Executive summary
This is a very entertaining portrait of a successful comedy actor, Garry Essendine, and the comic interplay among his coterie of servants, secretaries and sycophants (‘a tightly knit group like us’, as his wife puts it), plus a succession of outsiders whose arrivals are timed to create the maximum of comic confusion. This is the first Coward comedy that I found genuinely funny.
Background
Noel Coward wrote ‘Present Laughter’ in 1939. The title comes from a song sung by Feste the fool in Shakespeare’s comedy ‘Twelfth Night’. The song is on the age-old subject of taking pleasure while you can, the so-called carpe diem topos which we’ve seen mentioned in several other Coward plays (for example, ‘Design for Living’).
O Mistress mine where are you roaming?
O stay and hear, your true love’s coming,
That can sing both high and low.
Trip no further pretty sweeting.
Journeys end in lovers’ meeting,
Every wise man’s son doth know.
What is love, ’tis not hereafter,
Present mirth, hath present laughter:
What’s to come, is still unsure.
In delay there lies no plenty,
Then come kiss me sweet and twenty:
Youth’s a stuff will not endure.
This struck me as the funniest Coward play I’ve read and watched so far. It’s the only one I didn’t want to fast forward to get to the end of. I’ve been watching the highest quality productions available on the internet, in this case the 1981 Donald Sinden production.
Obviously Sinden was a notorious old ham but that means he was perfect to play the part of a notorious old ham, turning every possible moment into a Grand Scene which allows him to declaim and grandstand, the comedy sometimes deriving from the way he is sublimely indifferent to the reactions and feelings of all around him, sometimes from the way he artfully or cynically manipulates those around him.
Watching it also made me realise that although a lot of Coward’s lines are humdrum on the page, if they are delivered with the right emphasis and timing, apparently flat lines can be very funny. This makes me think badly of all the productions of the other plays I’ve watched which, by comparison, throw away or mute or lose the kinds of lines which here, in Sinden’s magniloquent performance, become comic gems.
Anyway, the plot such as it is, is that the comedy actor, Garry Essendine is in a more than usual tizzy because he is on the eve of a tour of Africa.
Built onto the premise of his outrageous self-absorption and the sycophancy of all who surround him, are piled events such as: having to deal with two women who want to seduce him, to placate both his long-suffering secretary and his worldly wise wife, cope with an infatuated young playwright, and overcome his impending mid-life crisis (he has recently turned forty).
Coward freely admitted that the character is a caricature of his real-life persona and he himself starred as Garry in the play’s original run. Because the part is such an obvious star vehicle, it has been performed onstage by a who’s who of British actors, including Albert Finney, Peter O’Toole, Donald Sinden, Ian McKellen, Simon Callow and, most recently, the hot priest from Fleabag, Andrew Scott.
It’s obviously based on a lifetime as a professional actor and he had been mulling it over for years, but the actual writing of ‘Present Laughter’ took him just six days. Fans of Coward cite this kind of thing as proof of The Master’s genius but critics might point out that it also explains the sustained thinness of the characters’ interplay and dialogue. Maybe if he’d spent a few days more working on it, the comic effects might be sharper and more effective.
Cast
- Daphne Stillington – shallow young woman Garry invited to ‘spend the night’ and soon leaves
- Miss Erikson – Swedish housekeeper with comic attitude and phlegmatic attitude
- Fred – breezy, whistling servant
- Monica Reed – Garry’s humorous and businesslike secretary
- Garry Essendine – ageing, larger-than-life comic actor
- Liz Essendine – Garry’s former wife, now separated
- Roland Maule – over-excited young playwright who switches from damning Garry’s lack of interest in politics and ‘commitment’ to revealing a worrying obsession with him
- Henry Lyppiatt – Garry’s agent
- Morris Dixon – Garry’s producer
- Joanna Lyppiatt – Henry’s wife who, it turns out, for seven long years has been secretly in love with Garry
- Lady Saltburn – ‘a majestic but rather effusive society woman’
Plot
All three acts of the play are set in Garry Essendine’s London flat. He is a successful West End actor who has just turned forty and dominates every scene with his grand gestures and star quality.
