Noel Coward and Sexual Modernism: Private Lives as Queer Comedy

Someday I'll find you,
Moonlight behind you,
True to the dream I am dreaming.
As I draw near you
You'll smile a little smile;
For a little while
We shall stand
Hand in hand.
I'll leave you never,
Love you for ever,
All our past sorrow redeeming:
Try to make it true,
Say you love me too,
Someday I'll find you again.

—Noël Coward, "Someday I'll Find You," Private Lives (Song Book [78–79])

The emergence of modern drama in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries was integrally linked to the development of modern sexual identities, and Noël Coward's career was at once shaped by and definitive of this larger historical development. Coward began his career when male homosexuality was still illegal in England and the imprisonment of Oscar Wilde for "gross indecency" was still a recent memory; his breakthrough play The Vortex premiered in 1924, just four years before Radclyffe Hall's lesbian novel The Well of Loneliness was banned for obscenity. Coward's historical situation as a necessarily closeted homosexual raises the question of whether and how the subversiveness of his sexual identity is reflected in his work.²

Alan Sinfield has suggested that "[t]heatre has been a particular site for the formation of dissident sexual identities" and that, while research on gay and lesbian theatre has tended to focus on issues of censorship and thus "produces a story of harassment and repression," there has in fact been "a lot more sexual dissidence in theatre than has been properly registered" (Out on Stage 1, 2, 2). Noël Coward serves as a case in point. Coward spent his public life trying to pass as straight, but Sinfield recalls that to his own "lower-middle-class, schol-arship-boy, Royal-Court, 1960s, Gay-Lib sensibility Coward's persona in its entirety, and all his characters and everything to do with his kind of theatre, appeared tinged with effeminacy" (Out on Stage 100).³ Moreover, noting the ties of friendship between Coward and Radclyffe Hall, who was an avid theatregoer, Terry Castle has suggested that Coward may have been the inspiration for the "increasingly sleek, androgynous look" that Hall began to affect during the late 1920s (33). In turn, Hall's fashionable appearance, together with that of her equally stylish but more feminine lover Una Troubridge, helped to establish the early-twentieth-century image of the lesbian as, in Havelock Ellis's words, "terribly modern & shingled & monocled" (qtd. in Baker 203). Coward was thus an important figure in the emergence of modern sexual identities over the course of the early-to-mid-twentieth century and, as Sinfield notes, "managed to construct a knowing subculture of privileged insiders," "[e]ven while attracting the respectable, middlebrow playgoer" (Out on Stage 106).

As recently as 2002, however, in an echo of William Archer's 1895 statement that Oscar Wilde's play The Importance of Being Earnest "imitates nothing, represents nothing, means nothing, is nothing, except a sort of rondo capriccioso, in which the artist's fingers run with crisp irresponsibility up and down the keyboard of life" (190), the distinguished theatre critic Robert Brustein described Coward's 1930 comedy Private Lives as "a comic soufflé with no plot, no characters, no theme, and no apparent purpose other than to consolidate its author's reputation for witty sangfroid" (26). In this essay, I want to consider how, while it continues to "pass" as light entertainment within the theatrical mainstream, the seemingly straight and perennially popular Private Lives, in which Coward originally performed the male lead, is not as straightforward, clear-cut, and unambiguous in its representation of gender and sexuality as it might initially and superficially seem.

Crucial to this analysis is a consideration of how Coward's queer manipulations of conventional comic form unsettled the gender and sexual norms that have been fundamental to comedy from its origins in ancient Greece through to the present day. Aristophanes is the earliest comic playwright whose works have survived, and in the Symposium, Plato represents Aristophanes as offering an...