The Private Lives Prompt

Beast, Brute, Swine, Cad

The Cue List

Author: Noël Coward
Original Production: August 18, 1930
Original Cast: Noël Coward, Gertrude Lawrence, Adrianne Allen & Laurence Olivier
Broadway productions: 1931, 1938, 1969, 1975, 1983, 1992, 2002, 2011, 2027 (upcoming)
Awards: Olivier Award, Tony Award, Drama Desk
Set: 1930, A hotel in Deauville France and a flat in Paris
Notable: Britain still had an official government censor in 1930 (till 1968 in fact) who took exception to the second act’s love scene. Coward pleaded his case in person by acting out the scene for the Lord Chamberlain at London’s St. James’s Palace.

Noël Coward, Theatre Incarnate

In a recent interview, Dame Maggie Smith said of playwright Noël Coward that he “always seemed to say the right things at exactly the right time. I don’t know how that happened. To have that kind of swift mind. He was lovely.” Sir Derek Jacobi said of Coward that “he was the theatre incarnate.” Stories of Coward inevitably tell of his effusive loveliness, endlessly generosity, and incredibly kindness. If Coward saw you in a play, he almost always showed up after bows in the dressing room and would heap praise on any actor he could reach. In just so many ways, there was no one like him – urbane, witty, stylish, musical, and (again) lovely.

Coward was a playwright, poet, lyricist, and director. Born of lower-class family, he made the stage at a very young age, and the theatre introduced him to high-society that he would mine for nearly all of his plays. In these plays, we see the swiftness of mind that Smith remembers. We also see something opposite of the loveliness that Jacobi recollects. Coward reminded us that people were beautifully complex and were nearly always capable of diametrically opposed actions and feelings. He captured their grace as well as their viciousness, but always with the most theatrical of flares!

Everyone’s Private Lives

Coward was already well-established when wrote Private Lives in 1931 as a vehicle for himself and his best friend, the actor Gertrude Lawrence. Strangely, behind this play about a wildly tempestuous relationship, is an act of love. Coward adored Lawrence and the play was a gift, like writing a song that you and a loved one can sing. Both had been child stars (Coward made the boards at the age of 11) and were already famous. The play was to be the perfect vehicle for both of them, written for their exact skills and sensibilities. It was a masterful publicity stunt on Coward’s part, and it is arguable his greatest work.

The play follows a couple, Amanda and Elyot, who can’t quit each other. Married and divorced, they meet each other on their honeymoons with their new spouses. Almost immediately, their passion for each other reignite. They find themselves in an impossible position and drastic decisions ensue. The play has all the elements that made Coward such a dominate playwright – the astounding wit and quickness of the dialogue, its lyricism, and beautiful people with minds like diamonds behaving badly. Like the works of George Bernard Shaw, there is an iconoclastic element in which people brilliantly legitimize, either intellectually or emotionally, breaking nearly any social norm.

We sometimes say that all of Henrik Ibsen’s plays could be called “Ghosts” because they all feature the haunting of characters by some horrid past. All of Coward’s plays could be called “Private Lives.” Below the sparkling dialogue and wit of his plays, Coward has deeper, slightly subversive goals. He was keenly interested in what people did when they dropped the mask of public persona. What was beneath the sheen of etiquette? For Coward, the truth was that people could be brutish, jealous, and irrational, but they could also be vulnerable, delicate, and generous. Coward could see the hypocrisy rampant in aristocratic mores of the period – while he was welcome in the upper-echelons of society, his low birth and sexual preferences always made him an outsider. He could simultaneously revel in the perfect poise and grace that defined the upper class while also revealing its artificiality.

Coward’s interest in unveiling life behind closed doors was more than simply a retreading of the Restoration “comedies of manner” that showed the absurdity of etiquette. It was also more than a contemporizing of Oscar Wilde’s aestheticism that focused on the value of perfecting such behavior. In Private Lives, Coward captures the spirit of a time between two world wars. Author John Lahr describes it as a period of “Post WW1 disillusionment in which romance and manners became a performance. Communication became a kind of false trail of language that leads back to solitude.” For Coward’s characters, the unimaginable sense of loss from the war (nearly one million British soldiers) and a general feeling of solitary listlessness cast a shadow over all human interaction, making earnestness untrustworthy, and moral clarity a thorny pursuit. The characters in Private Lives, Amanda and Elyot especially, embrace their antisocial impulses, fleeing any restrictions on their recklessness. And yet, it’s not just a play about pursuing hedonism. Elyot and Amanda constantly toil over the morality of their actions. What they can’t deny is that living at the extremes of their passions means embracing life at its fullest. It was a perhaps dangerous antidote for a moral and national ennui.

BRIGHT YOUNG THINGS

Coward’s Private Lives happens at a tidal shift in British life. The Bright Young Things of the 1920s and 30s were British versions of America’s “Flappers.” They were youths driven to dance, drink, and deviancy. Even more than their American cousins, the Bright Young Things were a response to the first decades of the twentieth century. After centuries of relying on logic and rational to further human life, artist and philosophers turned away from what they saw as the failure of Enlightenment thinking. This was helped by the fact that logic and science had produced the most devastating war in history – the hopeful movement of automation had created the machinegun. Avante Garde artists turned to nonsense and abstraction (Dada and Expressionism), philosophers turned to existentialism. The Bright Young Things manifested the distrust of old ways, representing a kind of pleasurable existentialism.

It might seem odd to put Noël Coward in conversation with such bleakness. He’s known for his frivolity, not philosophy. And let me be clear, your experience of Private Lives will be that it is screamingly funny and delightfully playful. At the same time there is clear evidence of more profound philosophical influence. No one better encapsulated the angst of the Bright Young Things more than the novelist Evelyn Waugh. Books such as Vile Bodies and Handful of Dust established Waugh as the British counterpart of F. Scott Fitzgerald who captured the exuberance and tragedy of the flapper generation in works such as The Great Gatsby. There are significant overlaps between Coward and Waugh. Both Waugh and Coward have elements of desire, carnality, and social subversion. They portray the breakdown of the family structure, the loss of a universal moral compass, and the rabid desire for freedom. They even share some specific language. Both Private Lives and Vile Bodies have a wonderful moment when a character levies at their partners the specific inventory of insults: “Beast, Brute, Swine, Cad.” I love this line. It’s linked to an older set of expectation around gentlemanly and lady-like behavior – “Don’t be a cad,” you can imagine someone from Downton Abbey saying. And yet, cumulatively, the words project behaviors far uglier and more vicious than anything within the realm of courteous gallantry or feminine modesty. For both Waugh and Coward, it was a new world of misbehavior.

All this is to say, that Coward was dramatizing the lives of people who were struggling for a purpose. We never know what the central couple, Elyot and Amanda, do to earn the lush lives that they live. It can be inferred that they don’t do anything. They are social creatures – their social lives are everything, and their search for purpose inevitably means flaunting social mores. For Coward and for Waugh, in our private lives behind closed doors, we can go to stunning (and hilarious) extremes.

ENT CENTER FOR THE ARTS at UCCS

Beast, Brute, Swine, Cad

The Cue List

Noël Coward, Theatre Incarnate

Everyone’s Private Lives

BRIGHT YOUNG THINGS

LINKS

Further Reading