Act 1
Daphne Stillington, 24, a young admirer of Garry’s, has inveigled herself into the flat and has spent the night there although, as she emphasises, in the spare room.
Garry is still asleep, and while waiting for him to wake, Daphne encounters in turn three of his employees: the housekeeper (Miss Erikson), valet (Fred) and his secretary (Monica). None of them display any surprise at her presence.
Garry finally wakes and plays the lead in a very funny scene, coping with Daphne’s slavish adulation while all the time looking at his watch and rushing her out. The housekeeper comes in leading to a characteristic joke.
MISS ERIKSON: Fred said I was to go and speak to the young lady.
GARRY: Very well, Miss Erikson.
MISS ERIKSON: What shall I say to her?
GARRY: I really don’t know.
MISS ERIKSON: I have been to the grocer’s and–
GARRY: That’s as good an opening gambit as any.
His secretary presents him with various letters, the phone keeps ringing (as it kept ringing in ‘Design for Living’) and people keep arriving. Piccadilly Circus.
Garry’s ex-wife, Liz Essendine, arrives, which leads to an embarrassing meeting between Daphne, emerging from having a bath and dressing, with her. But Liz is all suave urbanity and offers Daphne the use of her (chauffeur-driven) car.
Once the young woman has left we settle down to enjoy the interplay between Garry’s coterie – his ex-wife, his secretary, his servant, Fred, breezing around, whistling and dispensing coffee.
You know the difference between this and his 1920s comedies? It’s good humoured, it is good-humoured and comic throughout, in fact its high spirited mood highlights the genuine bitterness, anger and abuse which fill ‘Hay Fever’, ‘Private Lives’ and ‘Design for Living’ and make them very mixed amusements.
I’d just written that when there was an extended argument between Garry and Liz. I can’t help thinking irritable bad temper is the central Coward quality.
Anyway, Liz tells Garry that she thinks his manager, Morris Dixon, is having an affair with Joanna, the glamorous wife of his producer, Henry. The point is this intrigue might be picked up by the press and damage Garry’s reputation, so can he find out more and do something about it? Garry is having lunch with Morris, so Liz tells him to phone her and indicate whether the affair is or is not true by using a codeword.
Miss Erikson comes onstage to announce there is a lady at the back door with ‘a tiny baby’. Flummoxed, Garry tells his secretary to go and find out who on earth she is. Liz, too, is intrigued. She stays long enough for the arrival of a young man from Uckfield (!), Roland Maule, an earnest young playwright who’s sent Garry a copy of his play to read. Liz has time to say hello to this young chap and then leave. Comic dialogue with this young man:
GARRY: So you’ve come all the way from Uckfield?
ROLAND: It isn’t very far.
GARRY: Well, it sort of sounds far, doesn’t it?
ROLAND [defensively]: It’s quite near Lewes.
GARRY: Then there’s nothing to worry about, is there?
Monica enters to say the woman with the baby knocked at the wrong door, she was looking for her sister who lives further down the mews. Garry introduces her to Roland. She leaves to get the manuscript of his play. In ‘Design for Living’ Coward included newspaper reviews of one of the characters’ plays, as a way of satirising his critics. As far as I can see this Roland Moule character is a satire on the earnest and politically committed writers who scorn Coward for producing shallow entertainment just for money, instead of making his audiences think!
ROLAND: Every play you appear in is exactly the same, superficial, frivolous and without the slightest intellectual significance. You have a great following and a strong personality, and all you do is prostitute yourself every night of your life. All you do with your talent is to wear dressing-gowns and make witty remarks when you might be really helping people, making them think!
This, as you can imagine, does not delight Garry but it provides Coward with the opportunity to reply with a prolonged broadside, telling the young man that his play is rubbish, a farrago of adolescent pseudo-intellectual poppycock, then tells him to join a repertory theatre, and play numerous parts until he understands how plays work.
To his and our surprise this blunt attack makes Roland announce that he loves Garry. He is obsessed with him. He’s his number one fan. He even offers to come to Africa with him. Garry manages to talk him down and then usher him out, spilling his gratitude at giving him new insight into his life etc.
