography.Westport, CT Greenwood Press, 1993. Coward, Noel. Private Lives, virulent Sweet, The Marquise, Post Mortem. London Methuen, 1979. Gray, Frances. Noel Coward. Basingstoke, Hampshire Macmillan, 1987. Lahr, John. Coward the Playwright. London Methuen, 1982. Mander Raymond, and Joe Mitchenson. Theatrical Companion to Coward. London Rockliff, 1957. Morley Sheridan. A Talent to Amuse A Biography of Noel Coward. Boston Little, Brown, 1985. Payn, Graham and Morle y, Sheridan. The Noel Coward Diaries. Ed. Boston Little, Brown, 1982.