Blithe Spirit, Hay Fever, Private Lives: Three Plays

I got this book because I wanted to read the play Blythe Spirit. I don't even remember why now. I know I saw it as a young child as an old movie starring Rex Harrison; maybe it arose out of a moment of nostalgia. In any case, I almost put the book aside after reading the play itself. It seemed rather a bore, all things considered. I'd expected more witty conversations, double entends, and awkward moments. Instead I found a rather misogynistic attitude that was more annoying than funny. I also found that the play would have made a better Agatha Christie murder mystery. What if the central character wasn't just a haunted and beset husband but a serial killer of his wives? Many of the attempts at comedy came across as lame, and I couldn't help but feel that I, steeped in TV from childhood, had "seen it all before." After all, Laugh In, Saturday Night Live, stand up comedians, and the late night talk shows had pretty much done what there was to be done. The only thing that brought me back to the book was the knowledge that Noel Coward had been regarded in his time as a very witty and irreverent playwright, and I felt I should give him a fairer trial. I was glad I did, because both Hay Fever and Private Lives were quite amusing. Oddly enough, they were also much earlier plays. Perhaps the 1920s and 30s had more in common with the culture of the late 20th and early 21st centuries than with that between 1940-1990. I can almost visualize the manic comings and goings of the characters in Hay Fever and their equally insane comments and quarrels. Sitting in the audience of such a production must have been great fun, and the synergy between audience and actors must have made it even greater. The interaction partakes a great deal of standup comedy, with a slightly off-the-wall comedian paired with his or her "straight man." Here the off-the-wall and straight man types appear in abundance, and their activities on the stage generate a feeling of total pandemonium. It is no wonder that the guests sneak off, leaving their oblivious hosts to themselves. Here the dialogue is used to make a clear dividing line between the two types of individual, the conventional person and the totally unconventional. Much of what is said and what it means is known only to the unconventional set and the audience. The audience becomes part of the play by virtue of knowing what some of the characters on stage do not; that much of what the unconventional characters are saying are lines from a particularly bad play that one of them had appeared in at a previous time. Private Lives was less frenetically active, but it made its own great use of the stage. (For those who've never read a play, there are stage directions included at the beginning and throughout the play which lets the reader know when and where a character enters or leaves the stage, etc.) It also made wonderful use of the inanities of casual conversation, especially the repetition of statements a

I studied drama at Princeton because normally plays are shorter, but I never read this author. His words are fabulous and the inter persona tension he creates is fabulous. The Blythe Spirit was so rich that I've had to read a novel before tackling another play.

This is an important author, although poor Noel lived to see himself both scorned and forgotten. He got the Tennessee Williams treatment in spades. Suddenly, the clouds lifted and he was once again the toast of London, got knighted, and will live again evidently until the next round of purging. It all sounds terribly Soviet, doesn't it? But this seems to be how theater critics go about exciting the audience to new things. First they have to eviscerate the old. Coward could take it because he was a tough old sod. The British theater seems to produce little monsters, like Peter Sellers, Lawrence Olivier, and Noel Coward. Monsters as in gila monsters, with reptile-tough skin. Evidently one needs it. Coward exists in a time warp, somewhat like P. G. Wodehouse. His world is long gone if it ever existed. What is key is that once in it, you believe it did once exist and you hope it will last forever. The plays are addictive. Women love the roles in the same way they love to play Williams. I would venture to say that there will be a production of "Private Lives" some where on this earth every year until the last days of mankind. The editor is also Coward's most recent biographer. I happen to have this same volume, edited by Edward Albee with a nifty introduction.

Noel Coward's talent for spinning gossamer plots into rapier-sharp comedy assures his reputation in theatre, and his comedies have such timeless appeal that they remain staples of both English and American theatre. This volume collects three of his most memorable scripts: the fantasy BLITHE SPIRIT, the farce HAY FEVER, and the razor-wicked PRIVATE LIVES.Of the three, BLITHE SPIRIT and PRIVATE LIVES are best known to the general public through various film versions and frequent revivals. BLITHE SPIRIT concerns a novelist who invites a medium to give a seance that he might learn tricks of the trade for the book he is writing--but the medium is no fake, and she unintentionally summons up the ghost of his first wife, who promptly moves in and makes his second wife's life a living hell. PRIVATE LIVES offers the story of a divorced couple who unexpectedly meet while honeymooning with their new spouses--whom they quickly abandon in order to resume their torrid passion for each other. Trouble is, although they love each other desperately, their personalities are about as compatible as two scorpions in a bottle. HAY FEVER, one of Coward's earliest successes, presents the story of visitors to an eccentric family who are very nearly driven mad before they are able to escape.Coward was reknowned for his sophistocated and often acid turn of phrase, and all three of these plays contain enough outrageous situations and sharp-tongued lines to make even the worst sourpuss laugh loud enough to annoy the neighbors. Although those unused to reading playscripts may find HAY FEVER a bit hard to grasp, both BLITHE SPIRIT and PRIVATE LIVES read extremely, extremely well--so much so that you're likely to find yourself acting them out as you read! Wonderful fun, and strongly, strongly recommended.

Noel Coward's _Hay Fever_, Evelyn Waugh's _Handful of Dust_, and Kingsley Amis's _Lucky Jim_ are, for my money, the three funniest things written in English in the 20th century. I was a drama critic for nearly 12 years, saw hundreds of productions of all kinds from coast to coast in the US and a few in London, and never laughed harder or enjoyed myself more than at a regional US production of "Hay Fever" in the late 1970's. Do it again! Do it again!