He’s barely updated Monica (the secretary) before the front doorbell rings and it is Henry his producer and (‘rather dapper and neat’, about 40) and Morris his agent (‘a trifle younger, tall and good-looking and a little grey at the temples).
There’s a gag that on the way in they found a young man sitting on his steps, crying. Garry says it’s a young playwright and he’s just given him his opinion about his play. Henry laughs that he’s glad to see he hasn’t lost his touch.
The big news they’ve arrived with is that the leading lady in the troupe going to Africa, Nora Fenwick, has tripped and broken her leg! Now they’ll have to find a replacement though Garry takes violently against their proposed substitution of the old stager Beryl Willard.
Henry exists, leaving Morris with Garry. Garry asks him whether he’s having an affair with Joanna and explains why it’s important, namely the closeness of their little gang.
GARRY: Here we are, five people closely woven together by affection and work and intimate knowledge of each other. It’s too important a ‘set up’ to risk breaking for any outside emotional reason whatsoever.
Funny how this echoes comparable speeches by Leo and Otto in ‘Design for Living’, the sense of a tiny cohort of extremely close friends against the world. Anyway, Morris assures him he’s not having an affair with Joanna and the act ends with Garry telephoning Liz and using their much made-of code-word to assure her (Liz) everything is all round.
Act 2
Scene 1. Three days later, at midnight
A bit of preliminary business between Garry and his man Fred, who’s dressed up to go to a nightclub where his girlfriend, Doris, sings and does a turn with a skipping rope. When Garry says he knows Fred has been having relations with Doris, Fred says: ‘ Why not? She likes it, I like it and a good time’s ‘ad by all’ – a repetition of the carpe diem argument which echoes through Coward’s works and, more specifically, the idea that traditional conventional morality can simply be ignored if those involved agree and it hurts no-one else (see ‘Private Lives’ and ‘Design for Living’).
Anyway Garry is just preparing to go to bed when the front doorbell rings and it is… Joanna, who, the stage directions tell us: ‘ is an exquisitely gowned woman in the early thirties. She has a great deal of assurance and considerable charm.’
In the kind of echo/symmetry/repetition which Coward delights in, Joanna tells him she’s forgotten her latchkey which was, of course, the excuse Daphne gave for having to stay overnight in Act 1.
The comedy of this scene is that they are both artificial over-actors, triggering one among several gags at Garry’s expense:
JOANNA: I know that voice, Garry, you’ve used it in every play you’ve ever been in.
GARRY: Complete naturalness on the stage is my strong suit.
Garry has a barely concealed hostility towards her. She married Henry five years ago and swears she has done her best to stay outside their precious charmed circle. He sees that she has an ulterior motive – I thought it might be something cunning and complex but it turns out, a bit disappointingly, that she has been in love with him for seven years and just wants to seduce him. So he lets her.
But not before she delivers a little speech which is briefly earnest, and reminiscent of the serious and bitter speeches about emotional pain found in ‘Private Lives’ and ‘Design for Living’. Then it’s back to banter and a memorable exchange about which is better, the Queen’s Hall or the Albert Hall, as they move in for their first Big Kiss.
Scene 2. Garry’s flat, next morning
In a further example of Coward’s love of parallelism, Joanna emerges from the spare room wearing Garry’s pyjamas just as Daphne did in Act 1. She too encounters Miss Erikson, Fred and then Monica, who is horrified at her presence in such compromising circumstances.
Liz arrives, is taken aback by Joanna’s presence and threatens to tell Henry that she has had affairs with Morris and now Garry. Liz, again, paints the picture of a small, tight-knit group she is threatening to disrupt. Their exchange teeters on the real angry bitterness we know to be Coward’s core mode.
The doorbell rings and Liz takes advantage of it to say he knows it’s Morris, and this throws Joanna into a panic, she says she can’t face him and her temporary confusion allows Liz to extract from her a promise that she won’t see Garry again before he goes to Africa, and shoves Joanna back into the spare room where she slept.
The caller isn’t Morris but Roland Maule who says he has an appointment with Garry. Monica takes him into another room to wait for him.
