CAST

NOËL COWARD, a playwright, director, actor and composer

IVOR NOVELLO, a composer and actor

GERTRUDE LAWRENCE, an actress

GEORGE GERSHWIN, a composer

W. SOMERSET MAUGHAM, a writer

VIRGINIA WOOLF, a novelist

CHARLIE CHAPLIN, an actor and filmmaker

IGOR STRAVINSKY, a composer

LAURENCE OLIVIER, an actor

GRETA GARBO, a movie star

JOAN SUTHERLAND, a soprano

PET SNAKE, a reptile, allergic to gin

OLIVER SODEN, a biographer (with a good book on Michael Tippett under his belt)

The action moves from London to New York, Australia, Jamaica, France, Switzerland

TIME: 1899–1973 

Part One

You could hardly ask for a better tour guide through the artistic travails and triumphs of the twentieth century. Born as the previous century was closing its shutters, Noël Coward dominated the London stage in the interwar years, butted heads with the Angry Young Men in the 1950s, before wrenching victory from the jaws of disfavour in his final years in a series of stunning revivals.

He knew everybody. In America before the Great Depression, he heard Gershwin play through sketches of his piano concerto, and in 1931 he turned down Stravinsky’s suggested collaboration. In the early 1960s, he helped Joan Sutherland find a chalet near his own in Les Avants, Switzerland. He also retained properties in Jamaica, having discovered the island when holidaying in a house owned by Ian Fleming and where he entertained anyone from Alec Guinness to Winston Churchill. Virginia Woolf wrote of Coward to a friend, ‘He can sing, dance, write plays, act, compose, and I daresay paint’ (indeed he could). Ned Rorem noted that ‘his immodesty is generous’, while Robert Graves distilled 1920s literary England into four major figures: ‘Coward was the dramatist of disillusion, as Eliot was its tragic poet, Aldous Huxley its novelist, and James Joyce its prose epic-writer.’