Noel Coward

Thou slave, thou wretch, thou coward!
Thou little valiant, great in villany!
Thou ever strong upon the stronger side!
Thou Fortune’s champion that dost never fight
But when her humorous ladyship is by
To teach thee safety.
(William Shakespeare, King John)

I love both Noel Coward and Joyce Grenfell. In my teens when other people were listening to The Clash, Stiff Little Fingers and Angelic Upstarts, I was listening to Nina from Argentina and Matelot. I read all his plays, too. I first saw Joyce Grenfell on stage when I was 17, and still remember (I think from then) Three Lady Choristers and a parody of Chekhov, where they kept saying “Oh, if it would only snow”. It’s strange, because I’m usually a “classical only” person, but I love clever words, and Joyce Grenfell, after all, was a regular audience member, and then performer, at the Aldeburgh Festival.

I’m also a huge fan of Flanders and Swann, who are in the same sort of category, I think.

But … I’m afraid I can’t claim to be an unequivocal admirer of Coward. I say “afraid”, because there’s no denying his talents. He was responsible for some of the finest and most literate popular music ever created. However, I think his dramatic output is frail – too often, his dramatic works don’t have the necessary impact because they are performed as “light” pieces (think back to Joan Collins’s ill-starred mounting of the “Tonight @ 8.30” works a few years back).

I think Hay Fever can be very effective if done properly – when you can understand how clearly it anticipates Pinter. It’s a shame that Coward seems to be so popular with amateur theatre companies, who rarely do his work justice.

Glorious though Coward is in small doses, I am very sorry to say that there is something somewhere that leaves a slightly bad taste in the mouth for me.

Don’t let’s be beastly to the Germans, for example. It was written during the war and it appears to be condemning any attempt to remember that Germans had any humanity. I have no patience with sentimental bleeding heart liberalism and I would wish to unconditionally condemn Nazis and holocaust deniers. But all they same, it is not improper to remember the humanity of the Germans (particularly those not Nazis) and work for reconciliation afterwards.

A number of his post-WW2 songs have a nasty edge of mockery for the new age of equality in the 1950s. It is a common theme at the time (Waugh, Betjeman, Osbert Lancaster), but a true aristocrat like Nancy Mitford can celebrate a passed age, and accept that it needed to pass. Coward sounds snide at times. There’s a touch of the clever dick social climbing snob from Twickenham about dear Noel. Not that I would want him anything other that what he was, bless him.

And Hay Fever and Private Lives are wonderful, but none of his other plays are a patch.

Tags: aldeburgh, donald swann, hay fever, joyce grenfell, michael flanders, musical, nazis, noel coward, private lives