Hay Fever (Modern Classics)

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The charades scene and the entangled ‘engagements’ have all the spite which runs like a dark thread through all Coward’s best plays: his ability simultaneously to satirize and glamourize the frenzied 1920’s smart set is a great part of his fascination. Joanna Brookes as Clara the housekeeper seemed at first to be overdoing it a bit, stumping in and out with trays, but the joke mellows beautifully and her own music-hall song, while clearing the breakfast, got a well-deserved storm of applause. Actually, the physical and musical comedy all the way through is spot-on in Tam Williams’ production, as are the gorgeously stealable costumes.

At the age of 73, Coward died at his home, Firefly Estate, in Jamaica on 26 March 1973 of heart failure [50] and was buried three days later on the brow of Firefly Hill, overlooking the north coast of the island. [119] A memorial service was held in St Martin-in-the-Fields in London on 29 May 1973, for which the Poet Laureate, John Betjeman, wrote and delivered a poem in Coward's honour, [n 10] John Gielgud and Laurence Olivier read verse and Yehudi Menuhin played Bach. On 28 March 1984 a memorial stone was unveiled by the Queen Mother in Poets' Corner, Westminster Abbey. Thanked by Coward's partner, Graham Payn, for attending, the Queen Mother replied, "I came because he was my friend." [121] Coward's music, writings, characteristic voice and style have been widely parodied and imitated, for instance in Monty Python, [196] Round the Horne, [197] and Privates on Parade. [198] Coward has frequently been depicted as a character in plays, [199] [200] films, television and radio shows, for example, in the 1968 Julie Andrews film Star! (in which Coward was portrayed by his godson, Daniel Massey), [201] the BBC sitcom Goodnight Sweetheart [202] and a BBC Radio 4 series written by Marcy Kahan in which Coward was dramatised as a detective in Design For Murder (2000), A Bullet at Balmain's (2003) and Death at the Desert Inn (2005), and as a spy in Blithe Spy (2002) and Our Man In Jamaica (2007), with Malcolm Sinclair playing Coward in each. [203] On stage, characters based on Coward have included Beverly Carlton in the 1939 Broadway play The Man Who Came to Dinner. [204] A play about the friendship between Coward and Dietrich, called Lunch with Marlene, by Chris Burgess, ran at the New End Theatre in 2008. The second act presents a musical revue, including Coward songs such as "Don't Let's Be Beastly to the Germans". [205] Coward’s characters are subject to strict codes of behaviour, their restraint, politeness and decorum reflected in the precision of their language. So much of his humour lies in the contrast between the innocuousness of the sentiment and the clipped violence of the delivery. Here, it sometimes seems only Pauline Knowles’s glacially cool Myra Arundel, arriving in a purple flapper dress and cloche hat, is fully in that world. Her lines hit home accordingly.Grove, Valerie, "Carrying on Kenneth's pain", The Times, 27 December 1997, p. 19 and "Book Now" The Independent, 20 August 2008, p. 16 Coward spelled his first name with the diæresis (" I didn't put the dots over the 'e' in Noël. The language did. Otherwise it's not Noël but Nool!"). [150] The press and many book publishers failed to follow suit, and his name was printed as 'Noel' in The Times, The Observer and other contemporary newspapers and books. [n 12] Public image [ edit ] The Coward image: with cigarette holder in 1930

Kingston, Jeremy. "Hay Fever at the Rose Theatre, Kingston", The Times, 29 September 2010. (subscription required) Noël Coward himself said of 'Hay Fever', '[It] is considered by many to be my best comedy' and 'far and away one of the most difficult plays to perform that I have ever encountered. To begin with, it has no plot at all, and remarkably little action.' Perhaps he was understating it there for, while the play is not gung-ho full of action, there is plenty going on. It must have had something for, when first staged on 8 June 1925 it ran for 337 performances! Hoare, Philip (1995). Noël Coward, A Biography. London: Sinclair-Stevenson. ISBN 978-1-4081-0675-4. Alan Bennett, Peter Cook, Jonathan Miller and Dudley Moore / Irving Berlin / W. McNeil Lowry (1963)

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a b Norton, Richard C. "Coward & Novello", Operetta Research Center, 1 September 2007, accessed 29 November 2015 He soon became more cautious about overdoing the flamboyance, advising Cecil Beaton to tone down his outfits: "It is important not to let the public have a loophole to lampoon you." [159] However, Coward was happy to generate publicity from his lifestyle. [160] In 1969 he told Time magazine, "I acted up like crazy. I did everything that was expected of me. Part of the job." Time concluded, "Coward's greatest single gift has not been writing or composing, not acting or directing, but projecting a sense of personal style, a combination of cheek and chic, pose and poise." [1] In a study of Coward's plays, published in 1982, John Lahr called Hay Fever "the first and the finest of his major plays". [65] In 2014 Michael Billington wrote of a new production: "I found myself wondering why, 90 years after it was written, Noël Coward's comedy still proves so astonishingly durable. I suspect it is because it combines astute observation with ironclad technique". [66] Adaptations [ edit ] Coward completed a one-act satire, The Better Half, about a man's relationship with two women. It had a short run at The Little Theatre, London, in 1922. The critic St John Ervine wrote of the piece, "When Mr Coward has learned that tea-table chitter-chatter had better remain the prerogative of women he will write more interesting plays than he now seems likely to write." [36] The play was thought to be lost until a typescript was found in 2007 in the archive of the Lord Chamberlain's Office, the official censor of stage plays in the UK until 1968. [37]