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Like another British dramatist who was good, too, Noel Coward was born on a river bank, on the Thames at Teddington. a London suburb. His mother kept a boarding house, pinched and scraped so that she and Noel could occasionally go to a theatre. When he was ten he knew the smell of greasepaint. He was sent to a dramatic school run by Italia Conti, one of Britain's best. There was another moppet there named Gertrude Lawrence. Directress Conti recalls: "Little Noel Coward was a shy, bashful child and used to sit on my knee in the lodgings and cry because he was so terribly homesick. Little Noel was a clever boy, but I never regarded him as normal, even in those days. He was very emotional, but full of brains."
Consider him now as a young fellow hanging around casting agencies, writing occasional tunes and skits for musicals, a period punctuated by his threadbare trip to the U. S. Watch his thirsty hankering after elegance, dining, whenever he had the price, at Claridge's, making wry mental notes of the people who could dine there every day. Watch him cuff down his juvenile embarrassment with foolish youthful eccentricities. See him toss that flower box off its window sill because "the colors of it annoyed him." Behold him in The Vortex, his first writing-acting success, backed by newly-rich Michael Arlen.
The next three years must have been passed by Playwright Coward in a mild delirium. He wrote Easy Virtue, Fallen Angels, Hay Fever, This Was A Man, Home Chat, The Marquise, The Queen Was in the Parlour. Hay Fever was the cream of this crop. Most of these comedies had in common the impact of Continentalism on the stolid conservatism of Old England. Long and often very delightful passages of mutual abuse were to be found in the majority of these plays which were also masterpieces of padded wisecracking. The Coward technique of short crackling speeches developed to the point at which one statistician could count 158 consecutive "sides" of three lines or less in Act I of Hay Fever. The Greeks had a word for this system: stichomythy, dialog one line at a time.
Suddenly and inexplicably, in 1927, the British public took it into its mind to administer a brutal, heartless spanking to its precocious Bright Boy of the Theatre. Perhaps the playwright's thoughtless, perverse statements to the Press had something to do with it. Perhaps people were irritated by his appearance at a night club in a mauve polo jumper. Perhaps his brand of fun was not as amusing as it once seemed. At any rate a tirade of ugly booing arose from gallery and pit at the premiere of Sirocco, noise which his beaming and happily deaf mother mistook for applause. Someone spat in his face as he left the theatre.
His world suddenly gone to pieces, Noel Coward was persuaded with difficulty by Producer Charles B. Cochran to continue his work on the revue, This Year of Grace. It was a gratifying, vindicating triumph. For two seasons "A Room With a View" and "Dance Little Lady" tinkled away the twilight tea-dance hour on both sides of the Atlantic.
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