Nostalgic Patriotism

New Zealand Listener, Volume 17, Issue 440, 28 November 1947, Page 16

Nostalgic Patriotism

PEACE IN OUR TIME, By Noel Coward. Heinemann. OEL COWARD'S §lIatest play, Peace In Our Time, has for its theme the idea that Britain was successfully invaded by the Germans in 1940, to be liberated in 1945 by the Americans, the Dominions, the Free British, and the Free French. It is hard to decide just how seriously we are expected to take all this, but then it has always been difficult to delimit the frontiers of Coward’s charlatanism, He ap- | pears to want to have things both ways, ‘to celebrate the undoubted toughness of the British during the war and at the same time to give them also the rather different virtues of the French resistance. This allows him to deploy a nostalgic patriotism none the less intense for being tied to an illusion, a cooked-up fantasy. Occasionally there is the whisper of an ulterior thought, Alma Boughton says: "We should have been bombed and blitzed and we should have stood up under it--an example to the whole civilised world-and that would have finished it. As it is-in defeat-we still have a chance, There'll be no time in this country for many a long day for class wars and industrial crises and political squabbles.’’ This is a crack at modern England, but it overlooks that France, which the Germans did occupy, is even less. united than Britain and certainly more torn by strife, | Even if one chooses to sniff at -Coward’s facility, .it must be acknowledged that he is qa superb entertainer. This play is closer to Cavalcade than

to The Vortex or Private Lives: it is high Coward, lush, rich in the gradations of public emotion of which he is so skilful a manipulator, the dialogue sparkling, and a true picture of British behaviour. (Mr. Coward does not care for highbrows though; in this play they betray their suffering country.) The action is restrained, never melodramatic, and has only one German atrocity in five years’ "occupation." The small London publichouse, the "local," is an excellent device for assembling naturally characters who would never meet elsewhere. The unchanging scene has dramatic advantages, as well as appealing to economical producers, The action is shared out with remarkable equity among a long roll of characters, which will, I fear, commend it to repertory societies with a reservoir of players who cannot be let loose on a big part.