WILLY: The car’s downstairs.
FRED: How very thoughtful of you not to bring it up.
JANE (writing a note to Maurice): ‘C’est amusant, n’est-ce pas’ – but it isn’t, particularly.
JULIA: It’s all such ridiculous nonsense.
Twitter-length executive summary
Two rich married women get roaring drunk while planning adultery with the same French lover.
Slightly longer summary
Julia and Fred Sterroll and Willy and Jane Banbury are happily married and the best of friends, until a postcard arrives with news of the imminent arrival of a handsome Frenchman who both women had affairs with years earlier – which throws the two wives into a tizzy of expectation.
Or:
Two married women, living a life of passionless boredom, whip themselves into a state of sexual excitement over the return of a former lover. In the play’s celebrated central act they get riotously tipsy as they await the nocturnal arrival of the Gallic Romeo. But, having stoked up the sexual fires, Coward banks them down again in the finely symmetrical final act as each woman falsely believes the other has had a secret assignation with the Gallic intruder.
Or:
Jane and Julia are happily married to pleasant if boring husbands when a message arrives from a former flame of both of them, sending their staid lives into a tizzy. It appears a man with whom they’d each had a passionate tryst in the past is planning a visit, which sets them both questioning whether they can – or want to – withstand his charms.
While the husbands are off playing golf, the ladies plot and plan over copious glasses of champagne (with some help from their worldly housekeeper, Saunders) while awaiting the arrival of their former lover.
A more woke/progressive summary
‘Fallen Angels’ is a biting and hilarious comedy about the rivalry between two bored married women as they await the arrival of their exotic former lover. Dramatising female sexual desire and frustration, the play’s first performances in 1925 outraged the critics, who claimed to find it shocking and obscene. But rather than insulting British womanhood (as its scandalised opponents asserted) Coward’s sharp, entertaining script incisively draws attention to male sexual hypocrisy, while probing the vacuous lives of the play’s privileged protagonists.
Plot summary
Act 1
We are in the living room of Julia and Fred, happily married for five years. We are introduced to Julia and Fred’s newly employed maid, Jasmine who, however, they agree to call Saunders. Saunders is disconcertingly well educated e.g. knows more about golf than Fred, can play the piano better than Julia, can speak French better than Jane.
Fred is packing his stuff ready to go off for a golf weekend with Willy. Willy arrives to collect him and they depart. After being humiliated by Saunders’ superior piano playing, Julia is forced to answer the door herself and let her friend Jane in.
(The trope of the clever servant who knows more than and outsmarts his masters and mistresses is a very ancient one, that goes back through Restoration comedy and Shakespeare, to ancient Rome – where the role was called the servus callidus or clever slave – and, before that, back to ancient Greek comedy, and flourished as a stock character in comedy throughout the 18th and 19th centuries. What’s amazing is that the notion of Saunders being smarter than her employers still gets a laugh two and a half thousand years later. Human nature, human relations, and the comedy of human relations, doesn’t appear to change much.)
Jane bursts in with appalling news: Maurice, a lovely Frenchman they both had a passion for in the days before they were married, has sent a postcard saying he’s coming to London, arriving any moment. This triggers panic mixed with nostalgia and giggling memories of their naughtiness. They agonise a bit, not much, about what to do to avoid him: should they leave London, leave the country?
Julia in fact quickly gets dressed and packs a small suitcase to run away but as the two women approach the apartment door to exit, the bell rings and they freeze! Dramatic end of act 1!!
Act 2
I was expecting the dashing Frenchman to stride in and create havoc. Instead there’s a powerful sense of anti-climax because Act 2 opens with the two women lounging around on sofas, bored, and asking Saunders to fix them drinks. What happened? Who rang the doorbell so dramatically?
A few minutes into the act the ladies reveal that the fateful ring at the bell was… the plumber! And then a friend, Lady Coswick, arrived for a visit – in other words, they’ve experienced a series of disappointments which have only built up the latent frustration we are about to witness…
This act consists of 15 minutes of watching two posh 1920s ladies not only getting drunk but showing theatrical symptoms of sexual arousal and frustration.
JANE: You know what we’re doing, don’t you? We’re working ourselves up. We have been all day. Oh, I should like to scream and scream and scream and roll around on the floor.
Jane goes on to say, with comic bathos, that it must be… lack of food getting her so worked up. Yes. That’s what it is. Not lack of ****. Moments later Saunders calls them for dinner which consists of oysters, the famous aphrodisiac, and as they continue troughing, Jane declares:
JANE: Oh I adore this little sausage with my egg.
