First Englishman

(See front cover)

Twelve years ago an ambitious, talented young Englishman came to Manhattan and was disheartened to find the Land of Opportunity a place where one seemed to divide one's time between lying in bed in a cheap hotel, counting squashed insects on the ceiling, and sitting on park benches, hungry. This U. S. appeared to have two bright spots, however, in the persons of an actor and actress who were quite fond of each other and of him. They were very considerate people. When the actress took him to sing and play the piano for his supper at George S. Kaufman's, she made sure that Mr. Kaufman also paid the cab fare.

Last week Manhattan audiences witnessed the dramatic fruit of this long, three-cornered friendship, Design For Living--"a play about three people who love each other very much." The erstwhile young Englishman, Noel Coward, had written it and was acting in it. So were Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne.

The situation with which Design For Living concerns itself is somewhat unusual for light comedy--polyandry. Act I, laid in Paris, finds Actress Fontanne as Gilda (pronounced Jilda), an interior decorator vaguely troubled by the uncertainties of life. There are times when she wishes she could believe in "God and the Daily Mail and Mother India." Physiological studies do not wholly satisfy her. ("If you knew what was going on inside you, you would probably be bitterly offended.") In her quandary she is about to switch her allegiance from Otto (Mr. Lunt), a painter, to his good friend, playwriting Leo (Mr. Coward). According to Leo, he and Gilda have just gone for "an unpremeditated roll in the hay."

Act II discovers Leo and Gilda comfortably sinning in an attractive London flat. Both, however, pine for their absent crony Otto. Gilda, it appears, is not so happy as she might be with Leo's theatrical success. While he is away at a houseparty, up bobs Otto, fresh from a voyage on a tramp steamer. "The circle has turned," says he, "and it's my turn now." But next morning Gilda leaves notes for both her lovers, goes off to Manhattan to marry an art broker and find, she hopes, peace. When Leo and Otto meet and read their letters they collapse into mutually brandied bathos.

Two years later Gilda is inhabiting a gaudy penthouse full of Grand Rapids moderne furniture which she is selling to people with more money than taste. Suddenly in the midst of a party Leo and Otto appear, identically and immaculately clad in faultless evening dress. They have, it seems, been traveling. "You must forgive our clothes," says urbane Leo. "We just got off a freight boat." Soon the safely married Gilda succumbs to their witty charms, and when the art broker-husband returns from Chicago he is told that the three will resume their private offensive against the social code. While he expostulates against the madness of this incorrigible trio they slap their thighs with mirth. The curtain falls, the play having evidently solved all but the practical difficulty of how Gilda, Leo and Otto can roll in the hay simultaneously.

In spite of makeup which gives her eyelids a furry look and her old tendency to read her more dramatic lines as though she were giving a schoolroom recital of Elektra, Actress Fontanne manages to be conspicuously charming in a role which is not a paragon of lucidity. Actor Lunt is at all times expertly droll, although his parts in The Guardsman and Reunion In Vienna appear to have permanently endowed him with a Central European accent. Actor Coward, particularly when he is imitating a butler on a telephone and giving an interview to the Press, is, if possible, more suavely comic than ever.

Design For Living, which some spectators may find a bit decadent in spots, is a worthy successor to, if not an entertaining equal of, the playwright's previous Private Lives. Its deficiency is in the kind of hysterical laughter which in Private Lives fairly convulsed the gravest sophisticate and exalted Noel Coward to the front rank of fun-makers.

Noel Coward is conceded to be the cleverest of living English dramatists. Some go further, advancing the premise that in the last hundred years only Disraeli, Wilde and Shaw have started from nothing and conquered England as Mr. Coward has conquered.

Few indeed are the aspiring playwrights who would not give their eye teeth to be in Noel Coward's tan buckskin shoes. Aged 33, he has written or collaborated on 23 plays and musicomedies since 1920. One out of three have been huge successes. At one time he had five of his works running in London during a single season, a record equaled only by the late Edgar Wallace. A few blocks away from the Manhattan theatre housing his Design For Living, last week a cinemansion was packing in well-bred audiences who seldom stoop to cinema, to witness Cavalcade, his episodic pageant of empire not yet legitimately staged in the U, S. Further down the street the shadow of Claudette Colbert was to be seen fluttering across a screen version (Tonight is Ours) of one of Playwright Coward's most dismal failures, The Queen Was in the Parlour. Wherever he went last year--with the possible exception of the Brazilian jungles--during an enviably carefree junket, he could hear tunes he had written for Bittersweet, and the more recent Words & Music simpering from phonographs and radios. With his own two hands, long head and (when he danced and sang for This Year of Grace in 1928-29) nimble feet and voice he has made a comfortable fortune. In London a capable and adoring staff that addresses him as "the Great White Father" handles his business for him.

It was not always so, as will testify the deep sardonic lines which frame his smiling mouth like a stern proscenium.

Like another British dramatist who was good, too, Noel Coward was born on a river bank, on the Thames at Teddington. a London suburb. His mother kept a boarding house, pinched and scraped so that she and Noel could occasionally go to a theatre. When he was ten he knew the smell of greasepaint. He was sent to a dramatic school run by Italia Conti, one of Britain's best. There was another moppet there named Gertrude Lawrence. Directress Conti recalls: "Little Noel Coward was a shy, bashful child and used to sit on my knee in the lodgings and cry because he was so terribly homesick. Little Noel was a clever boy, but I never regarded him as normal, even in those days. He was very emotional, but full of brains."

