Coward - Design for Living, Cavalcade, Conversation Piece, Tonight at 8.30 (i)

Nol Coward
COLLECTED PLAYS: THREE DESIGN FOR LIVING, CAVALCADE, CONVERSATION PIECE,
TONIGHT AT 8.30 (Hands Across the Sea, Still Life, Fumed Oak) The plays in this volume present the best of Cowards work for the stage in the 1930s. Mr Coward is always at his best when he is fooling, The Times said of Design for Living in 1939. Here is the mixture of satire with fooling that is his special talent and his particular confusion. Of Cavalcade in 1931, the Daily Mail wrote: It is a magnificent play in which the note of national pride pervading every scene and every sentence must make each one of us face the future with courage and high hopes. While Coward himself wrote: I hadnt written the play on a dashing patriotic appeal at all. There was certainly a love of England in it, but primarily it was the story of thirty years in the life of a family.

It was a big occasion before ever the curtain rose, wrote the Daily Telegraph, reviewing Conversation Piece in 1934. It became a great one as soon as Yvonne Printemps appeared Mr Coward shares her triumph. Or, rather, since he is author, composer, producer, and chief male actor in this brilliant show, he enjoys a separate triumph all to himself. Of the three short plays from the To-night at 8.30 sequence written in 1935 as acting, singing, and dancing vehicles for Gertrude Lawrence and myself, Hands Across the Sea is a gentle satire on the contrasting manners of visiting colonials and London Society; Still Life is the original of the film Brief Encounter; and Fumed Oak is a suburban comedy on the theme of the worm who turns. in the same series (introduced by Sheridan Morley) Coward
Collected Plays: One (Hay Fever, The Vortex, Fallen Angels, Easy Virtue) Collected Plays: Two (Private Lives, Bitter-Sweet, The Marquise, Post-Mortem) Collected Plays: Four (Blithe Spirit, Present Laughter, This Happy Breed,
and Ways and Means, The Astonished Heart, Red Peppers
from Tonight at 8.30) Collected Plays: Five (Relative Values, Look After Lulu! Waiting in the Wings, Suite in Three Keys) Collected Plays: Six (Semi-Monde, Point Valaine, South Sea Bubble, Nude With Violin) Collected Plays: Seven (Quadrille, Peace in Our Time,
and We Were Dancing, Shadow Play, Family Album, Star Chamber
from Tonight at 8.30) Collected Plays: Eight (Ill Leave It To You, The Young Idea, This Was a Man) also by Nol CowardCollected Revue Sketches and ParodiesThe Complete Lyrics of Nol CowardCollected VerseCollected Short StoriesThe Letters of Nol CowardPomp and Circumstance A Novel Autobiographyalso availableCoward the Playwrightby John LahrNol Coward

THREE DESIGN FOR LIVING CAVALCADE CONVERSATION PIECE and Hands Across the Sea Still Life Fumed Oak from TONIGHT AT 8.30 Introduced by Sheridan Morley The third of these volumes of Nol Cowards plays opens with one which Nol had long promised he would write for Lynn Fontanne (a friend from his earliest theatrical years) and her husband Alfred Lunt, then the first couple of the New York stage. On a holiday in South America he began to think about Design for Living, perhaps the closest he was ever to come to writing a black comedy.

This is a curious, untypical, amoral and often oddly touching drama which lies well outside the mainstream of Cowards comic writing, not only because it touches, albeit tactfully for its times, on themes of bisexuality and homosexuality, but also because it is simultaneously more philosophic and less carefully structured than any of his other major comedies. And yet, as always, there are similarities: like Fallen Angels, like Hay Fever and like Private Lives, it is about a group of people who find it impossible to live apart and equally impossible to live together; like Present Laughter, it is about the nature of the self-obsessed artist. Here Gilda and Otto and Leo are the people who discover that, contrary to popular belief, three is not a crowd: indeed they can only really survive as a trio. Nol constructed this play on a strictly three-cornered basis: Gilda loves Otto and Leo, both of whom love her but are also devoted, perhaps too devoted, to each other. Any attempt by Gilda to exclude either Otto or Leo is doomed to failure, and at the final curtain all three come to realise that their unique design for living has, by its very nature, to be triangular. Nol himself described their problem vividly if perhaps a trifle fancifully: these glib, over-articulate and amoral creatures force their lives into fantastic shapes and problems because they cannot help themselves.

Impelled chiefly by the impact of their personalities each upon the other, they are like moths in a pool of light, unable to tolerate the lonely outer darkness but equally unable to share the light without colliding constantly and bruising each others wings. There was always reckoned to be something vaguely immoral about Design For Living because of its triangular alliance and also perhaps because there was some truth somewhere within the play about Nols own relationship with both Lynn and Alfred. As a stage project it had to wait, Nol wrote, until the exact moment when she and he and I had arrived by different roads in our careers at a time and place when we felt we could all three play together with a more or less equal degree of success. We had met, discussed, argued and parted again many times, knowing that it was something we wanted to do very much indeed and searching wildly through our minds for suitable characters. At one moment we were to be three foreigners, Lynn, Eurasian; Alfred, German; and I, Chinese. At others we were to be three acrobats, rapping out Allez Oops and flipping handkerchieves at one another.

A further plan was that the entire play should be played in a gigantic bed, dealing with life and love in the Schnitzler manner. This, however, was hilariously discarded after Alfred had suggested a few stage directions which, if followed faithfully, would undoubtedly have landed all three of us in gaol. Finally, when the whole idea seemed to have sunk out of sight forever, I got a cable from them in the Argentine, where I happened to be at the time, saying, Contract with the theatre Guild up in June: we shall be free: what about it?. In reviewing it several years later, Nol was to add Design For Living has been liked and disliked, hated and admired, but never I think sufficiently loved by any but its first three leading actors. This perhaps was only to be expected, since its central theme, from the point of view of the average, must appear to be definitely anti-social. People were certainly interested and entertained and occasionally even moved by it, but it seemed to many of them unpleasant.

This sense of unpleasantness might have been mitigated for them a little if they had realised that the title was ironic rather than dogmatic. I never intended for a moment that the design for living suggested in the play should apply to anyone outside its three principal characters the ending of the play is equivocal. The three of them, after various partings and reunions and partings again, after torturing and loving and hating one another, are left together as the curtain falls, laughing. Different minds found different meanings in this laughter. Some considered it to be directed against Ernest, Gildas husband, and the time-honoured friend of all three. If so, it was certainly cruel, and in the worst possible taste.

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