Born With Sense Of the Stage NOEL COWARD

Sun (Auckland), Volume I, Issue 288, 25 February 1928, Page 22

Born With Sense Of the Stage

NOEL COWARD

NOEL COWARD’S LUCK STUDY OF PLAYWRIGHT “I first .remember Noel Coward as a young actor in ‘Mumsee.’ I thought him very French in appearance, very eager, and very tall, bursting on to the stage of the Little Theatre, and falling in tears at the feet of his ‘mother’,” writes W. R. Titterton in “The Theatre World.” “I did not know what to make of him.” His nervous gestures seemed those of one who had drunk a dose of Wells’s Accelerator, or, to use an entirely different sort of simile, he seemed like a swan pretending to be a duck. He is altogether at his ease nowadays, th© nervous gestures have slowed down and have got ironic significance. But I still think of him as a swan in duck’s clothing, though I have a faint notion that if he liked he might be an eagle.

Born with Sense of Stage Then we come to “The Young Idea.” which I saw at the Savoy. It had fair success, and C. B. Cochran, who is equally interested in the arts and the Science, wept angry tears to heaven that it did not pack the Savoy for years. It is a good play—or rather it is two good plays: the last part of it bears no dramatic relation to the first. But th© most arresting things about it are its sense of the stage, its smart dialogue, and its impudent young people.

Coward must have been born with a sense of the stage, though I think it is more obvious in some other of his plays, but it is there in “The Young Idea.” None of his plays that I have read reads half as well as it acts. His script is merely a shorthand note of action in three dimensions. How he does it I don’t know; the thing escapes my analysis. Probably it escapes his. Natural Dialogue You will imagine that his stage sense and his gift for smart yet natural dialogue are one and the same, since a script is surely nothing but dialogue and stage directions. And certainly ther© is nothing more in the play—except the play. The play only happens when dialogue and stage directions become one on the stage—before an audience. But of course the naturalness of the dialogue counts, and what is more extraordinary, in the case of Coward so does the smartness. Usually verbal cleverness holds up the action, but in “The Young Idea,” as in "The Importance of Being Earnest,” the sparkle is a lamp to the actors’ feet. But “The Young Idea” derives far more from Shaw than from Wilde. It is not a question of imitation, Coward is original enough—if originalitycounts for anything. But, like Shakespeare, whom he does not otherwise closely resemble, he is content to take material where he finds it and make it his own. H© took the twins from “You Never Can Tell,” put them into “The Young Idea,” and then started working on them. He has been working on them ever since. They are the Adam and Eve of his creation. “The Vortex” His Best The next play of Coward’s which J saw was “The Vortex” —the best play

lie has done, and one of the most vital plays of our time. It portrays a little clique or circle of degenerates, which we need not take as typical of modern society, and it whips them with scorpions. Never had there been such a denunciation of vice from the modern stage. Was Coward also among the prophets? It was done with such passion—the burden of the parable put into the mouth and on the back of a young man who feels himself caught in the net of these devilish fishermen, sees his own mother in the net, and tears his heart at the horror of it. . Moreover, with infallible instinct, the dramatist puts in the middle of this mad world a perfectly sane man—the husband of the woman, the father of the boy. And his commonplace honesty is like the garrulous confidences of the Porter in Macbeth’s castle on the night when murder has been done. For me the one fault of the play is that you are led to suppose that the young man will escape. Well, the mercy of God is infinite; but so far as drama is concerned, that young man is doomed. At the height of his frenzy of reconciliation with his mother he would have felt for his cocaine, and then, remembering that his mother had thrown it out of the window, would have rushed after it. However, “The Vortex” was a gigantic fragment, not yet equalled by Coward. In his later works he views the descendants of th© twins (now a motley lot) with amused if cynical resignation. But in no play of his that I have seen does he accept them. And every now and then I seem to hear the note of protest—almost of screaming protest—break out. The protest comes more seldom of late, it sounds from far off, or as if strangled in the utterance, but it is there. “Home Chat” The Worst Well, now to come to “Home Chat,” which many critics regard as his worst play. They may be right, and still I shall contend that it is one of his most promising efforts. A just complaint against him had been that he concerned himself too exclusively with one little gang of queer fish —variants, as I hold, of Shaw’s heavenly twins, who had gone to the bad through carrying his gospel of the insurgence of the young to its logical conclusion. He did rather wonderful things with these few types; but, it was asked, was it worth doing? Obviously it was not worth while doing that and nothing else to the crack of doom. The dramatist was implored to break fresh ground, to observe and draw other types. Well, he has done so, and his advisers damn him for it. He has introduced into his other dramas a larger sprinkling of the average suburban man than the critics have noticed, but in “Home Chat” they are all suburban people, and most of the types are uncommonly well observed—if still from an oblique angle. I grant faults in the dialogue. It is as plain as life, but it is twice as natural. And it contains too much of this sort of trick: “Eve got a flat at X. It’s so handy for Y.” “Do you like Y?” “No, I hate it.” Yet there is obviously a striving after a simple straightforward style, which is often attained, and then with an effect of tense comedy. The typical Coward play would have had its first scene in that Waggon Lit, and it would not have spared you one detail of the pyjamas. It would have been a huge success, and Coward would have been marking time.