Reflections on Noel Coward’s plays ‘Hay Fever’, ‘Private Lives’ and ‘Easy Virtue’.
We live in an age obsessed with gender, vide the ongoing furore about trans women, the ubiquity of feminist discourse, the prominence of LGBTQ+ activism, Pride Week etc etc. It floods the zone.
Much of this has been developed in academia over the past 50 years or slow and slowly spread outwards as graduates in various branches of critical theory progress to become artists, novelists, film-makers or take control of artistic institutions and media channels.
Queer theory
One sub-set of this has been the rise of Queer Studies as a degree subject in academia. According to Google AI:
Queer Studies is an interdisciplinary academic field that examines the social construction of gender and sexuality, challenging traditional and normative categories. It explores the diverse experiences of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer individuals, as well as exploring how gender and sexuality intersect with other social categories like race, class, and ability.
This has led over the last few decades to the application of Queer Theory, with is basic attitude of ‘challenging traditional and normative categories’, to all and every conceivable work of art or literature. Even if the author, artist or the subject aren’t explicitly queer, queer theory (like feminist theory, like structuralist and post-structuralist and semiotic and deconstructionist theory, like all the other critical theories) will find a way.
Coward was gay and since most of his work is about the troubled relations between the sexes, it is relatively easy to apply Queer Theory to all and everything he wrote, deconstructing and rewriting the overt characters and plots in his plays to accommodate the notion that they ‘challenge traditional and normative categories’. Predictably enough, the Wikipedia article on Private Lives feels obliged to include queer theory interpretations of the play:
In a 2005 article, Penny Farfan analyses the play from the point of view of queer theory, arguing that ‘the subversiveness of [Coward’s] sexual identity is reflected in his work’, and that Private Lives questions ‘the conventional gender norms on which compulsory heterosexuality depends’. Positing that the leading characters’ portrayal as equals is evidence in support of this theory, Farfan instances the famous image of [Noel] Coward and [Gertrude] Lawrence as Elyot and Amanda smoking and ‘posing as mirror opposites’… John Lahr in a 1982 study of Coward’s plays writes, ‘Elyot and Amanda’s outrageousness is used to propound the aesthetics of high camp – an essentially homosexual view of the world that justifies detachment.’
So far, so obvious and inevitable, and dated. Note how Lahr’s not very interesting suggestion that the two protagonists dramatise a form of high camp is over 40 years old, and Farfan’s flagging of its ‘subversiveness’ is 20 years old. These are old ideas.
The imaginative versus the dull
For the sake of argument, though, I am positing that the chief binary in his work was not between straight and gay; that Coward was not concerned with ‘questioning conventional gender norms’. That aim, as anyone who reads my art reviews knows, is pretty much the stock, standard and utterly predictable interpretation imposed by all art curators, and countless literary critics, on any artwork which deals even remotely with gender or in any way includes women.
Instead my reading of Coward prioritises what I see as the far more central and fundamental binary in his work, which is that between the Imaginative and the Dull.
Easy Virtue
‘Easy Virtue’ may well subvert this or that gender stereotype (yawn), interrogate this or that patriarchal trope (snore) but what on my reading, what it’s really about is the confrontation between a funny, confident, imaginative woman (Larita) and the appallingly slow, dull, dense and conventional Whittaker family. The play leads up to Larita’s extraordinarily fierce and sustained denunciation of the Whittakers for their narrow-minded, blinkered bigotry and prurient hypocrisy.
Hay Fever
In the same way, in ‘Hay Fever’, the four members of the Bliss family, despite their appalling behaviour, are each dominated by their penchant for imaginative fancies, the son and daughter and husband just as much as the obvious dominating figure, the melodramatic actress Judith. And their actorish imaginativeness, their exaggeration, speaking for effect, and liability to drop into actually acting out scenes from a play, remains almost incomprehensible to their guests (apart, admittedly, for the savvy Myra Arundel, who has their number).
Private Lives
And the same in ‘Private Lives’. A structuralist critic may point to the very neat structuring and mirroring of the plot, whereby the two couples act out almost the same scenes. A queer critic may point to the subversion of heteronormative conventions, or the way the play undermines (indeed blows apart) conventional notions of married fidelity.
But to me the leading binary is between Elyot and Amanda’s imaginative playfulness and the stiff, dim, unimaginativeness of their two new spouses. In fact the two main poles of the play are not so much Elyot and his former spouse, Amanda – but Elyot, given to free-associating whimsy at the drop of a hat, and Victor, who literally doesn’t understand what he’s talking about.
Elyot has a big stand-off scene criticising Victor’s obtuseness, but it’s more effectively left to the secondary figure of Sibyl to pinpoint Victor’s weakness:
VICTOR: Making stupid rotten jokes!
SIBYL: I thought what Elyot said was funny!
VICTOR: Well, all I can think is, is that you must have a very warped sense of humour!
SIBYL: That’s better than having none at all!
VICTOR: I fail to see what humour there is in incessant trivial flippancy!
SIBYL: You couldn’t be flippant if you tried until you were blue in the face!~
VICTOR: I shouldn’t dream of trying!
SIBYL: You must be awfully sad, not to be able to see any fun in anything!
‘It must be awfully sad not to be able to see the fun in anything.’ I take this to be Coward’s central position. He, in his glory years egged on by his collaborator and conspirator Gertrude Lawrence, wanted to have fun, let his imagination run riot, in frolics and fantasies, comic songs, revues and sketches, plays which didn’t care about realism or plausibility in their desire to make an impact and have an effect.
The queer sub-texts are there, often in plain sight. And no doubt he was subverting umpteen different conventions, we know he was because contemporary critics pointed it out: it’s obvious that showing women on the stage smoking, talking smut and getting drunk (‘Fallen Angels’) did breach contemporary conventions; that showing an unnaturally close mother and son (‘The Vortex’) did make a lot of contemporary audiences feel uncomfortable, that revealing a leading character to be a cocaine addict (‘The Vortex’ again) did shock audiences.
Yet to my mind, the fundamental position which underpins these individual assaults on the conventions of his day, was that of the Imaginative against the dull and narrow and conventional and conservative and conformist. On my reading ‘Easy Virtue’, although not one of the most popular and not often revived, is the central play, because all the other subversions the critics list (gender, queer, etc) are subsumed by or encompassed by the much bigger, more fundamental issue of the eternal struggle of the clever and sophisticated and imaginative against all the forces in society which try to keep them down. As Amanda says in ‘Private Lives’:
AMANDA: It wasn’t an innocent girlish heart, it was jagged with sophistication. I’ve always been sophisticated, far too knowing.
That is the problem Coward’s lead characters face: not that they’re straight or gay, but they’re just too damned clever, imaginative and sophisticated for the dull, narrow, hidebound society which surrounds them, is scared of them, and wants to stifle them.
So my contention boils down to this: the gay issue may for all I know have been very big, very important to Coward, and doubtless the plays abound in queer sub-texts often bubbling very close to the surface. But much bigger, much more obvious, much more defining, was his repeated depiction of the triumph of the liberated, unconventional imagination and the defeat of society’s stupid, unimaginative conventions.
Books & Boots 