Noel Coward Collected Plays: THREE: 3

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Sorel and Simon Bliss, a brother and sister, exchange artistic and bohemian dialogue. Judith, their mother, displays the absent-minded theatricality of a retired star actress, and David, their father, a novelist, is concentrating on finishing his latest book. Each of the four members of the Bliss family, without consulting the others, has invited a guest for the weekend. Judith announces that she has decided to return to the stage in one of her old hits, Love's Whirlwind. She and Sorel and Simon amuse themselves acting out a melodramatic passage from the play beginning, "Is this a game?" "Yes, and a game that must be played to the finish!" [20] They are interrupted by the ringing of the doorbell. [21] Hay Fever", Daily News, 9 June 1925, p. 4; and "At The Ambassadors", The Tatler, 1 July 1925, p. 20

Evangeline Julia Marshall, an eccentric society hostess (1854–1944), married Clement Paston Astley Cooper, grandson of Sir Astley Paston Cooper, on 10 July 1877. She inherited Hambleton Hall from her brother Walter Marshall (d. 1899), and there she entertained rising talents in the artistic world, including Streatfeild, the conductor Malcolm Sargent and the writer Charles Scott Moncrieff, as well as the young Coward. [19] a b c d e Chothia, Jean. "Coward, Noël", The Oxford Encyclopedia of British Literature, Oxford University Press, 2006. Retrieved 5 April 2020 (subscription required) Alexander Woolcott wrote, "Laura Hope Crews was permitted to give one of the most disastrous performances I have ever seen in all my life". [17] James, Elliot (2020). The Importance of Happiness: Noël Coward and the Actors' Orphanage. UK: Troubador Publishing. ISBN 9781800460416.While Gielgud and Bogarde told me of their great love and respect for Coward, Carey was more reserved. She kept her counsel, as the great witness to her friend’s pleasures and pains. Above all, it is through her eyes – so constant, in these photographs she collected – that I would like to look again at that time and those people. As Amanda, the star of Coward’s most famous play, says: “I think very few people are completely normal really, deep down in their private lives.”

The Noël Coward Theatre in St Martin's Lane, originally opened in 1903 as the New Theatre and later called the Albery, was renamed in his honour after extensive refurbishment, re-opening on 1 June 2006. [122] A statue of Coward by Angela Conner was unveiled by the Queen Mother in the foyer of the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane in 1998. [123] There are also sculptures of Coward displayed in New York and Jamaica, [124] and a bust of him in the library in Teddington, near where he was born. [125] In 2008 an exhibition devoted to Coward was mounted at the National Theatre in London. [126] The exhibition was later hosted by the Museum of Performance & Design in San Francisco and the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in Beverly Hills, California. [127] In June 2021 an exhibition celebrating Coward opened at the Guildhall Art Gallery in the City of London. [128] Personal life [ edit ] Coward as Slightly in Peter Pan in 1913 Payn, Graham; Morley, Sheridan, eds. (1982). The Noël Coward Diaries (1941–1969). London: Methuen. ISBN 978-0-297-78142-4. After his London office and flat had been destroyed in the Blitz, Coward took a short holiday with the actress Joyce Carey at Portmeirion on the coast of Snowdonia in Wales. She was writing a play about Keats, and he was still thinking about his ghostly light comedy. He later recounted: The theatre must be treated with respect. It is a house of strange enchantment, a temple of dreams. What it most emphatically is not and never will be is a scruffy, ill-lit drill hall serving as a temporary soap-box for political propaganda. [146] In 1933 Coward wrote, directed and co-starred with the French singer Yvonne Printemps in both London and New York productions of an operetta, Conversation Piece (1933). [64] He next wrote, directed and co-starred with Lawrence in Tonight at 8.30 (1936), a cycle of ten short plays, presented in various permutations across three evenings. [n 5] One of these plays, Still Life, was expanded into the 1945 David Lean film Brief Encounter. [66] Tonight at 8.30 was followed by a musical, Operette (1938), from which the most famous number is "The Stately Homes of England", and a revue entitled Set to Music (1938, a Broadway version of his 1932 London revue, Words and Music). [67] Coward's last pre-war plays were This Happy Breed, a drama about a working-class family, and Present Laughter, a comic self-caricature with an egomaniac actor as the central character. These were first performed in 1942, although they were both written in 1939. [68]

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Twentieth-century blues: the songs of Noel Coward", "Ian Bostridge: Noël Coward songbook"; and "Sutherland sings Noel Coward", WorldCat, accessed 5 December 2013