Present Laughter

by Noël Coward
 
Director : Sara Randall




Reveiwed by Colin Smith
Before retirement, Colin Smith was a BBC Radio producer specialising in poetry and drama for schools. He has a special interest in Noël Coward.

"Present Laughter was great fun - and naturally my favourite part - it's got all the things I like best in it". The process of writing occupied Coward over six intensive days during April 1939, though he pointed out that "Present Laughter had waited about, half-formulated, for nearly three years before I finally wrote it".
This Happy Breed resulted from the same burst of activity, and his plan was to appear in each play on alternate nights heading the same company. A pre-London tour was scheduled to begin in Manchester during September. In August they did two weeks' strenuous rehearsals, but on September 1st Germany invaded Poland. "The sets and dresses were under way and the cast all engaged and straining at the leash, so there was nothing but the destruction of civilisation to worry about". The plays were cancelled, the company disbanded, and within a week Coward was on Government duties in Paris. It was not until three years later, after "the long and bloody travail" of filming In Which We Serve that the author was able to arrange a 28-week tour in wartime conditions. Six months later the two plays ran for eight weeks at the London Haymarket "where we played happily to capacity for the whole season."

Coward described Present Laughter as "a very light comedy", in spite of which is it more expansive than most of his output; but from the penultimate scene it builds to a well-crafted climax. The plot merely reflects the marital and other complications in the life of narcissistic matinee idol Gary Essendine and his entourage of ex-wife, affaires, devotees and fans, but the complications and reversals are of Feydeauesqure proportions - as Essendine himself remarks at one point, "it's like being in a French farce" - accompanied by a fusillade of treasurable ripostes. To add further piquancy, in a BBC interview many years later, Coward admitted: "Of course Gary Essendine is me".
Harold Hobson of the Sunday Times concluded that "his comedy lay in a carefully crafted, well-bred, discourteous retort, in chic and cultivated bad manners". John Lahr summarises Present Laughter as "Coward's justification of charm. It is one of his five enduring classics of light comedy because the public, who pay to be enchanted, like to see charm triumphant. It confirms their sense of well-being and their faith in manners." This theory seemed to be borne out in the audience's response to Sara Randall's ebullient production, strongly cast and attractively staged.