Word: cowards
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Then, in 1930, the apotheosis of the Coward comedies, Private Lives, appeared. All the old tricks were brought to shining perfection in a play which related the high-jinx of a divorced couple who found themselves on respective second honeymoons with decidedly the wrong people. The divorced couple were impersonated by Mr. Coward and the little girl from Miss Conti's, Gertrude Lawrence of the comely back. The playwright still stuck to stichomythy, a tendency reflected in last week's production. Some of his dialog was as bitter and bright as Alice in Wonderland...
...funniest sequence in Private Lives was the rough-and-tumble finale of Act II in which Mr. Coward and Miss Lawrence scrambled on the floor after she had cracked a phonograph record over his head. Even this delicious bit of business had its roots in earlier Coward work. The Rat Trap (unproduced) not only ended its second act in similar vein but its third as well. Perhaps it all goes back further than that, for when he was a child Playwright Coward once bashed a little girl on the head with a spade because she would not take seriously...
...Playwright Coward, War is anathema. The 'closest approach his comedies make to profundity is this philosophy: let us be merry today for yesterday (1914-18) we died. To prove his point he wrote two strongly sentimental dramas. The first, Post Mortem (unproduced), exposes the social dissolution observed by a young ghost who returns from Flanders. The second, Cavalcade, is a tragic cyclorama which begins with the Boer War and ends in 1930 with the hope that "this country of ours may find dignity, greatness, and peace again." Here was something more than the world dared to expect from...
Some people work hard because they like to. Playwright Coward is one of them. A good part of the time his mind must be as teeming as the last week of a rehearsal. So well had he mentally planned Hay Fever that he wrote it during a house-party weekend. Private Lives was the product of a week's flu-confinement in a Hong Kong hotel. The record is sagging. It took months of voyaging in South American waters for him to jot down Design For Living...
Playwright Coward is not to be found at fashionable resorts, as a rule, nor in social colyums. He likes beer. In spite of his knockabout experience, he is still given to emotional flights. Not long ago he rushed into Fred Astaire's dressing room. "Freddie!" he exclaimed. "When I see you dance I want...