There's more to Noël Coward than Private Lives

Shakespeare, being no slouch, knocked out either 38 or 39 plays. Impressive though that is – Harold Pinter managed just 29 – he is not the most prolific of British playwrights. That title is traditionally accorded to Alan Ayckbourn, who appears to lead the field with 90 produced stage plays. But he’s rivalled by Bryony Lavery, whose current total is 92, including her tiny handful of co-written plays featuring three glorious comedies with Patrick Barlow for the National Theatre of Brent. 

And then there’s Noël Coward.

You could be forgiven for thinking that the author, born 125 years ago, was responsible for Private Lives, the highest comedy of marital misbehaviour, Hay Fever and little else. Facts, however, speak otherwise.

For starters, he wrote 675 songs. Favourites include Mad About the Boy, in which characters sing of their yearning, including a cockney cleaner who cries:

“When I do the rooms / I see ‘is face in all the brushes and the brooms / Last week I strained me back / And got the sack / And ‘ad a row with dad about the boy.”

Or his typically crisply rhymed litany of British woes, There are Bad Times Just Around the Corner: “They’re mad at Market Harborough / And livid at Leigh-on-Sea / In Tunbridge Wells / You can hear the yells / Of woe-begone bourgeoisie.”

Alongside that – and his acting and performing – he wrote short stories, a novel, several screenplays, including the imperishable Brief Encounter, volumes of memoirs... oh, and about 50 published plays and nine musicals, all dripping with satire, sentiment and (sometimes hidden) sex. And thanks to his most recent biographer Oliver Soden – whose trenchant, invaluable Masquerade: The Lives of Noël Coward was published to considerable acclaim last year – we now know the list is yet longer with the recent discovery of umpteen unpublished plays.

You could be forgiven for thinking Coward wrote Private Lives, Hay Fever and little else

Then there are the ‘Cowardesque’ works. In 1972, a year before he died, a revue in London entitled Cowardy Custard was drawn from his output and mercifully recorded for posterity. To hear his work performed at its absolute peak, go online and listen to Patricia Routledge deliver a comedy masterclass in song, playing a woman getting ever drunker and singing I’ve Been to a Marvellous Party. The show was a huge late hit for Coward, whose work had fallen well out of fashion. Fifteen years later, it inspired a magnificent short story about fandom by Georgina Hammick entitled Mad About the Boy.

Continues...