Hay Fever (Modern Classics)

Product Information

Coward's fictional South Sea Islands colony, "Samolo", was loosely based on Jamaica, where he had a home; he used it as the setting not only for his novel, but for two plays ( Point Valaine and South Sea Bubble) and a musical ( Pacific 1860). [100] Rosemary Harris / Marin Mazzie / Terrence McNally / Sonny Tilders and Creature Technology Company / Jason Michael Webb / Harold Wheeler (2019)

Gaye, Freda, ed. (1967). Who's Who in the Theatre (fourteenthed.). London: Sir Isaac Pitman and Sons. OCLC 5997224. Between 1929 and 1936 Coward recorded many of his best-known songs for His Master's Voice (HMV), now reissued on CD, including the romantic " I'll See You Again" from Bitter Sweet, the comic " Mad Dogs and Englishmen" from Words and Music, and "Mrs Worthington". [69] Second World War [ edit ]

Last on

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]

Hoare, Philip. "Coward, Sir Noël Peirce (1899–1973)", Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, September 2004; online edn, January 2008. (subscription or UK public library membership required) The Savoy Theatre", The Times, 26 June 1912, p. 10; "The Coliseum", 29 October 1912, p. 8; and "Varieties etc", 18 November 1912, p. 1During the 1950s and 1960s Coward continued to write musicals and plays. After the Ball, his 1953 adaptation of Lady Windermere's Fan, was the last musical he premiered in the West End; his last two musicals were first produced on Broadway. Sail Away (1961), set on a luxury cruise liner, was Coward's most successful post-war musical, with productions in America, Britain and Australia. [96] The Girl Who Came to Supper, a musical adaptation of The Sleeping Prince (1963), ran for only three months. [97] He directed the successful 1964 Broadway musical adaptation of Blithe Spirit, called High Spirits. Coward's late plays include a farce, Look After Lulu! (1959), and a tragi-comic study of old age, Waiting in the Wings (1960), both of which were successful despite "critical disdain". [98] Coward argued that the primary purpose of a play was to entertain, and he made no attempt at modernism, which he felt was boring to the audience although fascinating to the critics. His comic novel, Pomp and Circumstance (1960), about life in a tropical British colony, met with more critical success. [99] [n 8] Love film and TV? Join BBC Culture Film and TV Club on Facebook, a community for cinephiles all over the world. By the end of the 1960s, Coward developed arteriosclerosis and, during the run of Suite in Three Keys, he struggled with bouts of memory loss. [113] This also affected his work in The Italian Job, and he retired from acting immediately afterwards. [114] Coward was knighted in 1970, [115] and was elected a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. [116] He received a Tony Award for lifetime achievement in 1970. [117] In 1972, he was awarded an honorary Doctor of Letters degree by the University of Sussex. [118] A 1985 production at the Music Box Theatre in New York had a cast including Mia Dillon as Sorel, Robert Joy as Simon, Barbara Bryne as Clara, Rosemary Harris as Judith, Roy Dotrice as David, Campbell Scott as Sandy, Carolyn Seymour as Myra, Charles Kimbrough as Richard, and Deborah Rush. [46] Other [ 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]

The play itself is a mixed bag. Whilst it’s loaded with Coward’s turns-of-phrase and snappy dialogue, it’s not his strongest work. There’s really no plot to talk of and none of the flimsily created characters does enough to elicit any sort of rapport or engagement with the audience. They seem like vacuous vessels to spew out a host of Coward’s one-liners. Haymarket Theatre", The Times, 8 May 1953, p. 12; and Brown, Ivor. "Royal and Ancient", The Manchester Guardian, 8 May 1953, p. 5

Noël Coward: BBC Radio Drama Collection

The exhausting thing [for him was] having to perform Noël Coward all the time," suggests Barnaby Thompson, director of the documentary Mad About the Boy. "I assumed he grew up in a nice family, had a good education… then we find out he left school at nine? He was a child actor, and entirely self-educated. So you've got a guy who, from nowhere, created this incredible persona that ended up defining the modern Englishman." 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 Our procedures and the technology we use have appropriate safe guards in place to keep information as secure as possible. 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] Other examples of "Dad's Renaissance" included a 1968 Off-Broadway production of Private Lives at the Theatre de Lys starring Elaine Stritch, Lee Bowman and Betsy von Furstenberg, and directed by Charles Nelson Reilly. Despite this impressive cast, Coward's popularity had risen so high that the theatre poster for the production used an Al Hirschfeld caricature of Coward ( pictured above) [n 9] instead of an image of the production or its stars. The illustration captures how Coward's image had changed by the 1960s: he was no longer seen as the smooth 1930s sophisticate, but as the doyen of the theatre. As The New Statesman wrote in 1964, "Who would have thought the landmarks of the Sixties would include the emergence of Noël Coward as the grand old man of British drama? There he was one morning, flipping verbal tiddlywinks with reporters about "Dad's Renaissance"; the next he was ... beside Forster, T. S. Eliot and the OMs, demonstrably the greatest living English playwright." [112] Time wrote that "in the 60s... his best work, with its inspired inconsequentiality, seemed to exert not only a period charm but charm, period." [1] Death and honours [ edit ] The Noël Coward Theatre

The first London revival was in 1933 at the Shaftesbury Theatre with Constance Collier as Judith. [28] In 1941 the piece was revived at the Vaudeville Theatre in a repertory series of English comedies. [29] Walt Disney, William Garity, John N. A. Hawkins, and the RCA Manufacturing Company / Leopold Stokowski and his associates / Rey Scott / British Ministry of Information (1941) 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.Barbey D'Aurevilly, Jules (2002) [1845]. Who's a Dandy? – Dandyism and Beau Brummell. George Walden (trans. and ed. of new edition). London: Gibson Square. ISBN 978-1-903933-18-3. Noel Coward's Hay Fever, The Argus, 9 February 1931, p. 13; and "Hay Fever at Tivoli", The Argus, p. 10 Bausch & Lomb Optical Company / Danny Kaye / Kemp Niver / Greta Garbo / Jon Whiteley / Vincent Winter / Gate of Hell (1954) Aside from Dench, Peter Bowles as Judith's novelist husband best catches the acidulous tone of Coward's comedy of bad manners. Bowles looks like a cat who has swallowed several dishes of cream and exudes the vanity of a man who knows he's a second-rater and can get away with it. Even if Coward's misogyny emerges in a scene where the novelist toys with Myra, Bowles hits just the right note of armour-plated insouciance.