Coward the Playwright by John Lahr (review)

Book Reviews JOHN LAHR. Coward the Playwright. London: Methuen 1982. Pp. x, 179, illustrated.£3.95 (PB). Political dogmatism has always been one ofJohnLahr's most marketable specialties as a critic. Seldom has his engagement seemed as mechanical- and as supererogatory- as in his book on Noel Coward's plays. It is a shame, too, because parts of Coward the Playwright indicate a receptivity to Coward's work far too valuable to be crowded off center by a "social conscience," the pertinence of which is never demonstrated. Lahr's organization of his topic is itself most promising. His fine introduction, entitled "Impresario of Himself," offers in a mere eight-and-a-half pages one of the best "establishing shots" of Coward's art that I have seen: Coward the self-dramatizing star, Coward the virtuoso craftsman, Coward the actor fathering Coward the writer - all cogently linked. Each of the five succeeding chapters unwinds a separate thematic thread: "The Politics of Charm," "Comedies of BadManners," " 'Savonarola in Evening Dress'?", "Ghosts in the Fun Machine," and "PartingShots." The progression is broadly biographical without being strictly chronological, each chapter focusing on two to four exemplary plays. But even in the introduction· one hears an ominous rumbling off Left. Coward's butterfly characters suddenly become "Monsters of vanity and selfishness" (p. 5). Thereafter, Lahr's very diction sets the reader careening through waves of approval and troughs of revilement, often without the support of persuasive logic. Something schizoid emerges, as though Lahr's own enjoyment had to be purged at intervals by a stem superego. We may call Lahr's superego "Ninotchka" and envision her costumed in five-year­ plan gray. There is certainly no reason to takeLahr's intermittent bouts ofLeft-Wingery as a more modem or nuanced Marxian critique. Ninotchka simply keeps score by the old dogmas: "Winners in a competitive society, stars of free enterprise, the famous are living embodiments of the society's economic rules" (p. 78); "But fame is a neurotic Book Reviews defence that dramatizes vindictiveness as drive, megalomania as commitment, hysteria as action, greed as just reward" (p. 8o). In the late 1950s and early 1960s, Coward got crotchety about the new class-conscious drama and its didactic defenders. In huffy response, Ninotchka does no more than commit that most mind-numbing of platitudes, "Entertainment is not politically neutral" (p. 103), and repeats it verbatim thirty-eight pages later. True enough, but it is as if Coward's own premise could not matter: that "mere entertainment," though it indeed battens on the status quo, is nonetheless an art experience qualitatively distinct from the hortatory mode, whether the latter is pro or contra the status quo. It was the hortatory that Coward disliked as "political," not merely the contra. But Ninotchka believes in criticism by aphorism. Ninotchka's interpolations take three directions: blunt contempt for Coward's "socially irresponsible" characters and plays (PrivateLives, Designfor Living); political -not merely aesthetic- condescension toward his patriotic pieces (This Happy Breed); and intense psychologizing, either to redeem a play that Lahr is fond of (Blithe Spirit, Waiting in the Wings, A Song at Twilight) or to ferret out some supposedly explanatory model based on Coward's covert homosexuality (passim). Often the three directions, like Coward and the Lunts in Design for Living, intertwine. Lahr's criticism can be astonishingly uncontextual. Not only theatrical fashions, but also genres, literary traditions and historical facts are ignored. He does not seem aware that Miranda in Relative Values is Coward's updating of Dickens's Mr. Bounderby. Coward's 1923 song lyric, "Life is nothing but a game of make-believe," is plumbed for dark revelations without any appreciation that its theatricalist metaphor was stock in trade to playwrights of the period across Europe - Pirandello, of course, but also Chiarelli (The Mask and the Face), Yevreinov (The Chief Thing), Molnar (The Play's the Thing), and even Chesterton (The Surprise). Lahr flagellates such of Coward's characters as Elyot Chase and Leo Mercure as if they were flesh-and-blood fiends standing athwart the Revolution ("swaggering" ... "glib" 0 0 . "cruel and bad-mannered" 0 0 0 "isolated in hatred" 0 0 . "vulgar ambition for attention"), when...