LEO: It should be easy, you know. The actual facts are so simple. I love you. You love me. You love Otto. I love Otto. Otto loves you. Otto loves me. There now!
GILDA: Ernest, if you only realized what was going on inside you, you’d be bitterly offended!
‘Design for Living’ is a comedy play written by Noël Coward in 1932. It concerns a trio of artistic characters, Gilda, Otto and Leo, and their complicated three-way relationship. Originally written to star Lynn Fontanne, Alfred Lunt and Coward, it was premiered on Broadway, partly because its risqué subject matter was thought unacceptable to the official censor in London. It was not until 1939 that a London production was presented.
‘Design for Living’ was a success on Broadway in 1933, but it has been revived less often than Coward’s other major comedies. Coward said:
‘It was liked and disliked, and hated and admired, but never, I think, sufficiently loved by any but its three leading actors.’
The play was adapted into a film in 1933, directed by Ernst Lubitsch, with a screenplay by Ben Hecht, and starring Fredric March, Gary Cooper, and Miriam Hopkins.
Background
In the second half the 1920s Coward became one of the world’s most famous playwrights, with a succession of popular hits ranging from the operetta Bitter Sweet (1929) and the extravaganza Cavalcade (1931), to the intimate comedies Hay Fever (1924) and Private Lives (1930). Back when he was penniless Coward had met Lunt and Fontanne Lunt on his first trip to new York and had promised he’d write a play to showcase them as an ensemble. By the early 1930s the time was right for Coward to write their star vehicle.
The play was based on the Lunts’ own marriage. They were a devoted couple but had an open relationship with ‘triangular relationships in their private lives’. Coward wrote:
‘These glib, over-articulate and amoral creatures force their lives into fantastic shapes and problems because they cannot help themselves. Impelled chiefly by the impact of their personalities each upon the other, they are like moths in a pool of light, unable to tolerate the lonely outer darkness but equally unable to share the light without colliding constantly and bruising each other’s wings…. The ending of the play is equivocal. The three of them… are left together as the curtain falls, laughing…. Some saw it as the lascivious anticipation of a sort of a carnal frolic. Others with less ribald imaginations regarded it as a meaningless and slightly inept excuse to bring the curtain down. I as author, however, prefer to think that Gilda and Otto and Leo were laughing at themselves.’
‘Design for Living’ opened in New York on 24 January 1933, at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre on Broadway. It was such a success that Coward was persuaded to relax his usual rule against appearing in any production for more than three months, and he allowed the play to run for a total of five months. So great were the crowds of fans in the street that special police had to be called in during the last week of the run.
Ménage à trois
A ménage à trois is a domestic arrangement or committed relationship consisting of three people in polyamorous romantic or sexual relations with each other, and often dwelling together.
Cast
- Gilda – ‘a good-looking woman of about thirty’, ‘a permanent spectator’
- Ernest Friedman – ‘any age between forty and fifty, rather precise in manner’
- Otto Sylvus – ‘tall and good-looking’
- Leo Mercuré – ‘thin and nervous’
- Miss Hodge
- Photographer
- Mr Birbeck
- Grace Torrence
- Helen Carver
- Henry Carver
- Matthew
Plot
Act 1. Otto’s studio in Paris, 1932
Gilda is an interior designer who lives with the painter Otto, who was previously attached to Leo, an author. Ernest Friedman arrives, an art dealer and friend of all three. He is excited about his newly acquired Matisse and wants to show it to Otto. Gilda says that Otto is in bed, ill, has had neuralgia and absolutely cannot be disturbed.
Their conversation consists of classily phrased arguments and insults. ‘Private Lives’ taught me that a good deal of Coward dialogue consists of bad-tempered arguing.
ERNEST: If, in my dotage, I become a bore to you, you won’t scruple to let me know, will you?
GILDA: Don’t be an idiot!
He wonders why she doesn’t marry Otto and she replies because he loves her too much. To be tied legally to him would kill the love. She tells him to mind his own business.
ERNEST: I cannot, for the life of me, imagine why I’m so fond of you. You have such abominable manners.