Consider him now as a young fellow hanging around casting agencies, writing occasional tunes and skits for musicals, a period punctuated by his threadbare trip to the U. S. Watch his thirsty hankering after elegance, dining, whenever he had the price, at Claridge's, making wry mental notes of the people who could dine there every day. Watch him cuff down his juvenile embarrassment with foolish youthful eccentricities. See him toss that flower box off its window sill because "the colors of it annoyed him." Behold him in The Vortex, his first writing-acting success, backed by newly-rich Michael Arlen.

The next three years must have been passed by Playwright Coward in a mild delirium. He wrote Easy Virtue, Fallen Angels, Hay Fever, This Was A Man, Home Chat, The Marquise, The Queen Was in the Parlour. Hay Fever was the cream of this crop. Most of these comedies had in common the impact of Continentalism on the stolid conservatism of Old England. Long and often very delightful passages of mutual abuse were to be found in the majority of these plays which were also masterpieces of padded wisecracking. The Coward technique of short crackling speeches developed to the point at which one statistician could count 158 consecutive "sides" of three lines or less in Act I of Hay Fever. The Greeks had a word for this system: stichomythy, dialog one line at a time.

Suddenly and inexplicably, in 1927, the British public took it into its mind to administer a brutal, heartless spanking to its precocious Bright Boy of the Theatre. Perhaps the playwright's thoughtless, perverse statements to the Press had something to do with it. Perhaps people were irritated by his appearance at a night club in a mauve polo jumper. Perhaps his brand of fun was not as amusing as it once seemed. At any rate a tirade of ugly booing arose from gallery and pit at the premiere of Sirocco, noise which his beaming and happily deaf mother mistook for applause. Someone spat in his face as he left the theatre.

His world suddenly gone to pieces, Noel Coward was persuaded with difficulty by Producer Charles B. Cochran to continue his work on the revue, This Year of Grace. It was a gratifying, vindicating triumph. For two seasons "A Room With a View" and "Dance Little Lady" tinkled away the twilight tea-dance hour on both sides of the Atlantic.

Then, in 1930, the apotheosis of the Coward comedies, Private Lives, appeared. All the old tricks were brought to shining perfection in a play which related the high-jinx of a divorced couple who found themselves on respective second honeymoons with decidedly the wrong people. The divorced couple were impersonated by Mr. Coward and the little girl from Miss Conti's, Gertrude Lawrence of the comely back. The playwright still stuck to stichomythy, a tendency reflected in last week's production. Some of his dialog was as bitter and bright as Alice in Wonderland.

The funniest sequence in Private Lives was the rough-and-tumble finale of Act II in which Mr. Coward and Miss Lawrence scrambled on the floor after she had cracked a phonograph record over his head. Even this delicious bit of business had its roots in earlier Coward work. The Rat Trap (unproduced) not only ended its second act in similar vein but its third as well. Perhaps it all goes back further than that, for when he was a child Playwright Coward once bashed a little girl on the head with a spade because she would not take seriously her part in one of his nursery productions.

At this point came a new twist in the playwright's career which amplified his versatility, provided an explanation for the underlying motif of his comic sense.

For Playwright Coward, War is anathema. The 'closest approach his comedies make to profundity is this philosophy: let us be merry today for yesterday (1914-18) we died. To prove his point he wrote two strongly sentimental dramas. The first, Post Mortem (unproduced), exposes the social dissolution observed by a young ghost who returns from Flanders. The second, Cavalcade, is a tragic cyclorama which begins with the Boer War and ends in 1930 with the hope that "this country of ours may find dignity, greatness, and peace again." Here was something more than the world dared to expect from a "song & dance man." a range and flexibility of talent that was grounded on more than disillusioned cleverness.

Some people work hard because they like to. Playwright Coward is one of them. A good part of the time his mind must be as teeming as the last week of a rehearsal. So well had he mentally planned Hay Fever that he wrote it during a house-party weekend. Private Lives was the product of a week's flu-confinement in a Hong Kong hotel. The record is sagging. It took months of voyaging in South American waters for him to jot down Design For Living.

Playwright Coward is not to be found at fashionable resorts, as a rule, nor in social colyums. He likes beer. In spite of his knockabout experience, he is still given to emotional flights. Not long ago he rushed into Fred Astaire's dressing room. "Freddie!" he exclaimed. "When I see you dance I want to cry."

It is possible that most of the Coward works are perishably dated. But he knows the theatre as few have known it. What he may do with this knowledge later, none can say. Although his excursions into serious drama are represented to date by The Vortex, Cavalcade and Post Mortem --none of them deathless--most of his fellow subjects would call Noel Coward the First Englishman of the British Stage. That opinion was shared by hundreds of U. S. citizens who, in a cold drizzle, formed a block-long ticket queue in front of the theatre four days before last week's opening in Manhattan--a Broadway phenomenon unseen since the Depression. If accomplishment counts for anything, Noel Coward would appear to have knuckled out a fairly workmanlike design for living himself.

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