The pace picks up as more people arrive. First Morris who virtually bumps into Garry coming out of his room. When Garry makes a casual reference to a lady in the spare room, Morris demands to know who it is and knocks but it is Liz who emerges, to Morris’s surprise and Garry’s astonishment.
Things become farcical. Morris melodramatically announces that he’s madly in love with Joanna (married to Henry, remember), has promised to keep it a secret, told Joanna how she feels, but she left and he hasn’t seen her for days. We are teetering on the brink of revealing that Joanna has had a fling with Garry when Liz lies that Joanna spent the night with her, well aware that she is saving Garry’s bacon and he will owe her one.
Ripe comedy when Liz calls the phone in the spare room, gets Joanna to answer it, and hands the phone to Morris, having persuaded him Joanna is at her place. He wails down the phone how much he loves her but she slams the phone down.
Garry takes this as an opportunity to complain to everyone how he is pushed from pillar to post and everyone exploits him. In the middle of which Roland Maul emerges from the other spare room, to Garry’s horror.
He’s in the middle of coping with this mad fan when the doorbell rings and Henry comes in. He, too, wants to know where Joanna is, saying she’s disappeared, she hasn’t been home all night. Garry looks panic-stricken but Liz repeats her lie that Joanna spent the night with her. They do the phone trick again, ringing through to the spare room as if it’s Liz’s flat, so that Joanna can answer and reassure Henry.
Henry doesn’t understand when Joanna says she feels like she’s in a French farce but it makes the entire audience realise that she is, and how close Coward is to straight farce, stripped of the supposed elegance and wit his fans insist on.
The doorbell rings yet again and Fred the butler announces Lady Saltburn and Miss Daphne Stillburn i.e. the young lady the play started with. Lady S is polite but Daphne is, of course, very enthusiastic. They remind him that Garry promised to give her an audition, which is what triggered her seduction of a few nights before.
Morris and Henry make their excuses and leave, though irritating Mr Maule insists on remaining. Rather inconsequentially Daphne insists on reciting a poem, ‘We Meet Not as We Parted’ by Shelley, the very same one Garry used to paint his passion and then get rid of her at the start of the play – another example of Coward’s penchant for repetition and echoing.
She’s only just finished when Joanna storms out of the spare room where she’s been stuck for most of this scene. Liz suavely tells her she can borrow her car and Daphne – to big laughs – repeats what Liz told her in that first scene, describing the appearance and name of the chauffeur.
Joanna delivers a biting accusation of Garry and mocks his loyal band of satellites, then storms out. Daphne faints.
In the production I watched his secretary, Monica, rushes to get a glass of water to revive Daphne but as she reaches it past Garry, who’s kneeling beside the fainted young lady, he grabs it and drinks it himself. This isn’t in the original script. If only there were a few more comic touches in the original… but maybe that’s always the point of comic plays, that the script leaves it open for actors and director to come up with comic business…
Act 3
It’s a week later and the act opens with Monica reading out some of his mail, generally from people he has no memory of ever meeting. After this preliminary, Monica asks Garry why he won’t go and see Liz. He says she knows Liz is in a rage, he hasn’t seen her for a week, since the Joanna incident.
As she puts on her hat to depart the dialogue becomes charged with poignancy. We are allowed to see how much he means to her and how much she relies on him. They have a moment when she could kiss him but then it passes. She knows she’d be a fool to join his list of conquests.
Left to himself for a few minutes we realise he is bored and lonely. Mrs Eriksen emerges. She is dressed to go out. Garry rather desperately asks her to stay and have a cigarette, and tell him about her life. There’s some comic banter about a friend of hers who lives in Hammersmith and is a medium. It’s not actually very funny, more sad.
The front doorbell rings and he leaps up, obviously relieved, but then dismayed when Daphne walks in in travelling outfit carrying a suitcase. She announces she’s bought a ticket and is going to accompany him to Africa. She explains that she’s realised the truth: that he is desperately lonely and needs someone to look after him, realising this when she saw that dreadful prostitute come out of the spare room. She is, of course, referring to Joanna and he is appalled.