Ernest tells her that Leo is back in Paris after making a success in New York. They both find it hilarious that he’s staying at the Georges V hotel.
Gilda’s discourse is all on stilts, on a high register of shrill self-awareness occasionally tipping over into hysteria, so much so that Earnest confesses she scares him.
GILDA: I’m yelling! Can’t you hear me yelling like mad?
OTTO: What on earth are you talking about?
GILDA: A bad joke, and very difficult to explain.
For example, she delivers a little speech about how she hates her own femininity, hates being trapped in a woman’s body.
There’s nothing funny in the scenario and few comic lines or jokes. It’s just listening to a posh man being mildly abused by this wilful neurotic. Everything is overdramatised. When Ernest makes the slightest of comments on her claiming to be in love with both Otto and Leo at the same time, she flies into a wild dramatisation of the threesome.
GILDA: Look at the whole thing as a side show. People pay to see freaks. Walk up! Walk up and see the Fat Lady and the Monkey Man and the Living.
To the audience and Earnest’s surprise, Otto – not at all in bed and suffering from neuralgia as Gilda claimed – enters from the street carrying luggage. Gilda lied fluently as so many Coward characters do cf Elyot and Amanda in ‘Private Lives’. In fact Otto’s just returned from a trip to Bordeaux where he was doing a portrait for an unknown client who he insulted by telling her she was fat, and got thrown out.
When Ernest tells Otto that Leo’s back from America, Otto insists that they go and see him straightaway and Gild eggs them on so they both depart.
Then Leo stumbles in from the bedroom and we realise why Gilda lied to Ernest about Otto being in bed with neuralgia and he couldn’t go into the bedroom even to whisper hello. It’s because it wasn’t Otto in the bedroom it was Leo. When he says ‘What we did was inevitable. It’s been inevitable for years’ it makes it sound like they’ve had sex for the first time after fancying each other for years. In other words, that the ménage à trois I’ve read about in all the blurbs and summaries of the play isn’t as established as I thought.
Anyway, he’s racked with guilt about it and they spend some time discussing what it means to have betrayed their best friend etc. As usual with Coward this takes the form of an argument or a squabble. His character suffer from an over-articulacy, they are far too fluent and articulate for their own good – which almost guarantees that they pick up on stray words here and there and magnify them into huge arguments. This was Elyot and Amanda’s way in ‘Private Lives’ and the same here. Leo says something sweet and reassuring which Gilda takes to be an appalling cliché and explodes:
GILDA [viciously]: Let’s have some more! ‘Passion’s only transitory’, isn’t it? ‘Love is ever fleeting!’ ‘Time is a great healer’. Trot them all out, dear.
LEO: Don’t try to quarrel with me.
GILDA: Don’t be so wise and assured and knowing, then. It’s infuriating.
The key word here is ‘viciously’. All Coward characters flip from civilised banter to vicious recriminations and insults in a second, and then back again. It makes them all dislikeable. And it gives the plays a constant sense of walking on eggshells, anxiously waiting for the next character to explode. It’s more like living with a wife beater than attending a sophisticated ‘comedy’.
At the height of their discussion-squabble-argument, Otto walks in and discovers them. Ah. He and Ernest got to the Hotel Georges V only to discover Leo wasn’t staying there at all, so he’s come back to his apartment and found…
They come out and tell him that they slept together in his absence. With crushing inevitability they start arguing and finding articulate fluent ways to describe how miserable they are and to accuse each other. Posh people fighting in a Noel Coward play! Yes.
LEO: What right have you to be hurt and grieved, any more than Gilda and me? We’re having just as bad a time as you are, probably worse.
Much like the audience. Coward’s alleged ‘wit’ is only intermittently apparent. Much, much more present in all these plays is the bad-tempered arguing and insults.
OTTO: I’ve seen something in you that I’ve never seen before; in all these years I’ve never noticed it—I never realized that, deep down underneath your superficial charm and wit, you’re nothing but a cheap, second-rate little opportunist, ready to sacrifice anything, however sacred, to the excitement of the moment.
