Noël Coward on (and in) Theatre
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- $14.99
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
Noël Coward on theatre was as dazzling and entertaining as his masterful plays and lyrics. Here his ideas and opinions on the subject are brilliantly brought together in an extraordinary collection of commentary, lyrics, essays, and asides on everything having to do with the theatre and Coward's dazzling life in it.
The book Noël Coward wanted, promised, threatened to write—and never did.
Including essays, interviews, diary entries, verse, his views on his fellow playwrights: "My Colleague Will," Shaw, Wilde, Chekhov, Barrie, Maugham, Eliot, Osborne, Albee, Beckett, Miller, Williams, Rattigan, Pinter, and Shaffer.
Coward on the critics—many of whom irritated him over the years but came to admire him: James Agate, Alexander Woollcott, Graham Greene, Kenneth Tynan among them.
And on the plays he wrote, among them: The Vortex; Hay Fever; Private Lives; Design For Living; Blithe Spirit.
Here is the Master on the producers who crossed his path: André Charlot, C. B. Cochran, Binkie Beaumont. And the actors in the Coward galaxy: John Gielgud, Laurence Olivier, Gertrude Lawrence, the Lunts, etc. . . .
His views on the art of acting: auditions, rehearsals, learning the lines, clarity of delivery, timing, control, range, stage fright, fans, theater audiences, revivals, comedy, "the Method," plays with a "message," taste, construction, "Star Quality," etc. . . .
And last, but Noël Coward least, his experience in, and thoughts on: revue, cabaret, television, and musical theater, Bitter Sweet, Conversation Piece, Pacific 1860, After the Ball, Ace of Clubs, Sail Away, The Girl Who Came to Supper, Words and Music, This Year of Grace, London Calling! . . . and much more.
Ingeniously, deftly compiled, edited, and annotated by Barry Day, Coward authority and editor of The Noёl Coward Reader and The Letters of Noёl Coward.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The 20th-century titan of English comedies and musicals dispenses trenchant wisdom on playwriting and much else in this sparkling anthology. Playwright and producer Day (The Noël Coward Reader) excerpts Noël Coward's autobiography, diaries, letters, and articles, grouping them in loose thematic or chronological chapters held together with his own unobtrusive exposition. The topics run the gamut from playwriting strictures to flaws in Coward's own works; tips for actors on when to accelerate the onstage pace (" for the first sinister cough of boredom") and how to avoid stage fright (he frowns on settling the nerves with booze and recommends the oft-neglected strategy of knowing one's lines); and the menace of performers who manipulate authors into enlarging their roles. An aesthetic emerges: coward extols polished entertainments and technically proficient acting, scorns avant-garde plays that soapbox drearily about class oppression, and derides the "pretentious nonsense" of Method acting. ("Learn to laugh and cry—without feeling happy or sad," he enjoins actors.) Day's selections showcase Coward's dazzling prose, which is always lively, urbane, and stocked with well-aimed zingers. ("It is odd that such brilliant wit should be allied to no humour at all," he writes of Oscar Wilde.) Theater pros and fans alike will revel in Coward's incisive, compulsively readable takes on showbiz.