Coward was doing as much as the censor allowed to portray two married women on heat. Surely it’s this, not the pair’s drunkenness, which outraged the savvier moral critics.
As they get really plastered the two women’s sexual rivalry comes out (as so often with Coward characters) in a sustained and furious argument, and Act 2 ends with Jane storming out, claiming that she is going ‘straight to Maurice’, while Julia collapses on her sofa in hysterics.
Act 3
Next morning, Julia is painfully hungover, as Saunders serves her a hard-boiled egg.
Willy (Jane’s husband) arrives unexpectedly and tells Julia he had an argument with Fred (as Coward characters so often do) and so abandoned the golfing weekend early, leaving Fred at the hotel at Chichester. Willy asks where Jane is and Julia is shocked to learn she isn’t at Willy’s house, immediately leaping to the conclusion that she really did storm off and spend the night with the legendary Maurice. She’s so furious at her rival stealing a march on her that she angrily tells Willy everything. Bluff old Willy can’t believe it.
JULIA: She’s gone off with a man.
WILLY: What?
JULIA: A Frenchman.
WILLY: Nonsense. She can’t have. You’re unhinged.
JULIA: I’m perfectly hinged…
That’s as good as the jokes and the punchlines get i.e. weak. It’s the basic situation and the permission it gives the actors to go way over the top which provides most of the entertainment. Compare the flaring shouting matches in ‘Hay Fever’ or ‘Private Lives’ or ‘Design for Living’. I don’t think characters in Oscar Wilde‘s plays shout because they don’t need to, they dispense withering barbs and witty ripostes. Whereas most of the characters in the three Coward plays I’ve read so far quite rapidly resort to insensate, furious shouting and abuse, and this is supposed to be funny.
Anyway, Julia yells at Willy that he must leave and that she’s coming with him in order to track down Jane and they exit leaving the stage empty.
A few moments later the phone rings and Saunders the servant enters to answer it. It is ‘Maurice’, the man Julia and Jane has spilled so many furious words waiting for who has, ironically, rung when neither of them are around. Farce.
Fred (Julia’s husband) unexpectedly arrives and moments later Jane (Willy’s wife) arrives, in obvious evening dress. When Fred asks where his wife has gone, the maid says she just left with a man (not knowing Willy’s name) and Jane leaps to the conclusion that she’s left with Maurice. And, exactly as Julia told Fred that his wife, Jane, had left him, now Jane tells Fred that his wife, Julia, has run off, with a Frenchman, and abandoned him.
Jane explains that both Julia and Jane and had an affair with the same man and Fred reacts exactly as Willy did i.e. accusing Jane of telling lies and being a depraved monster. He is just dragging her to the door so they can go and find Julia and this Maurice fellow when they bump into Julia and Fred coming the other way i.e. the two women confront each other.
At which point they both quickly clarify that neither of them have been off with Maurice. When their husbands confront them with what they’ve said, the women realise that in their anger they’ve given the game away and so gotten each other in trouble. Now they close ranks and rack their brains for some way to talk themselves out of it and… have the inspiration to declare it was all a joke. They were making it up. it was a practical joke ha ha ha. They are in the middle of trying to sell this implausible story to their sceptical husbands when…
Saunders announces a visitor and the legendary Maurice sweeps in!
He straightaway kisses both ladies but the husbands are understandably disgruntled. Julia and Jane quickly explain the situation to Maurice – i.e. only 60 seconds earlier they told both their husbands that they’d had affairs with him and ‘Oh my God, what are they going to do!?’
Thinking quickly on his feet, Maurice comes up with a solution and turns to the husbands. He has come up with a solution which suits the limited mentality of these two boringly conventional men, and now delivers a thumpingly clean and impeccable moral point. Maybe, he says with a great flourish of moral concern, maybe Englishmen take their wives a little too much for granted; maybe they should pay more attention to their wives!
And he goes on to concoct the (truly ridiculous) idea that he and the girls are simply old friends and concocted the story of them having had affairs with him back in the day as a joke, a contrivance, a scheme to shock the husbands out of their complacency.
Even more ridiculous than this hastily cobbled-together excuse, is the way the two dim husbands believe him, and promptly apologise to their wives, promising to love them better in future. I know it’s a farce, but the men are portrayed as unbelievably dim. This is only a fraction above the tradition of Whitehall farces.
At which point Maurice makes the genuine revelation, which takes everyone by surprise, that he’s come to stay in London and has rented the flat directly above Julia and Fred’s for a year! Jane collapses in hysterical laughter.
