The courage of Coward

Noël Coward is remembered for cocktail parties, clipped one-liners and cigarette holders. Tracy-Ann Oberman would like us to remember something else. Behind the silk dressing gowns was a man who despised fascism, worked for British intelligence and refused to be seduced by the politics of appeasement. It is one of the reasons she feels such an affinity with him – and why she believes Present Laughter deserves to be rediscovered by a new generation.

“There is a beautifully preserved myth surrounding Noël Coward,” whispers Tracy-Ann. “Researching him made me realise he was not just about perfectly enunciated vowels. He was someone with far greater substance than his polished public image suggested.

“The more I read about Noël, the more I admired him,” she tells Life. “People forget that he was passionately anti-Nazi and worked for British intelligence during the war. More than that, he had many Jewish friends and he wasn’t frightened to stand apart from people in the theatrical world, where he found the views morally repugnant.”

In the current climate, this really chimed with Tracy-Ann’s concerns about her industry. She was particularly struck by Coward’s refusal to indulge those who flirted with fascism.

“He couldn’t bear people who admired Hitler or excused Nazism. He had absolutely no time for them,” she adds. “He wasn’t interested in fashionable opinion; he was interested in what was right.”

Tracy-Ann also learnt about Coward’s friends.
“I read aboutBlanche Blackwell, who was Noël’s muse. She was also Ian Fleming’s muse and lover. Very interesting, but the point is she came from an extraordinary Sephardi family, and I realised he surrounded himself with Jewish people – and they weren’t token friendships. These were people he admired and loved.”

For Tracy-Ann, that moral certainty gives Present Laughter an unexpected resonance. Present Laughter is more than a revival. It is a conversation across almost 90 years between two artists who understood that charm and conviction are not mutually exclusive.

Understanding the man also changed the way she looked at what many regard as Coward’s most autobiographical comedy.

“Present Laughter has always been one of my favourite plays,” she says. “But when I looked at it more closely, I saw something beyond the sparkling comedy. I saw a portrait of the cost of celebrity – of
a fragile ego trapped inside a gilded cage, desperately trying to hold back the one thing that catches up with every icon: time, and the fear of becoming irrelevant.”

Coward’s original centres on celebrated actor Garry Essendine, whose private life teeters permanently on the edge of chaos. Tracy-Ann wondered what would happen if that towering  ego belonged not to a man but to a woman.“The moment I flipped the gender, the stakes suddenly became even more fascinating,” she beams. “Enter Geri Essendine – who has been
39 for the best part of a decade.”

This triggered thoughts of other women who set their own rules.                   “I thought of Mae West, who wrote and produced her own work and famously enjoyed the company of many of her leading men. I thought of Joan Collins and her uniquely British glamour, of Elizabeth Taylor and Liza Minnelli.”

The next leap was geographical. Rather than remaining in pre-war London, Tracy-Ann transports Coward’s world to New York in 1977, at the height of Studio 54.“I found myself drawn to the endless queues outside, the celebrities gliding into those hallowed VIP spaces, the glamour, excess and intoxicating sense of belonging to the ‘in crowd’.”

“And I began to wonder: what if Geri were an expatriate British actress? A hugely successful West End star who had arrived in America 15 years earlier with her chosen family – her dashing ex-husband, her fiercely loyal secretary and her producers – all determined that she would conquer Broadway and make all their fortunes.

“Geri needs them desperately, and they need her. Without each other, can they even exist? Can Monty, Len, Henrietta, Morris – and Geri herself – survive the arrival of the handsome Johannes, whose presence threatens to blow ‘the firm’ apart?”

Tracy-Ann is keen to stress that while championing Coward for his courage, it is alongside his wit and she is not modernising his play for modernity’s sake.“We haven’t broken Noël Coward’s masterpiece. Quite the opposite. Beneath the mirrored disco ball, Present Laughter remains what it has always been: a dazzling comedy about love, vanity, friendship and the strange business of being adored.” And for Life readers there’s nothing strange about adoring Tracy-Ann Oberman.

Present Laughter runs at Theatre Royal Bath until
5 September, then tours until 24 October, including at Richmond Theatre from 22 to 26 September  https://www.atgtickets.com/shows/present-laughter/