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Loading... Coward Plays: 4: Blithe Spirit; Present Laughter; This Happy Breed; Tonight at 8.30 (ii)by Noël Coward
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Volume Four of No¿l Coward's plays contains a selection of Coward's plays from the thirties and forties which includes Blithe Spirit, a comedy that centres around the spirit medium Madame Arcati. The play that mocks sudden death was produced at precisely the moment when bombs were bringing it to Britain "I shall ever be grateful, for the almost psychic gift that enabled me to write Blithe Spirit in five days during one of the darkest years of the war." The play was for years the longest-running comedy in the history of British theatre. Present Laughter follows the life of Garry Essendine, a world-weary, middle-aged projection of the dilettante, debonair persona - self-obsessed and dressing-gowned who struts through the play like an educated peacock. It is a comedy about the 'theatricals' that No¿l best knew and loved, and was originally a star vehicle for himself. It is the closest to an autobiographical play that Coward ever wrote. This Happy Breed is a saga of a lower middle-class family; and three shorter pieces fromTonight at 8.30 - is a farce set in the South of France, and serves as an oblique tribute to Frederick Lonsdale; The Astonished Heart is about the decay of a psychiatrist's mind through personal sexual obsession. Red Peppers, which closes the volume, was a cynical tribute to the lost music halls of the First World War. No library descriptions found. |
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Google Books — Loading... GenresMelvil Decimal System (DDC)822.912Literature English English drama 1900- 1900-1999 20th Century 1900-1945LC ClassificationRatingAverage:
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I originally bought my Coward collections when I was taking a film class on Britain at War and one of the assigned films was This Happy Breed. Since this was ages ago I can't remember if we were assigned the play (somehow I think that was the case) or whether I just managed to run into this collection. Since there was another Coward collection sitting next to it on the shelf I figured I'd buy both - but this one has the plays I enjoy more.
The preface to this book is by Raymond Mander and Jope Mitchenson and has a lot of excellent information and quotes from Coward about the plays.
I also have to note here that the stage directions for almost every Coward play seem to include "french windows." This is in no way meaningful, but if you read a lot of Coward you can't help notice them popping up again and again. So anyone hoping for sunshine, roses and lovable human beings to admire had best look elsewhere.
One sweeping statement I can make about Coward characters is that many of them aren't terribly nice people - but then if you have people making witty yet cutting dialog, you aren't often going to come up with terribly nice people.
I'll link these to Wikipedia in case you want a bit of background or a plot summary:
Blithe Spirit
Because of its continued popularity this is one of the Coward plays most people know. And that's as it should be, because it still holds up well, and has a great plot, dialog, etc. In the preface Coward talks about writing this in six days and then not needing any rewrites on it:
Present Laughter
In the 1980s there was a filmed stage version of Present Laughter that played on HBO or Showtime that I managed to watch multiple times, and fell deeply in love with the play. (And I can't find the damn thing on IMDB, argh. It wasn't this revival because I would have recognized Scott in the role - the lead was definitely a British actor.) To the point where I can't read certain lines and not hear them in the same tone and inflection as the actor who played Garry Essendine. Like the name Beryl Willard - I giggle every time I read those lines just remembering how the actor pronounced the name.
Ah ha! I've dug a bit more and the actor that was in the version of Present Laughter I watched was Donald Sinden. According to the wikipedia page for the play he was in a 1981 UK revival. Here's the broadcast: BBC 1, Broadcast 16 December 1981.
The part of Garry, a prima donna actor, is one that has many long rants/diatribes that really require an actor to chew up the scenery - in fact those bits are just the sort that that the phrase "chewing up the scenery" was invented to describe. And afterwards the rest of cast has a delightful time critiquing the rant.
Here Garry takes an author (Roland Maule, who's written a play in verse) to task, after the author criticizes him for only playing parts that are "superficial, frivolous and without the slightest intellectual significance." Garry's response:
Of course part of the joke with the "inflated ego" bit is that describes Garry as well.
Reference to Mount Pleasant was from this play, and was found in Underground London. Garry's secretary goes through his mail and the letters he doesn't want to deal with he tells her to put into Mount Pleasant, which is now part of the mail system, but was previously a rubbish dump and had been given the name ironically. I'm still a bit unsure whether, when Garry says to "put it in Mount Pleasant" he means to put it in the wastebasket or not, because he sometimes also says that they'll deal with that particular letter later. I've probably spent way too much time trying to figure this unimportant thing out, but I'm delighted by the historical rubbish dump history. (Yes, trivia like that excites me, what can I say.)
This Happy Breed
A lot of other Coward plays are drawing room farce material - but this one is a family drama, with the background of the end of WWI and leading to WWII. Coward's words as quoted in the preface:
Tonight at 8:30 (II)
These are a series of one act plays meant to be presented one after the other - there are ten all together, and three are in this collection: Ways and Means, The Astonished Heart, and Red Peppers. I'm not particularly fond of any of these - probably because I'm not much interested in bickering couples (which reoccur a lot) - but they're all good meat for discussion and drama. Ways and Means did have stage instructions which I enjoyed:
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