Not that funny. Otto is violently unpleasant and Gilda collapses in tears.
GILDA (collapsing at the table): Stop it! Stop it! How can you be so cruel! How can you say such vile things?
Otto makes clear his contempt and hatred for both of them, wishes they were dead and in hell, and storms out.
Act 2
Scene 1. Leo’s Flat in London, 18 months later
Most of Coward’s plays take place over a few days. A gap of 18 months is a big thing, more like a novel.
Leo and Gilda are now living together and he is writing plays which are being produced and are tremendously successful. The scene opens with Leo reading out the reviews of his latest play, ‘Change and Decay’, to Gilda,
A playwright nervous about his reviews writing a play about a playwright nervously reading his reviews – you could consider this delightfully meta and cleverly postmodern – or tiresomely self-obsessed and narcissistic, according to taste.
Coward does that thing which numerous modern-ish authors do, which is have a character in one of their novels or plays repeat the popular criticism of them: in this case he has Leo read out the Daily Mirror‘s criticism that his latest play is ‘thin’. This exasperates him and stings him to tell Gilda that in future he will write fat plays about fat characters. This is, of course, to ignore the substance of the criticism: Coward’s plays are thin. The basic scenarios are often quite winning, but the characterisation is generally shallow as a puddle and the dialogue is astonishingly lacking in the wit and humour I have for decades associated with Coward until I actually came to read and watch his plays, and be rather disappointed. Instead of genuine wit or comedy you have exchanges like this.
GILDA: Anyhow, you can’t expect a paper like the Times to be really interested in your petty little excursions in the theatre. After all, it is the organ of the nation.
LEO: That sounds vaguely pornographic to me.
Schoolboy humour. Here’s another example of Coward’s shimmering wit, Gilda pretending to be a brainless newspaper interviewer:
Gilda [conversationally]: Tell me, Mr Mercure, what do you think of the modern girl?
LEO: [politely]: A silly bitch.
Not scintillating repartee, is it?
A phone call from some aristocratic inviting them to dinner prompts Leo to say these social situations are awkward when they’re obviously a couple but not married. So he proposes to her but she sagely turns him down and even says it would be against her moral code.
Presumably this kind of suave, sophisticated exchange was designed to shock and outrage the older, Edwardian generation with their Victorian morals.
The phone rings incessantly, a symptom of the modern world. Leo calls their maid or servant, Miss Hodge, in and tells her to answer the phone for him. Next time the phone rings working class Miss Hodge answers the phone with comic ineptness. The working classes, eh, ha ha ha.
What’s obvious is how bored they are. Gilda is bored to death.
GILDA: Perhaps you’re wise about our marrying; perhaps it would be a good thing. I’m developing into one of those tedious unoccupied women, who batten on men and spoil everything for them. I’m spoiling the excitement of your success for you now by being tiresome and gloomy.
Watching posh bored people torment each other, throwing ‘cheap gibes’ at each other, that’s entertainment. ‘Tiresome’ – that’s the key word. And Leo is as irritated and frustrated.
LEO: This looks like a row but it hasn’t even the virtue of being a new row. We’ve had it before several times, and just lately more than ever.
A journalist, Mr Birbeck, and press photographer from the Evening Standard arrive to do a feature on him. After arguing with Gilda Leo is in a bad mood and gives sharp replies to all the questions. Here is an example of his authorly wit:
MR BIRBECK: Do you believe the talkies will kill the theatre?
LEO: No. I think they’ll kill the talkies.
MR BIRBECK (laughing): That’s very good, that is! It really is.
It isn’t though, is it? It’s not in the slightest bit funny. It’s flippant and cynical and sounds like it ought to be a joke, but it isn’t. Leo gives up answering questions and tells him he’s tired and doesn’t he find asking all these stupid questions ‘grotesque?’ and tells him to come back dome other time when he’s less… tired.
