Customer Reviews

Coward & Company

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England's favorite sitcom star Richard Briers here dusts off his pen and sits back with a cup of hot tea to remember his limited encounters with the master, Noel Coward, and to bask in the master's wit and wisdom in nearly sixty years of acting and playwriting. I lapped up every page of this book, but I would be remiss if I didn't advise readers that this book is organized in a very slapdash manner, nearly invisibly, without rhyme or reason and definitely laughing in the face of old-fashioned chronological order.

The same stories are told again and again, and the different incidents in Coward's long life are chopped up and tossed like a salad. Coward breaks up his long theatrical association with the producer C.B. Cocky Cochran in chapter three, for example, and yet he meets Cocky in chapter four, and works with him in chapter five. Again the breakup story is told thereafter.

Briers isn't exactly prim, and many of his anecdotes are raucous, his language ripe, so I wonder why he is so reticent about Coward's sex life? We find out that Coward broke off with Cochran to set up his own production company in partnership with Jack Wilson, but Briers doesn't mention that Wilson was Coward's boyfriend. Similarly we hear a lot about Graham Payn, Coward's "Matelot," but nothing about their long-term relationship beyond the fact that the two men were very great friends. It does have the story from Kenneth More's memoirs about More's fear, as a young cute juvenile, that Coward would attempt a seduction, and how he fobbed it off by saying, "I could never have an affair with you, Mr. Coward, because you remind me of my father." That cooled his jets, it did.

The book is nearly entirely a Bennett-Cerf style anthology of Coward anecdotes, and when Briers runs out of those, he pads out the material with similar funny anecdotes from British stage actors of the same time period. This makes for confusing reading as you might be following a story for some pages, wondering when Coward will make his appearance, then the punchline comes and boom, you realize you've been de-Cowarded. But in general I recommend this book to all who wondered how Oscar Wilde's wit became, after his death, a thing brittle and scathing in Noel Coward's mouth. One actress complains, "You're confusing me on stage, Noel, and much more of this I will start throwing things at you." Without a pause, Coward snaps, "You might begin with my cues."