Maurice goes on explain that the flat needs furnishing and decorating and asks the girls if they will come and view it for him. And so, before the husbands can stop them, Maurice sweeps the two glamorous wives out the front door and away to his place…
Very dim Fred is just saying how much he likes this French chappy to Willy’s scornful scepticism, when they both hear a piano playing from the flat above. Going out onto the balcony they listen and (in the TV production I watched) we cut to Maurice sitting at a piano, playing beautifully and singing the same sentimental love song which captured the girls’ hearts all those years ago, while they sit either side of him, mooning and spooning and swooning on his shoulder. Boom boom.
Thoughts about comedy
As I noted in my notes on ‘The Vortex’ and ‘Hay Fever’, there is a general tone of amusement and some of the characters’ behaviour in those plays is actively funny (like Judith Bliss’s taking every opportunity to play a Grand Scene in ‘Hay Fever’) but one of the most striking things about Coward’s texts is the paucity of actual jokes. There are many lines which gesture towards being jokes, which sound like jokes, with punchlines and everything, but which aren’t actually funny.
At the start of Act 2 Julia and Jane ask Saunders to make them strong cocktails, which triggers her (Saunders) to give a little speech:
SAUNDERS: If you’ll allow me to say so Madam, several drinks never did any harm, it’s only the first drink which is dangerous; after that the damage is done.
It’s sort of amusing but very slight, not laugh-out-loud funny unless you have a very low threshold for humour. Its sententious quality makes me expect an Oscar Wilde type of unexpected reversal, a genuinely clever paradox. But Coward rarely rises to that level. Something similar with the unhinged/hinged line I quoted earlier. Fairly good. Sort of funny. Not a real gutbuster, though.
These kind of ‘jokes’ are severely rationed with only about three gags per play.
The critics
Feminist
Earnest modern critics have to say that it’s a penetrating study of female sexuality and desire, that the play interrogates gender roles in a patriarchal society, and generally trot out all the other clichés of progressive critical theory, because it’s what they’re paid to teach and write.
To the unprejudiced eye it could easily be read as the exact opposite: as a comically exaggerated caricature of two middle-aged sex-starved matrons who display a shopping list of caricatured behaviour (champagne, oysters), panting and flushing with arousal, then over-dressing and overdoing their make-up in a pathetic attempt to outdo each other in attractiveness to a man; generally acting out every sexist stereotype. The opposite of feminism.
Take your pick which interpretation you prefer.
The continental cliché
If anything, the entire thing conforms to and shouts to the rooftops another hoary old stereotype, which is that English men are jolly decent but extremely boring chaps, whereas Continental men, especially French men, have a ‘je ne sais quoi’ which dull practical golf-playing Englishmen will never have. That foreign men are sexy in a way few British men can match. This perception was still as widely held in the 1970s of my boyhood as in the 1920s when the play was written.
Contextual
Taking a more historical approach, we read that:
Fallen Angels was produced the stage at a time when alcoholism was barely mentioned onstage. Therefore its portrayal of two middle class ladies getting plastered (the second half of the play is entirely taken up with an alcoholic duologue between the two women) was decried as ‘degenerate’, ‘vile’, ‘obscene’, ‘shocking’.
As I mentioned, I would have thought it wasn’t so much the drinking as the two women being so evidently aroused that would have caused scandal. But maybe that only comes over in the post-permissive 1970s production I watched and was toned down to invisibility in the original productions.
Contemporary critics
The Wikipedia article quotes a variety of contemporary theatre reviews of which I thought The Observer one was most apt, both for this and the other Coward plays I’ve read and watched: the Observer critic thought it was ‘neither a great nor a good play’ on account of its overt theatricality and lack of depth, but nonetheless declared himself ‘vastly amuse[d]’ by it. Coward in a nutshell.
The Lord Chamberlain’s view
The Lord Chamberlain was the official censor for plays on the British stage. Apparently one of his staff thought the sight of two married women getting drunk on stage was immoral so argued that the play shouldn’t be given a licence to be performed. The Lord Chamberlain sagely overruled him, stating: ‘I take the view that the whole thing is so much unreal farcical comedy, that subject to a few modifications in the dialogue it can pass.’
‘Unreal farcical comedy’ is as good a summary as any.
1974 TV production
I’m watching the best modern Coward productions I can find on YouTube. For this I watched the 1974 TV dramatisation starring Joan Collins as Jane (married to Willy) and Susannah York as Julia (married to Fred) and the impossibly dashing Sacha Distel as Maurice.
Related links
- Fallen Angels Wikipedia article
- Audience guide by the Shakespeare Theatre of New Jersey (PDF)
- Notes on a production at Aldeburgh
- Noel Coward bibliography
Books & Boots 