A night at the … er … Theatre
Last night I was privileged to join Tim Holford-Smith to see Rufus Hound star as Garry Essendine, an actor suffering something of a mid-life crisis, in the latest revival of Noel Coward’s semi-autobiographical Present Laughter at the Chichester Festival Theatre, a clever but perhaps (to 21st Century audiences) lightweight piece that brings to mind echoes of Michael Frayn’s classic Noises Off (1982) which famously employs the ‘play within a play’ device of presenting its farcical action from the chaotic backstage viewpoint of a repertory company’s performance of an actual one.
These days Coward’s canon is generally approached via ‘the prism of hindsight’ in that, fairly or not, it tends to be regarded as an unfashionable series of period pieces dripping with the subliminal irony of the fact that – although a sometime matinee idol in the eyes of the public – within the theatrical fraternity Coward openly used to bowl ‘round the wicket’ (as we sometimes referred to it during my schooldays) at a time when in Britain the legalisation of homosexual practices was still some way off.
Thus in Present Laughter Coward uses Garry Essendine’s personal issues, stemming largely from an adult lifetime of infidelity and propensity to pursue the opposite sex – an open and accepted fact by those in his immediate circle – as a veil of respectability behind which to comment upon his own proclivities, not least in the character of Roland Maule (a role undertaken in this Chichester production by Ben Allen), an aspiring young playwright whose obsession with Essendine may or may not contain a gay undertone.
Elsewhere – I learn from cursory research upon the internet – Coward drew upon his own entourage to find inspiration for his characters, e.g. Essendine’s secretary Monica Reed (played Tracey-Ann Oberman at Chichester) apparently unmistakenly based upon Coward’s own much-loved real-life equivalent Lom Lorraine and Morris Dixon (Richard Mylan) upon Jack Wilson, Coward’s agent and sometime lover.
As we took the opportunity to retire outside during the interval Tim remarked upon the fact that, although written just pre-War, Present Laughter made no reference at all to the impending conflict. In fact Coward wrote both This Happy Breed and Present Laughter in 1939 although the latter’s first production was three years later when presumably it was taken (mid-war) as a nostalgic look-back to a time when peace was the order of the day and the relatively care-free doings of the theatrical world were a welcome distraction from the more fundamental ‘life and death’ matters of the moment.
As a matter of record, Coward – in his fortieth year (the same age as his protagonist Garry Essendine) when he wrote Present Laughter – as the saying goes ‘had a good war’.
Immediately it was declared he abandoned the theatre and offered himself up to the war effort, first running the British propaganda office in Paris and then openly visiting America seeking to influence American political and public opinion to look favourably upon Britain’s cause, a move that caused him angst because of widespread press criticism of him going abroad when he was unable to reveal that he was doing so on behalf of British intelligence.
Not long afterwards Churchill persuaded Coward that he could serve the country best by entertaining the nation as only he could, which led to Coward endlessly recording and touring to perform patriotic songs and pieces and then producing morale-boosting films such as Blithe Spirit (1945 – based upon his play written four years earlier) and In Which We Serve (1942) which received an honorary award at the 1943 Oscars.
As we left the theatre afterwards, in comparing our reactions to last night’s performance Tim and I seemed to agree that history has not been kind to Coward’s undoubted talent and reputation.
To modern eyes he is seen as very much ‘of his time’ – viz. a now unfashionable non-PC and non-diverse period when (on screen, airwaves and in theatre), with a patriarchal ‘Auntie’ BBC posing as the voice of the nation and Britain still possessed of an Empire, a condescending Establishment still presented upper middle class values as the norm and Jimmy Porter of Look Back In Anger was just a distant glint in the eye, if that, of John Osborne – and therefore, as night follows day, has not ‘travelled’ well this past half-century.
For good or ill, the Garry Essendine of Rufus Hound – who incidentally last night did much to dispel my own perception of him, gained entirely from such of his television appearances as I have caught by accident, as a minimally-talented but lucky performer – made much of every opportunity that came his way to over-act in order to both distance his character from the inevitable constraints of what is now a ‘dated’ piece and also gain an mildly-ironic laugh by ‘coming away from the action’ to engage knowingly with his modern audience.
To be frank, on the night I gained as much from the welcome opportunity to immerse myself in the experience of watching a live theatre performance as I did from anything particular from Present Laughter itself.
C’est la vie, I suppose, in the 21st Century world of social media, fake news and YouTube.
