He presented himself as a message-free entertainer but, 50 years after his death, it is time to reconsider the variety of the great playwright’s work
Anniversaries offer a chance for reappraisal. Fifty years after the death of Noël Coward, it is worth asking whether, as a playwright, he still speaks to us today. You might have thought that his world had faded but the truth is that between 1924 and 1941 Coward wrote five comedies – Hay Fever, Private Lives, Design for Living, Present Laughter and Blithe Spirit – that are regularly revived. They may look like escapist diversions but their structural symmetry, verbal precision and opportunities for actors mean that they are bankers which have achieved the status of minor classics.
But, rather than dwell on the famous five, I think it is worth asking whether there is more to Coward than a mastery of quilted fun and whether we should range more widely through his 50 or so plays. Oliver Soden’s excellent new biography, Masquerade, reveals Coward to be a more complex individual than we had acknowledged: Soden even suggests that, in his combination of manic activity and deep melancholia, there was a hint of what we now know as bipolarity. Sheridan Morley, Coward’s first biographer, called his book A Talent to Amuse. But, while Coward liked to present himself to the world as a message-free entertainer, he was a finger-wagging preacher and occasionally scathing satirist. You could, in fact, write an alternative study of Coward called A Talent to Abuse.
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