I've hugely enjoyed COTW and any week which includes Joyce Grenfell's performance of Richard Addinsell's streetwise 'Maud' is bound to get off to  good start.    This posting will feature on the work of Noel Coward as my shelves are bulging with his LPs,CDs, DVDs and there must be a dozen biographies, including his Present Indicative and Future Indefinite; his Diaries and, more recently his Letters.   Aficionados may be interested that I've just ordered a CD: Noel Coward in Las Vegas and NC Live in New York for £2 99 from the river people.

I've seen him several times on stage: King Magnus -The Apple Cart (1953); Suite in Three Keys (1966) and a few years later at the celebratory Gala for his 70th birthday.   A consummate performer with an unexpected diversity as an actor.   A split second sense of timing as well as an innate instinct for subsuming, say, two or three laugh lines as he held off the audience and went for the bullseye.   He had John Gielgud's lightness of touch and pace,  and Peter Pears's sense of stillness; remarkable accomplishments, all, only granted to a few.

I treasure my off-air videos; the accolade of an Omnibus Noel Coward Trilogy made at the time of his 70th tributes.    Last week, I used the occasion of St George's Day to make a DVD transfer of an off-air film version of"Cavalcade" (1933).  I recall a stage version at the Chichester Festival Theatre in the 80s, several dozen amateur players supplementing the large professional cast.   The play traverses 30 years from the turn of the 20th century and is the story of the Robert and Jane Marryot dynasty in Belgravia - where else?   The original production at the Drury Lane Theatre, in 1931, made a huge impact at a time when the UK was leaving behind an era of the bright young things and coping with widespread economic depression.  The same plot was reworked as 'Upstairs, Downstairs' in the 1970s.

Two images linger.   An inset of a ship's rail as one of the Marryots leave for a luxury honeymoon cruise to New York with his bride.   She leaves her cloak on the rail and when she retrieves it, as they leave, the lifebelt mounted on the rail reveals the name Titanic.     A real coup de theatre.   Later, in October 1918, Jane Marryot accompanies her other son, Joey, to Victoria where he is leaving for active service.    At the same time, a hospital train arrives and it is always chilling to see the Red Cross orderlies and nurses waiting to meet the wounded with stretchers at the ready.

Coward took an anti-war stance.   The crowds cheering the outbreak of WW1.     JANE    "Drink to the war, then, if you want to.  I'm not going to.  I can't!  Rule Britannia!  Send us victorious, happy and glorious!    Drink, Joey, you're only a baby, still, but you're old enough for war.   Drink like the Germans are drinking, to Victory and Defeat, and  stupid, tragic sorrow.  But leave me out of it, please!"                 

Surprisingly but wisely, Coward used familiar but popular music to depict each era:  Land of Hope & Glory, Sunday I Walk Out With a Soldier, Beside the Seaside etc  and his sole contribution became the 11 o'clock number;  Twentieth Century Blues:

VERSE        Why is it that civilised humanity
                 Must make the world so wrong?
                 In this hurly burly of insanity
                 Your dreams cannot last long.
                 We've reached a headline -
                 The Press headline - every sorrow,
                 Blues value is News value to-morrow.

                 Blues, Twentieth Century Blues, are getting me down.
                 Who's escaped those weary Twentieth Century Blues.
                 Why, if there's a God in the sky, why shouldn't he grin?
                 High above this Twentieth Century din,
                 In this strange illusion,
                 Chaos and confusion,
                 People seem to lose their way.
                 What is there to strive for,
                 Love or keep alive for?    Say -
                 Hey, hey, call it a day.
                 Blues, nothing to win or to lose.
                 It's getting me down.
                 Blues, I've got those weary Twentieth Century Blues.

Jane proposes the toast to a new decade, the 1930s.

"Now, then. let's couple the Future of England with the past of England. The glories and victories and triumphs that are over, and the sorrows that are over, too.   Let's drink to our sons who made part of the pattern and  hearts that died with them.  Let's drink to the spirit of gallantry and courage that made a strange Heaven out of unbelievable Hell, and let's drink to the hope that one day this country of ours, which we love so much, will find dignity and greatness and peace again."                The lights fade.....

The reception was ecstatic and Coward's curtain speech ended with:

"I hope this play has made you feel that, in spite of the troublous times we are living in, it is still pretty exciting to be English."

               

As usual, Stanley, one wonders how much many of the moaners over at TOP actually know of Coward's work, and whether they've listened to any of the programmes at all, before working themselves up into a tizzy.....

that's the one ant

I already knew I wasn't very respectable.

I'm afraid I can't claim to be an unequivocal admirer of Sir Noel.


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 At 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.

A shame that Coward seem to be so popular with amateur theatre companies, who rarely do his work justice.

For some reason, Marianne Faithfull's version of '20th Century Blues' is the one that sticks in my mind....

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Marianne-Faithful-20th-Century-Kurt-Weill/dp/B000003ETN/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=music&qid=1209588484&sr=1-1

Try the above link! 

Not heard her version, but I do have Al Bowlly's with Ray Noble's New Mayfair Dance Orch.

 Yes, Ian, it was delicious to hear the extracts from Addinsell's settings of 'Alice in Wonderland', today, and I was also intrigued to hear the voice of the narrator, Eva Le Gallienne; a real Broadway drama queen in her heyday,  alongside Helen Hayes and Katherine Cornell.   I recall her grand presence in the film "Prince of Players"; a biopic of Edwin Booth (Richard Burton); brother of the notorious man who assassinated President Lincoln, at the theatre.    The sick joke at the time of the film's release, in 1955, was "Yes, yes, Mrs Lincoln, but did you enjoy the play?"   Tom Lehrer?   

Tomorrow, we have the charming melody Addinsell wrote for Peter Brook's 1950 production of  Anouilh's "Ring Round The Moon" - the sort of tune which will tinkle in your mind for the rest of the day.    "Strange how potent cheap music is".