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The image of Noel Coward, clad in his hancy dressing gown and drawing on gold-banded cigarette holder, has endured as a powerful symbol of 'England between the wars'. Whether this is an appropriate symbol is open to debate. He was seldom mentioned in the press without allusions to cocktails and decadence, but what he was doing, either consciously or not, was building the Noel Coward myth.
Coward's mask, his public profile (remembering that he had quite lowly middle-class origins) is very theatrical, and themes of play and artifice feature heavily in his plays. Role-playing, game-playing and social conventions are they key elements of confusion in his great comedy of "bad manners", Hay Fever.
It is a great play, as it typlifies all that is best in Coward's legancy to drama. His characters are a strange bunch, and are invariably difficult to pin down. As the critic John Russell Taylor has pointed out, Coward's comic creations, "do live as people, and their lives go on behind and under and around what they are saying; the text provides only the faintest guide lines to what is going on between the people on the stage."
Chris Bissex |
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