One does not usually think of the late Sir Noël Coward, that ubiquitous eminence of the British theatre for five decades, as being particularly a "political" dramatist…. Even critics and students of the theatre appraising his career generally begin by acknowledging his wide-ranging versatility and then tend to concentrate their attentions on his major, most frequently staged comedies. Those plays (Hay Fever, Private Lives, Blithe Spirit, Design For Living, and Present Laughter) a...

Reading Noel Coward's plays encourages the belief that there is a point where Literature and Show Business meet. While it is difficult to know exactly what happens there, these four volumes of his plays [Coward Plays], which take us up to 1941, certainly suggest that it may have provided Coward with the criteria as well as the conditions within which he conceived his work. (p. 46) Coward's earlier plays prick at the pomposity principles of English life. Modernity, in behaviour, codes of conduc...

Mr. Coward, who has often been held up as himself the prototype of the post-war young man, does not fulfil the popular conception of an irritable and irritating person, dispirited and boneless, who drifts about asking people what he shall do to be saved. If anybody has worked in the past sixteen years, Mr. Coward indisputably has. In spite, however, of the profound dissimilarity between him and the young men whose prototype he is said to be, there is, I think, ample warrant for regarding him as their protot...

Mr. Coward is, or would have us believe that he is, extremely annoyed by those of his critics who inquire into his motives…. He adds, with the air of injured ingenuousness that has always been assumed by Mr. Shaw when trailing his coat, that "a professional writer should be animated by no other motive than the desire to write and, by doing so, to earn his living." This has a modest, straightforward sound…. But is it impertinent to inquire into Mr. Coward's aesthetic motive...

Coward's theatrical impulse came from a sense of his persona, not a sense of life. From his first produced play, I'll Leave It to You …, to his last, A Song at Twilight …, his obsession remained his performing self. Where his stage frivolity announced a philosophical detachment, his charm broadcast a craving for affection. It was a potent mix. The word "charming" appears in the first entry of The Noel Coward Diaries,… and echoes like a lost soul through his d...

At first I thought I wouldn't like [The Noël Coward Diaries], anticipating—correctly, it turned out—yards of theatrical gossip and name-dropping, the unrelenting celebration of great moments in the author's social life, and the general flight from the significant to be expected in an artificer of lyrics and light comedies. But I changed my mind fast when I also encountered the author's pleasure in reading James's The Portrait of a Lady, Wordsworth's lo...

It is in his dialogue that Mr. Coward has shown himself something of an innovator, for in his construction he has been content to use the current method of his day; he has deliberately avoided the epigram that was the fashion thirty years ago (when an early play of mine, Lady Frederick, was bought by Mr. George Tyler he told me that it was not epigrammatic enough, so I went away and in two hours wrote in twenty-four), and has written dialogue that is strictly faithful to fact. It does not only represent eve...

Any discussion of the art of Noël Coward must necessarily turn on the distinction between 'Drama' and 'Theatre'—and the value, if any, of pure 'Theatre' considered as an end in itself. Pure 'Drama'—we are not flattering ourselves here?—we can all hope to recognise. Today pure 'Theatre'—thanks to the Arts Council, 'The Method', M. Ionesco, the spirit of the age, the 'comedies' ...

Whatever other enduring value [The Lyrics of Noël Coward] may turn out to possess, it will always be a fascinating document for the student of theatrical history of the past four and a half decades. For Mr. Coward has always managed to swim so blandly and with such admirable judgment against the current that his actual position at any given time has remained firmly in the centre of the stream, even if obstinately facing in the opposite direction. By deft manipulation of the journalistic properties of...

[The Noel Coward Diaries] record a life largely given over to the theatre and the company of friends. Much time is spent stacking name upon name…. Though his worst contempt is directed against journalists, his own mind is journalistic, taking things at face value. The editors admit only to minor censorship, but it is hard to believe that any was necessary, for the effect of the diaries is not at all intimate. Coward was clearly writing for eventual publication, and in a style which aims to give nothi...

I have been quoting from ["The Noel Coward Diaries"] for three weeks, to an insolent, cowering wife and baffled, jeering friends. I first met The Master in 1959. Tony Richardson, the stage and film director, rang me from Nottingham, where Coward's "Look After Lulu" had opened before coming into London's Royal Court. Mischievous, hectoring, he pleaded: "I mean, you've got to come up. Noël's determined to be WITTY. All the time." I d...

Ezra Pound defined literature as news that stays news. Literature is achieved by the sweated labors of a temperament facing the facts. Sir Noël Coward, playwright, actor, director, composer, novelist, diarist and for 30 years a short-story writer, was nothing if not a temperament, and for the better part of a generation, with eyes shaded by gesticulant hands trained in a posture of disciplined Tory salute, he faced great avalanches of limelit factual event in peace and war without once facing the fac...