She is in the middle of explaining that she has True Love for him when the doorbell rings again. Daphne refuses to be bundled into the spare room and so he bundles her into the office instead.
The new caller is Roland. He is worryingly demented. He announces that he too has a ticket for the voyage to Africa. Garry tries to get him to leave, but the doorbell rings a third time and Roland bolts into the spare room and locks the door.
The third caller is Joanna, who has also bought a ticket for the Africa voyage. She explains that she needs him and he needs her and they are fated to be together. Determined to do something about all this Garry phones Liz and delivers the code-word from the first scene, triggering her to pop round.
She is just explaining that she’s written a letter to Henry and Morris telling them everything when the doorbell rings again. It is Liz, come at the bidding of his code-word to save the day.
Confronting Joanna, Liz announces that she too is travelling to Africa. In her urbane way she thinks it will be most amusing for them all to be together, dining at the same table and sharing so many stories.
Moments later the doorbell rings again and Henry and Morris enter. Morris demands to know whether the contents of Joanna’s letter are true and whether Garry has been Joanna’s love. He immediately admits it. But he deflects it by saying that the person who minds the situation the most is Morris, who has also been Joanna’s lover and genuinely loves her.
Shocked, Henry asks them if it’s true. But Garry counter-attacks by telling everyone about Morris’s affair with Elvira Radcliffe for over a year.
He accuses them all of hypocrisy and then delivers the Author’s Message:
GARRY: I believe now and I always have believed that there’s far too much nonsense talked about sex. You, Morris, happen to like taking your paltry attachments seriously. You like suffering and plunging into orgies of jealousy and torturing yourself and everyone else. That’s your way of enjoying yourself. Henry’s technique is a little different, he plumps for the domestic blend. That’s why he got tired of Joanna so quickly. Anyhow, he’s beautifully suited with poor Elvira. She’s been knee-deep in pasture ever since she left Roedean! Joanna’s different again. She devotes a great deal of time to sex but not for any of the intrinsic pleasures of it, merely as a means to an end. She’s a collector. A go-getter and attractive, unscrupulous pirate. I personally am none of these things. To me the whole business is yastly over-rated. I enioy it for what it’s worth and fully intend to go on doing so for as long as anybody’s interested and when the time comes that they’re not I shall be perfectly content to settle down with an apple and a good book!
Relax. It’s only sex. It was to be another half century or more before the great British public accepted this simple philosophy without offence or horror, if it actually yet has.
Joanna angrily slaps Garry’s face and stomps out but her departure goes unnoticed because Morris let slip that they’ve booked the Forum theatre for his next production despite his expressly saying he didn’t want it. This triggers a far more important argument between Garry, Henry and Morris than all the sex and infidelity in the world.
In fact it triggers a bravura last few minutes as Garry goes into theatrical overdrive, delivering a grand histrionic speech accusing everyone of being vultures that eat his life’s blood before melodramatically sinking to the floor. Completely unimpressed, Morris and Henry depart in good humour.
MORRIS: That performance wouldn’t deceive a kitten.
You can see how Coward has dodged all the logical or psychological problems of these revelations of infidelity and betrayal with this one piece of theatrical legerdemain.
Melodramatically gasping, Garry begs Liz to fetch him a brandy to revive him but spits it out when she announces that she’s not only genuinely coming with him to Africa, but is coming back to good. She’s going to move back in. Not because she loves him especially, she’s thinking of the good of ‘the firm’. Without someone to chaperone him he goes off the rails at the slightest opportunity. He needs a minder and it’s going to be her.
At which point he remembers Daphne and Roland hidden in the adjoining rooms and tells Liz, ‘You’re not coming back to me… I’m coming back to you’ and – repeating the ending of ‘Hay Fever’ and ‘Private Lives’ – they quietly tiptoe out.
THE END
Donald Sinden production
1981 theatre production at the Vaudeville Theatre, filmed by the BBC, directed by Alan Strachan, and starring Donald Sinden as Garry, Dinah Sheridan as Liz, Gwen Watford as Monica, Elizabeth Counsell as Joanna and Julian Fellowes as Maule.
Part 1
Part 2
Books & Boots 