Nonetheless he lets the photographer take some snaps and the scene ends with Mr Birbeck tentatively asking whether Leo could, just maybe, possibly, give them a teeny weeny smile? This is one of the few things I’ve found funny so far, these poor professionals trying to do their job in the face of Leo’s self-important moodiness.
Scene 2. Leo’s London flat, a few days later
A few days later Leo is away. After some comic business with the working class character, the maid Miss Hodge (Gilda asks if she minds that she and Leo are not married; Miss Hodge says she doesn’t mind, having herself been twice married and not thinking much of the institution) departs and Otto turns up.
He too is now successful, as an artist. He’s just back from staging an exhibition in New York.
There’s a joke, a joke with a punchline, such a rarity in Coward it’s worth recording.
OTTO: This seems a very nice flat.
GILDA: It is. You can see right across to the other side of the square on a clear day.
Ooh, immediately followed by another one. Otto says he bumped into a woman just leaving. Gilda explains that that was the maid, Mrs Hodge.
GILDA: That was Miss Hodge. She’s had two husbands.
OTTO: I once met a woman who’d had four husbands.
And a little later, after Otto explains that he went away for a while, on a Norwegian freighter:
OTTO: I can say, ‘How do you do?’ in Norwegian.
GILDA: We must get to know some Norwegian people immediately, so that you can say ‘How do you do? to them.—
Noel’s on fire! Maybe you can see what I mean when I say that this kind of thing isn’t really funny in itself. These aren’t really jokes, or barely. What makes them funny (if it does) is how they exemplify the attitude of these posh, superior, self-absorbed arty types. It’s so exactly the kind of flippant throwaway remark that a posh character in a Coward play ought to say.
Anyway, she asks why he’s avoided them for so frightfully long and he says yes, it has been frightfully long, hasn’t it. Did you miss me, darling etc.
Remember I commented on a playwright having a character in his latest play commenting on newspaper reviews of the character’s previous plays which sound very like the reviews and criticism Coward got for his plays? Happens again here. Otto asks what Gilda thinks of Leo’s latest play, prompting quite a serious reply:
GILDA: Three scenes are first rate, especially the last act. The beginning of the second act drags a bit, and most of the first act’s too facile—you know what I mean—he flips along with easy swift dialogue, but doesn’t go deep enough. It’s all very well played.
‘Doesn’t go deep enough’. Well, there’s no point criticising Coward for what he isn’t. No Ibsen or Strindberg, he. He concocted effective and extremely popular entertainments over a career spanning decades. An awesome achievement.
Back in this play, Otto and Gilda have a picnic dinner together: cold ham, salad, cold rice pudding, and slowly revive their friendship turning back into love. Or whatever it is they have. Maybe just opportunity.
Otto jokes about what would happen if they ended up fighting over Gilda, reminiscent of the fight scene between Elyot and Victor which fizzles out in ‘Private Lives’.
The conversation is frequently difficult to distinguish from an argument or row.
OTTO: Shut up! Don’t talk like that…
GILDA [breaking down]: Don’t—don’t laugh at me.
Author’s message
Remember how I’ve pointed out that the fundamental dichotomy in Coward isn’t between the straight and the gay, it’s between what my son calls ‘the normies’ – the normal, everyday people with their conventional beliefs and lives and morality and behaviour – and the Coward characters who proclaim that they are special, different, exceptional, Well, the same sentiment is expressed here in a pat little speech by Otto. For when Gilda has a moment of ‘normality’ and says that their falling in love is sordid and gross, Otto suavely replies that this is only so if measured by other people’s standards. I might as well give the whole speech, as it amounts to a manifesto of sorts.
GILDA: Why should we flatter ourselves that we’re so tremendously different?
OTTO: Flattery doesn’t enter into it. We are different. Our lives are diametrically opposed to ordinary social conventions; and it’s no use grabbing at those conventions to hold us up when we find we’re in deep water. We’ve jilted them and eliminated them, and we’ve got to find our own solutions for our own peculiar moral problems.
GILDA: Very glib, very glib indeed, and very plausible.
