Ruth Leon recommends… Noel Coward – Present Laughter

Present Laughter

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This week marks the 125th birthday of Sir Noel Peirce Coward. For those not old enough to remember, Noel Coward was an English playwright, composer, director, actor, and singer, known for his wit, flamboyance, and style.

Few of those still alive were lucky enough to know him personally and appreciate his warmth, brilliance and limitless capacity for work. I am one of them and I loved and admired him. My late husband, Sheridan Morley, wrote several books about Sir Noel, including the authorised biography, A Talent to Amuse, so we were privileged to spend time with him and marvel at his extraordinary output close-up.

He wrote more than 50 plays, starting in his teens, and was a West End and Broadway playwright and actor in his, and the century’s, early twenties. Many of his works, such as Hay Fever, Private Lives, Design for Living, Present Laughter, and Blithe Spirit, have remained in the regular theatre repertoire and are performed all over the world to this day.

He composed hundreds of songs, well over a dozen musical theatre works (including the operetta Bitter Sweet and comic revues), screenplays, poetry, several volumes of short stories, the novel Pomp and Circumstance, and a three-volume autobiography. Coward’s stage and film acting and directing career spanned six decades, during which he starred in many of his own works, as well as those of others.

I could go on but, instead, I believe it will do more honour to Noel’s memory to see one of his plays because, despite hundreds of close friendships and endless letter-writing to contacts throughout the show business world, what really mattered to him was the work he applied himself to every day.

Here is a marvellous new production of Present Laughter from the National Theatre, starring Andrew Scott, in which the principal character, Garry Essendine, is a thinly disguised self-portrait. It’s Noel Coward poking fun at himself, and nobody did it better.

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