The first London revival was in 1933 at the Shaftesbury Theatre with Constance Collier as Judith. [28] In 1941 the piece was revived at the Vaudeville Theatre in a repertory series of English comedies. [29] After Christmas dinner, the grown-ups (Frank and Ethel, Ethel's mother Mrs Flint, and Frank's sister Sylvia) have retired to another room to leave the young people (Frank and Ethel's children: Vi, "a pleasant nondescript-looking girl of twenty"; Queenie, "a year younger... prettier and a trifle flashy"; and Reg, aged eighteen, "a nice-looking intelligent boy", Reg's friend Sam, and Queenie's friend Phyllis) alone. Sam indulges in a spot of socialist preaching against capitalism and injustice. The young women fail to accord him the respect he thinks he deserves, and he and Reg leave. Bob Mitchell's son Billy visits the house. He is left alone with Queenie, and there is a short love scene between them. Queenie baffles him by saying that she so hates suburban life that she would not make him a good wife, and rushes out. Frank enters and encourages Billy. After Billy leaves, Ethel and Frank chat together, partly to avoid Sylvia's singing in the room next door and partly for the pleasure of each other's company. Gilbert, Jenny. " Hay Fever, Duke of York's Theatre", The Arts Desk, 12 May 2015; and " Hay Fever starring Felicity Kendal transfers to West End", WhatsOnStage, 15 January 2015 Other examples of "Dad's Renaissance" included a 1968 Off-Broadway production of Private Lives at the Theatre de Lys starring Elaine Stritch, Lee Bowman and Betsy von Furstenberg, and directed by Charles Nelson Reilly. Despite this impressive cast, Coward's popularity had risen so high that the theatre poster for the production used an Al Hirschfeld caricature of Coward ( pictured above) [n 9] instead of an image of the production or its stars. The illustration captures how Coward's image had changed by the 1960s: he was no longer seen as the smooth 1930s sophisticate, but as the doyen of the theatre. As The New Statesman wrote in 1964, "Who would have thought the landmarks of the Sixties would include the emergence of Noël Coward as the grand old man of British drama? There he was one morning, flipping verbal tiddlywinks with reporters about "Dad's Renaissance"; the next he was ... beside Forster, T. S. Eliot and the OMs, demonstrably the greatest living English playwright." [112] Time wrote that "in the 60s... his best work, with its inspired inconsequentiality, seemed to exert not only a period charm but charm, period." [1] Death and honours [ edit ] The Noël Coward Theatre The Savoy Theatre", The Times, 26 June 1912, p. 10; "The Coliseum", 29 October 1912, p. 8; and "Varieties etc", 18 November 1912, p. 1

At the end of the Second World War, Coward wrote his last original revue. He recalled "I had thought of a good title, Sigh No More, which later, I regret to say, turned out to be the best part of the revue". [181] It was a moderate success with 213 performances in 1945–46. [182] Among the best-known songs from the show are "I Wonder What Happened to Him?", "Matelot" and "Nina". [54] Towards the end of his life Coward was consulted about, but did not compile, two 1972 revues that were anthologies of his songs from the 1920s to the 1960s, Cowardy Custard in London (the title was chosen by Coward) and Oh, Coward! in New York, at the premiere of which he made his last public appearance. [183] Songs [ edit ]

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The family have been listening to ex-king Edward VIII's abdication broadcast. In the intervening time, Mrs Flint has died, and Vi and Sam, now married, have become comfortably middle-aged. Billy enters with the news that he has run into Queenie in Menton. Her lover had left her and returned to his wife, leaving Queenie stranded. After some prevarication Billy says that Queenie is with him and indeed is now his wife. Queenie enters, and there is an awkward but loving reconciliation between her and Ethel. Love film and TV? Join BBC Culture Film and TV Club on Facebook, a community for cinephiles all over the world. Coward's out-sized, charming persona was his passport to freely moving through worlds he was not from. It has not, however, necessarily helped our understanding of the work: it's taken "half a century to get him out the way!" Soden laughs. Coward had a vein of determined anti-intellectualism, and often undermined his own work: "He would swear blind that he wasn't remotely serious, just a silly trite little comedian. But the plays tell a completely different story, whether or not he meant them to," insists Soden.

From the age of 14, he had some sort of relationship with 36-year-old artist, Philip Streatfeild – possibly sexual – before Streatfeild died of trench fever in World War One. Coward's other close friend, John Ekins, also died in the war. In 1918, at the age of 18, Coward had a nervous breakdown in an army training camp before seeing any action, and was hospitalised for six weeks.

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Coward later said, "I have always had a reputation for high-life, earned no doubt in the twenties with such plays as The Vortex. But, as you see, I was a suburban boy, born and bred in the suburbs of London, which I've always loved and always will." This Happy Breed, like his short play Fumed Oak, is one of his rare stage depictions of suburban life. [10] Plot [ edit ] Act 1 [ edit ] Scene 1 – June 1919 Ambassadors Theatre", The Daily Telegraph, 9 June 1928, p. 8; and "Criterion Theatre", The Daily Telegraph, 8 September 1925, p. 12 Magill, Frank (ed.). Magill's Literary Annual, 1997. Vol.2. Pasadena: Salem Press. ISBN 978-0-89356-297-7.

In 1933 Coward wrote, directed and co-starred with the French singer Yvonne Printemps in both London and New York productions of an operetta, Conversation Piece (1933). [64] He next wrote, directed and co-starred with Lawrence in Tonight at 8.30 (1936), a cycle of ten short plays, presented in various permutations across three evenings. [n 5] One of these plays, Still Life, was expanded into the 1945 David Lean film Brief Encounter. [66] Tonight at 8.30 was followed by a musical, Operette (1938), from which the most famous number is "The Stately Homes of England", and a revue entitled Set to Music (1938, a Broadway version of his 1932 London revue, Words and Music). [67] Coward's last pre-war plays were This Happy Breed, a drama about a working-class family, and Present Laughter, a comic self-caricature with an egomaniac actor as the central character. These were first performed in 1942, although they were both written in 1939. [68] Coward "wraps this flippant humour around himself like a shield – it's not only disguise but protection," he adds. And when you look at Coward's early years, you see why he might want that armour: they are ripe with grief and guilt. Herbert, Ian, ed. (1977). Who's Who in the Theatre (sixteenthed.). London and Detroit: Pitman Publishing and Gale Research. ISBN 978-0-273-00163-8. Coward completed a one-act satire, The Better Half, about a man's relationship with two women. It had a short run at The Little Theatre, London, in 1922. The critic St John Ervine wrote of the piece, "When Mr Coward has learned that tea-table chitter-chatter had better remain the prerogative of women he will write more interesting plays than he now seems likely to write." [36] The play was thought to be lost until a typescript was found in 2007 in the archive of the Lord Chamberlain's Office, the official censor of stage plays in the UK until 1968. [37] Alan Bennett, Peter Cook, Jonathan Miller and Dudley Moore / Irving Berlin / W. McNeil Lowry (1963)Frank and Ethel are about to move to the country. The house is now almost empty of furniture as they prepare to leave. Frank is left alone with his youngest grandchild, also called Frank. He talks to the baby philosophically, in a long monologue about what it means to be British. Ethel calls him to supper.