OTTO: It’s true. There’s no sense in stamping about and saying how degrading it all is. Of course it’s degrading; according to a certain code, the whole situation’s degrading and always has been. The Methodists wouldn’t approve of us, and the Catholics wouldn’t either; and the Evangelists and the Episcopalians and the Anglicans and the Christian Scientists—I don’t suppose even the Polynesian Islanders would think very highly of us, but they wouldn’t mind quite so much, being so far away. They could all club together—the whole lot of them—and say with perfect truth, according to their lights, that we were loose-living, irreligious, unmoral degenerates, couldn’t they?
GILDA [meekly]: Yes, Otto, I expect so.
OTTO: But the whole point is, it’s none of their business. We’re not doing any harm to anyone else. We’re not peppering the world with illegitimate children. The only people we could possibly mess up are ourselves, and that’s our lookout. It’s no use you trying to decide which you love best, Leo or me, because you don’t know! At the moment, it’s me, because you’ve been living with Leo for a long time and I’ve been away. A gay, ironic chance threw the three of us together and tied our lives into a tight knot at the outset. To deny it would be ridiculous, and to unravel it impossible. Therefore, the only thing left is to enjoy it thoroughly, every rich moment of it, every thrilling second.
This is no different from the ancient trope of carpe diem, Latin for ‘seize the day’, which is a literary phrase for the pretty obvious idea that you should enjoy life while you can. (The original Latin phrase comes from Horace’s Odes, which I’ve reviewed for this blog.)
The banter goes on for page after page until they realise they need to go to bed together. They embrace passionately. So it’s partner swapping again, as in ‘Private Lives’.
Scene 3. The same, the next morning
10.30 the next morning. Otto is still asleep when Ernest calls on Gilda. He asks to see Leo but Gilda lies, saying he’s not very well and can’t be disturbed. In reality, as we know, Leo is away at a weekend house party and it’s Otto asleep in the next room. This is quite funny because it mirrors the situation in the first scene, where Ernest arrived wanting to see Otto and Gilda lied, saying he was in bed with neuralgia when it was, of course, Leo who she’d illicitly slept with, who was in the bedroom.
This explains why Gilda is, once again, as in the first scene, slightly hysterical. And in this hysteria liable to sound off and make sweeping statements. For a start she says humanity is a great disappointment, has barely risen above the primeval slime. But this leads onto a more revealing statement.
GILDA: The human race is a let-down, Ernest; a bad, bad let-down! I’m disgusted with it. It thinks it’s progressed but it hasn’t; it thinks it’s risen above the primeval slime but it hasn’t—it’s still wallowing in it! It’s still clinging to us, clinging to our hair and our eyes and our souls. We’ve invented a few small things that make noises, but we haven’t invented one big thing that creates quiet, endless peaceful quiet—something to pull over us like a gigantic eiderdown; something to deaden the sound of our emotional yellings and screechings and suffocate our psychological confusions—
Coward hated critical analysis of his plays, so I’m going to do something he would have loathed and subject this little speech to tuppeny-ha’penny analyses according to several classical schools of literary criticism.
A Marxist interpretation
Most of Coward’s characters come from the parasite rentier class which doesn’t work for a living. Thus, lacking the purpose given to existence by the need to work, they are often bored to death, as Gilda is. In this particular play, the two male leads do in fact work for a living, after a fashion, as a playwright and an artist.
But the real point is that none of them are aligned with the forces of History, specifically the Proletariat which is, in late capitalism, the embodiment of the spirit of History and which must, as Marx proved with his scientific socialism, soon overthrow the exploitative capitalist system and its imperial extensions, and usher in the triumph of the working class.
So on the Marxist view of his day, it is only by throwing in their lot with people with a cause, committed to the liberation of humanity, that Coward’s characters can discover meaning and purpose to life and stop indulging in their squalid, petty bourgeois intrigues.
Thus Gilda’s wish for ‘something to pull over us like a gigantic eiderdown; something to deaden the sound of our emotional yellings and screechings and suffocate our psychological confusions—’ is the cry of the rootless, aimless, cosmopolitan bourgeoisie adrift from the unstoppable march of History, and for which there is only one cure or solution. Align with the class of the future, the proletariat. See the plays of Jean-Paul Sartre which dramatise just this issue.
