Noel Coward: A Biography by Philip Hoare

Author:Philip Hoare [Hoare, Philip]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Autobiography, Biography, Non-Fiction, Performing Arts
ISBN: 9780226345123
Amazon: 0226345122
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Published: 1998-05-21T23:00:00+00:00

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1. The amateurs who helped Sherlock Holmes; the SOE headquarters moved to 64 Baker Street.

20

Play Parade

It is positively frightening to think what may happen if he outlives his success – at the moment he is on the highest wave of his career so far . . . But his hand twitches nervously for more triumphs – and the applause of the matinee audience does not satisfy him – he is waiting already for the evening audience to arrive.

Cecil Beaton on Noel Coward, war diary

BY 1941, Coward’s finances were under pressure, partly because none of his plays was being performed. At the beginning of the war, the government had closed down all non-essential media: BBC radio was reduced to non-stop news and organ music, and its television transmissions had been suspended for the duration. Theatres and places of entertainment were closed, putting the entire profession out of work; Bernard Shaw called it a ‘masterstroke of unimaginative stupidity’, depriving the people of something which might boost their morale. Two weeks later, the authorities gave in to the entertainment industry and the ban was lifted, but only for performances during daylight.

Wartime required a particular sort of entertainment, and Coward knew he had to come up with a good commercial proposition. In his diary for 22 April he wrote, ‘Spent morning with Lorn discussing financial troubles which are considerable. Also discussed play as possible solution. Title Blithe Spirit. Very gay, superficial comedy about a ghost. Feel it may be good.’ The scenario had evolved from the idea of a large French house (perhaps Elsie Mendl’s Villa Trianon) visited by the ghosts of its past. Coward and Joyce Carey (also writing a play) set off for the Italianate folly of Portmeirion – Clough Williams-Ellis’s fantasy village in Wales – and the plot for his new play emerged. Just seven days after his arrival, Blithe Spirit was all but complete.

‘Disdaining archness and false modesty’, Coward knew it would be a hit. ‘My gift for comedy had obviously profited from its period of inactivity.’ Such was the precision of his script that only two lines needed to be cut in production: for a man with a notoriously low threshold of boredom, it was a necessarily rapid talent. Coward was justified in being sanguine about Blithe Spirit: it is one of his most durable, best-constructed plays, with an adept plot and brilliant comic structure. He gave the formula of marriage and infidelity a twist with the introduction of the paranormal: a man whose dead wife returns to haunt him and his second wife. Blithe Spirit is set in an idyllic never-never land, itself an escape from the drastically changing 1940s. Madame Arcati became the scene-stealer; originally an unimportant role, Coward described to Cecil Beaton that ‘a character takes hold . . . and writes itself’, and Arcati ‘had refused to leave the stage’. Clemence Dane declined the part created for her, and it was Margaret Rutherford who perfected the dotty eccentricity of the character, a foil for the sophistication of her sceptical hosts.

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