Surface profundity
Reviewing Paul Johnson's To Hell with Picasso for another organ, or at any rate attempting to squeeze its almost unbear- ably succulent ingredients into an 800-word pie-dish, I was struck by the following sen- tence neatly adapted from Evelyn Waugh, in a piece anent Christmas, in which the writer is climbing the stairs to the annual TLS party:
Halfway up, one was hit by the full roar of sound, as several hundred literary types gave tongue — the authentic, uninhibited tones of the chattering classes braying for broken reputations.
The phrase which arrests here isn't that Daily Mail vulgarism 'the chattering class- es', of which, incidentally, the author is an authentic and quite operatically uninhibit- ed member, though doubtless hotly deny- ing the fact. It's the bit about braying for broken reputations which hits the spot.
Reputation haunts the literary world as it does no other. Painters, sculptors and com- posers are not half so obsessed with critical status as we hacks and stylus-scrapers , with the posthumous destiny of our words and works and the awful possibility that, if we don't take special care, there may be no destiny at all to speak of. Writers who declare that this doesn't bother them are probably liars, while those who worry too much, making holocausts of private papers, swearing cronies to silence and bundling up their manuscript remains in a barbed wire entanglement of legal sanctions, make pompous asses of themselves.
Nothing in this respect inspires more optimism than the fate of Noel Coward, whose reputation, since his death in 1973, has recovered so spectacularly from its headlong plunge during the 1950s and '60s that a young dramatist feels quite safe in acknowledging his influence as a master technician of theatrical pace and dialogue and the shimmer of 'director's theatre' has lent itself to revivals of plays which 20 years ago not even Shaftesbury Avenue would have cared to touch.
Not all, of course, is quite as it was with Noel in the days when actors were darlings rather than luvvies, when your programme at the Ambassadors or The Duke of York's carried a seal for you to break; when trays of tea were handed along the stalls at mati- nees, or when the entrance of the star halfway through Act I would be greeted with rapturous applause (I gather this still happens in musicals, but since everything to do with Broadway makes me heave with disgust I am unable to vouch for such con- tinuance). Some of the oeuvre has declined into senility, though I should not be sur- prised to hear that at Hammersmith Neil Bartlett 'even as we speak' is preparing a swooningly glamorous revival of Cavalcade, with its famous scene of doomed honey- mooners on board the Titanic. The drama- tist's vision of an England run paternalistically by friends of Dickie Mountbatten and the Queen Mother, its cockney working class full of people with names like Bert and Ethel muddling cheer- ily through as Mr Hitler drops the odd bomb into the washing-up basin, is not one which all of us find easy to share. Some pieces which looked like genius at the time, what's more, have forfeited their lustre. Blithe Spirit, for example, now appears as monstrous in its redundant verbosity as anything by the elderly Bernard Shaw.
While resprayed, sandblasted versions of Private Lives, Design for Living and The Vortex have been finding Coward new admirers, that consummate masterpiece Hay Fever has sunk into a trough of myste- rious neglect. First produced in 1925, it was quite rightly the pet of its author, who described it as 'far and away one of the most difficult plays to perform that I have ever encountered', which perhaps explains why no memorable revival has been presented since a wonderfully funny BBC television version in 1967 with Celia Johnson, Dennis Price and Anna Massie.
The antics of the ironically named Bliss family and their bemused weekend guests provoked impatient accusations of triviality For our entertainment tonight there's a programme on HIV-positive, one on cervical cancer and another on cardiac hypertrophy.' from the critics, but Hay Fever's superficial- ity is, as it were, merely superficial. Coward was the sort of gay showbiz personality who recoils in horror from anything in art which sets its brow too high, and the phrase neo- Aristotelian modernism' in reference to this nicely fluffed-up comic soufflé would have had him spluttering into his Martini. Yet such indeed is the play's essence when read in cold print. The unities of time and place are observed and there is no subplot. A cunning symmetry among the dramatis personae means that each of the Blisses will find his or her alter ego among the various weekenders, but that all such figures will somehow appear hamstrung and insuffi- cient amid the epigrammatic bickerings and poses of a family bearable solely to itself. Even the standard-issue gorblimey maid Clara has her classic function as both jester and chorus.
Works of art arc nowadays always held to be 'about' something or other, and it is not necessarily bidding for a prime site on Pseud's Corner to say that Hay Fever, if Coward only knew it, is about most of those thumping great existential issues with which A-Level students are nowadays encouraged to freight their essays on King Lear, Wuthering Heights. Judith Bliss, the semi-retired actress, is quite clearly in the grips of a Pirandellian identity crisis, a touch of Brecht's famous 'alienation effect' conditions her novelist husband David, and the family's stops-out, pyrotechnic row in the last act as their baffled guests tiptoe away is a gesture of magisterial symbolism evocative of Sartre's 'hell is other people'.
And anyway isn't the dialogue, as Judith's hunky toyboy Sandy would say, `simply ripping'? Moments like 'Even a cuckoo has charm in moderation', the flap- per Jackie's sublimely obtuse 'Appendicitis' in the Act II adverb game or the exchange, 'Didn't you know I had a husband?' I . . . I thought he was dead."No, he's not dead, he's upstairs', are the lineal forebears of Orton and Pinter. As for David and Judith's semantic spat over the import of correct relative pronouns, 'What was Paris?', 'Which was Paris' etc, here lies Tom Stoppard's fons et origo. A flawless and, even accidentally, profound work of art. So can we have it back on the stage, where it belongs?
Jonathan Keates
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