A Freudian interpretation
Freud’s first, pre-war model of the mind, developed between about 1895 and 1918, attributed the central driving force of the unconscious to Sex, broadly speaking the Darwinian drive of the human organism to reproduce which, more narrowly, creates erotic drives which had to be channelled ‘correctly’ in order to be socially acceptable. Freud was among the first to discover how easily these drives get blocked and misdirected in childhood and adolescence to turn into the florid array of sexual ‘perversions’, or be stifled and emerge was a wide variety of neurotic and obsessive symptoms, which his patients described when they presented to him.
However, the colossal slaughter and destruction of the First World War persuaded him that his theory was inadequate. Nothing about sex could explain the hecatombs of corpses and entire empires brought to their knees.
Thus in the 1920s he developed his second model of the mind and this time posited that alongside the positive Life Force or Eros, of which reproduction and sex are merely subsets, an equal and opposite drive in all humans, indeed (he speculates) in all organisms, which he called the Death Drive or Thanatos: the widespread wish that the whole wretched business of life, all the anxieties and worries and responsibilities, not to mention illnesses and accidents, would all cease once and for all.
Thus Gilda’s wish for ‘something to pull over us like a gigantic eiderdown; something to deaden the sound of our emotional yellings and screechings and suffocate our psychological confusions’ is a textbook expression of the deep wish, a key component of all human minds – sometimes buried deep, sometimes (as here) freely acknowledged – for the whole stressful business just to end.
Anyway, this big speech is all preparatory to Gilda telling Ernest she is leaving. Leaving Leo and Otto. Running away. She feels stifled. She wants to be free. She wants to be her ‘unadulterated self’. She’s going to run away, stay in a hotel, go to Paris, no, Berlin. Explaining all this makes her feel very tender towards Ernest and she throws her arms round his neck. She leaves two letters on the desk and then leaves with Ernest.
The phone rings, Miss Hodge answers it and this prompts Otto to slouch out of his bedroom in his pyjamas and dressing gown. Miss Hodge lets him know she disapproves, and he tells her to go away and mind her own business.
Leo sneaks in through the front door, and for a moment mistakes the back of the head on the sofa and the cigarette smoke rising to be Gilda and shouts Hi honey, I’m home. So is appalled when it’s Otto who turns to greet him.
This turns into a row, with Leo telling him how vile he is, just as Otto told him how vile he was in the earlier scene. As with so much Coward, this is studiedly symmetrical and patterned.
OTTO: I said all that to you in Paris. Do you remember? I thought it was true then, just as you think it’s true now.
They have a long conversation about how they’re doomed to repeat the same situation (infidelity with Gilda). Leo says he needs to be tolerant which Otto, understandably, finds hard.
Then they notice the letters, reading them and concluding that Gilda has escaped. So, rather pathetically, they decide to get completely pissed on brandy and then sherry. Difficult for actors portraying steady descent into quite wild and then tearful drunkenness. Otto delivers a semi-drunken rant:
OTTO (with sudden fury): So many words! That’s what’s wrong with us! So many words—too many words, masses and masses of words, spewed about until we’re choked with them. We’ve argued and probed and dragged our entrails out in front of one another for years! We’ve explained away the sea and the stars and life and death and our own peace of mind! I’m sick of this endless game of three-handed, spiritual ping-pong—this battling of our little egos in one another’s faces! Sick to death of it! Gilda’s made a supreme gesture and got out. Good luck to her, I say!
Apart from the detail of it being a trio, the basic idea of being sick to death of choking themselves with words and dragging their entrails out, this could come from one of Elyot or Amanda’s rants in ‘Private Lives’.
Coward drags out this scene to inordinate length with Leo and Otto arguing at length, though it’s dressed up with fancy ideas, for example:
LEO: Science is our only hope, the only hope for humanity! We’ve wallowed in false mysticism for centuries; we’ve fought and suffered and died for foolish beliefs, which science has proved to be as ephemeral as smoke. Now is the moment to open our eyes fearlessly and look at the truth!
