24 November is a day of theatrical anniversaries. Firstly, it’s the 96th anniversary of Noël Coward’s most spectacular flop — a disastrous early play, Sirocco, at which, he wrote
the gallery, upper circle, and pit hooted and yelled … Most of the lines weren’t heard at all.
He’d had a very good 1924 and 25, what with The Vortex and Hay Fever (which ran for 337 performances), and a not bad 1926. 1927 was not his year. The Marquise managed 129 shows, but Home Chat just 38, so he needed a hit — and Sirocco closed after 28.
It starred Ivor Novello, so it should have worked, but perhaps because it was a reworking of something he’d written at just 21, it didn’t. One critic wrote that, although the play proved that Coward was growing up, it also showed “that the process is painful”.
The plot concerns an unhappily married young woman whose husband is off on a business trip. She begs him to take her with him, but he insists that North Africa is an unsuitable place for her. So she has an affair with an Italian, and finds that very unsatisfactory, too.
Or, as Observer reviewer St. John Ervine puts it (with magnificent disdain — not least for the romantic fiction of Elinor Glyn — and a certain amount of racism):
Young Mrs. Griffin, married to a beefy oaf and obliged to spend too much time in Italy in the society of elderly, frowsty, and mentally bankrupt persons, finds herself in that state of danger to which young, beautiful, and romantic women are prone when they discover themselves to be unsuitably married. She seeks relief from her boring life in the tempestuous, but tawdry, passion of Sirio Marson, son of an English father and an Italian mother, and allows herself to be seduced by him in a low-class dancing- saloon. Thereafter she lives with him in his slovenly studio for a week. At the end of that time she has no illusions left about the glory of romantic passion. The whole business has become unutterably disgusting to her, and Sirio, with his Elinor Glyn emotions, is discovered to be a nasty little dago with the spiritual and mental outlook of an enlarged newt.
Ervine’s review is pretty balanced overall — defending Coward against “the assumption … that [he] is a flippant youth” — but does say
I am very certain that Mr. Coward has quality, although I am bound to acknowledge that he too often attempts to conceal it from us.
…which is the sort of line you can imagine Coward, or one of his characters, saying. The audience was less… ambivalent. “The first act”, Coward wrote, “was received dully”, and then the romance started. (His words are here are taken from 1957’s Theatrical Companion to Coward.)
The storm broke during Ivor’s love scene with Bunny Doble. The gallery shrieked with mirth and made sucking sounds when he kissed her, and from then onwards proceeded to punctuate every line with catcalls and various other animal noises. The last act was chaos from beginning to end. The gallery, upper circle, and pit hooted and yelled, while the stalls, boxes, and dress circle whispered and shushed. Most of the lines weren’t heard at all. Ivor and Bunny and the rest of the cast struggled on doggedly, trying to shut their ears to the noise and get the torture done with as quickly as possible. The curtain finally fell amid a bedlam of sound….
As Ervine says,
When Mr. Coward took the stage at the end of this play in face of a hostile audience, I thought that he displayed a courage which was wholly admirable.
Coward’s version is probably exaggerated, but he tells it well:
I went on again and stood in the centre, a little in front of Bunny and Ivor, bowing smiling my grateful thanks to the angriest uproar I have ever heard in a theatre. They yelled abuse at me, booed, made what is known in theatrical terms as ‘raspberries’, hissed and shrieked. People stood up in the stalls and shouted protests, and altogether the din was indescribable. It was definitely one of the most interesting experiences of my life and, my anger and contempt having reduced me to a cold numbness, I was able almost to enjoy it. I stood there actually for about seven minutes until their larynxes became raw and their breath failed and the row abated a little.
That still wasn’t the end of it, though. The female lead hadn’t yet had her say…
Then someone started yelling, ‘Frances Doble’; it was taken up, and she stepped forward, the tears from her recent emotional scene still drying on her face and, in the sudden silence following what had been the first friendly applause throughout the whole evening, said in a voice tremulous with nerves: ‘Ladies and gentlemen, this is the happiest moment of my life.’ I heard Ivor give a giggle behind me and I broke into laughter, which started a fresh outburst of booing and catcalls. Bunny stepped back, scarlet in the face, and I signalled to Basil to bring the curtain down.
The next morning, Coward said:
My first instinct was to leave England immediately, but this seemed too craven a move and also too gratifying to my enemies, whose numbers by then had swollen in our minds to practically the entire population of the British Isles.
But then he reflected a little, decided not to try putting anything on in London for a while, to “give them time to forget”, and
Having decided upon this, we strapped on our armour, let down our visors, and went to the Ivy for lunch.
Life, as the popular saying has it, Goals.
He was, indeed, back in London a couple of years later, with a little thing called Private Lives. Mind you, his days of disaster weren’t entirely behind him, as a splendid anecdote about David Lean’s 1945 film of Blithe Spirit (from David Lean by Kevin Brownlow) shows:
Noël Coward was abroad for most of the time Cineguild were making BLITHE SPIRIT, so whenever they were confronted by a lack of Noël Coward dialogue, they had to make it up themselves. Then came the nerve-racking moment when David had to show the roughcut to its author.
“The lights came up after the showing and I said, ‘Well what do you think?’
Noël said, ‘You’ve just fucked up the best thing I ever wrote.’
I said, ‘I’m sorry. I did warn you I didn’t know anything about high comedy.’
I got back at him because years later [in 1957] I was in New York and he did it on television with himself as Condomine and Lauren Bacall playing Elvira and it was really appalling. Mine was a masterpiece compared to what he did. I met him after and I said, ‘You’ve just fucked up the best thing you ever wrote.’”
But today is also the 28th anniversary of a triumph: Michael Gambon’s marvellous speech at the Evening Standard Drama Awards in 1995:
…ah, the glamour of showbusiness.