Which might mean something in a more serious play but, spoken by one of Coward’s superficial mannequins, comes over as flippant and inconsequential as everything else they say. For example, increasingly fanciful digressions, for example about the absurdity of the words ‘macaroni’ and ‘wimple’. Eventually they get so drunk that they embrace, sobbing helplessly.
So the act ends with two old friends having got hopelessly drunk and feeling hopelessly lonely and sad. Not immediately comic, in fact quite sad for us…
Act 3
Scene 1. Ernest’s apartment in New York, two years later
Like the gap of 18 months before Acts 1 and 2, two whole years is another long period of time to jump. So we find ourselves in Ernest’s New York apartment. Gilda has married Ernest and become a commercially successful designer. Ernest is away and, on this fine summer’s evening, Gilda is giving a reception for some important clients, namely: Henry and Helen Carver, ‘a comparatively young married couple, wealthy and well dressed’, and Grace Torrence, ‘slightly older, a typical Europeanized New York matron’.
Gilda has grown up. She is elaborately and beautifully gowned. Her manner has changed a good deal. She is much more still and sure than before. A certain amount of vitality has gone from her, but, in its place, there is an aloof poise quite in keeping with her dress and surroundings.
Gilda takes Grace off to show her something and Henry and Helen have an extended argument about the merit of interior decorators, Henry thinking it’s all a racket, Helen defending her. Couples fiercely arguing, it’s Coward’s basic situation.
Doorbell rings and Henry lets in… Otto and Leo, both in fine fantastical moods. They come over as very camp i.e. over self-consciously mocking everything everyone says.
OTTO: There’s something strangely and deeply moving about young love, Mr. and Mrs. Carver.
LEO: Youth at the helm.
OTTO: Guiding the little fragile barque of happiness down the river of life. Unthinking, unknowing, unaware of the perils that lie in wait for you, the sudden tempests, the sharp jagged rocks beneath the surface. Are you never afraid?
HENRY I don’t see anything to be afraid of.
LEO (fondly): Foolish headstrong boy.
This is deliberately aggressively offensive but cast in such suave politeness as to be hard to talk back to. Part of the purpose of camp which is a power play.
Otto and Leo’s fast-talking sophisticated banter startles and puzzles Henry and Helen. This is also a classic scenario – clever, fast-talking smartarses bewildering the normies. Which conceals, not very well, their anger. They are cattily, bitchily angry with Gilda and their anger quickly comes out, constantly teetering on the brink of… yet another argument, a fight, a flaring row. The basic Coward content.
Gilda responds to their aggressive flippancy with bitterness of their own and barely controlled fury. On a general point, lots of twentieth century drama seems to be about people behaving badly on stage. Drunken angry bitterness being the speciality of, for example, Tennessee Williams a generation later.
Their intense, recriminatory conversation drives Helen, Henry and Grace away. Grace recognises boorish behaviour when she sees it. Gilda insists Leo and Otto leave as well but secretly gives them a key and tells them to come back.
After they’ve all gone she compulsively finished one of the other’s drink, with tears in her eyes.
Scene 2. The same, the next morning
Ernest returns the next morning and is greeted by his Black servant who makes him a coffee, he puts down his luggage etc and then… Otto and Leo come down the stairs wearing his pyjamas and dressing gowns.
He is completely flabbergasted and triggers their ‘brazen impertinence’ i.e. more camp flippancy. They tell him they gatecrashed Gilda’s little party the night before, she gave them a key, but when they came back she had gone.
They call him ludicrous for claiming that Gilda is his wife, but they dismiss this as nonsense, claiming she belongs to them just as much as to him (Ernest).
Cue Gilda walking in and explaining that she spent the night at a hotel. Ernest explodes in anger but once again, as in the previous scene, it’s a case of the two tricksters, jokers, sparky and flippant and imaginative people, against the ‘normie’, Ernest, who can’t keep up with their smooth repartee. Just as straight-laced Victor couldn’t keep up with Elyot’s smart repartee in ‘Private Lives’. So:
ERNEST: I think your arrogance is insufferable. I don’t know what to say. I don’t know what to do. I’m very, very angry.
Of course he doesn’t know what to do. He’s the normie in a play about tricksters.
Now it turns out that Gilda has realised she is bored with her life with Ernest and so she’s going to leave him. She reveals that being her wife has no value to her, it’s been very convenient and comfortable but now she realises she has to go back to the tricksters.
Ernest tries to argue that Gilda knows too much to be taken back by them but she denies it. He thinks she’s gone mad but she declares they are all of a piece, they all share the same ‘difference’ from normal society which I commented on earlier.
GILDA: It’s silly to go on saying to yourself that I’m different from Otto. and Leo just because you want to believe it. I’m not different from them. We’re all of a piece, the three of us. Those early years made us so. From now on we shall have to live and die our own way. No one else’s way is any good, we don’t fit.
‘We don’t fit’, cry of the alienated teenager for at least the last 70 years. And more manifesto:
ERNEST: Your values are false and distorted.
GILDA: Only from your point of view.
ERNEST: From the point of view of anyone who has the slightest sense of decency.
LEO: We have our own decencies. We have our own ethics. Our lives are a different shape from yours. Wave us good-bye, Little Ernest, we’re together again.
Ernest accuses them of wallowing in a ‘disgusting three-sided erotic hotch-potch’. But the more angry he gets – the more he invokes conventional morality – the more flippantly amused the naughty threesome become and, as Ernest stomps to the apartment door, leaves and slams it shut, the threesome collapse into hilarious laughter.
Thoughts
I’ve made my main comments: not many comic lines; thin characters; the whole effect achieved almost entirely by the posh self-centred self-satisfied smug superiority of the characters, which the audience is invited to alternately identify with and/or laugh at.
What impresses, maybe, is the professionalism with which the initial premise or scenario is worked through, with clever structural echoes and parallelism. But it gets pretty monotonous at moments, since the audience quickly develops a strong idea of what’s going to happen.
Is it even a real ménage à trois?
Short answer, no. It isn’t. Our three heroes do not live in a relaxed happy ménage, so they? The opposite. What really happens is Gilda sleeps around, betraying first Leo, then Otto and then, a year or so later, her husband Ernest. It is not a ménage at all but the story of a serial adulteress or promiscuous woman. The idea that the three of them can somehow happily co-exist only really comes at the end, in the Betraying Ernest scene.
But again, as with The Vortex, there’s little point judging the scenario by our own modern standards: in its day, the play’s timid hints at a genuine ménage were enough to cause shock and scandal among the bourgeois newspapers, critics and staid theatre goers.
Mocking the provinces
I wonder how long the English upper classes have been mocking the provinces. Maybe since the Norman Conquest. One of Coward’s other plays mocks Newcastle, and there’s a slight dig here.
GILDA: Have you been married much, then?
MISS HODGE: Twice, all told.
GILDA: Where are your husbands now?
MISS HODGE: One’s dead, and the other’s in Newcastle.
GILDA (smiling): Oh.
More sustained metropolitan snobbery is dispensed by Otto in Act 2.
OTTO [drawing up a chair]: What delicious-looking ham! Where did you get it?
GILDA: I have it specially sent from Scotland.
OTTO: Why Scotland?
GILDA: It lives there when it’s alive.
OTTO: A bonny country, Scotland, if all I’ve heard is correct, what with the banshees wailing and the four-leaved shamrock.
GILDA: That’s Ireland, dear.
OTTO: Never mind. The same wistful dampness distinguishes them both.
A post-colonial interpretation
Hilarious (that’s sarcasm). But if you were an Irish nationalist, an Indian nationalist, any educated inhabitant of one of Britain’s 57 colonies, dominions, territories, or protectorates, you might have read this kind of thing as precisely the kind of ignorant, self-centred, privileged, smug indifference that you had to shoot your way through in order to gain independence.
Books & Boots 