How Beautiful It Is and How Easily It Can Be Broken (44 page)

Still, none of this looked like your typical Greek tragedy. For one thing, there's humor here, and lots of it: these Danaids enter by clomping onto the stage in their wedding dresses, loaded down with luggage; almost immediately they strip and jump into that bathtub. Their cousins arrive, noisily, by helicopter, and peel off their flight suits to reveal dinner jackets beneath. There are, thankfully, no attempts to reproduce the craggy grandiosity of Aeschylean diction: Aeschylus's terrified fiancées compare themselves poetically to heifers and doves pursued by hawks, ravens, wolves, serpents, and dogs, whereas Mee's girls are worried about being “the kind of person who ends up in a ravine with her underpants over her head.” And it's a safe bet to say that Aeschylus
wouldn't have thought up the Cupid-like character of Giuliano, Piero's gay nephew and Bella's sidekick, who collects Barbie dolls and confesses a penchant for being “taken forcibly from behind”—one of several additions Mee has made in order to emphasize the variety and inexplicability of love (which is Aeschylus's subject, or one of his subjects). At the end of
Big Love
, this Giuliano and the wise old Bella sing an eerie climactic hymn: a song that corresponds to those seven preserved lines from
Danaids
, the ones in which Aphrodite waxes ecstatic about how love produces the fodder for flocks and the fruit of the trees. Here, Aphrodite's lines become a lyric poem to what Mee's characters, if perhaps not Aeschylus, believe to be the pleasures that make civilized life worth living: “silk stockings,” “buttons,” “birds nests/hummingbirds,” “lessons for the flute,” “a quill pen.” But it amounts to the same thing.

Nor does
Big Love
show the physical restraint characteristic of Greek tragedy: the centerpiece of the first,
Suppliant Maidens
part of Mee's play is an acrobatic tour de force in which the girls repeatedly and quite violently hurl themselves to the ground, crying out things like “Who needs a man?” and “These men are parasites, these rapists.” That scene is nicely balanced by one a little later on, in the part that corresponds to the second third of Aeschylus's trilogy—Mee has thought a lot about the construction of his model—where the men hurl themselves on the same mats, angrily denouncing “the expectations that people have that a man should be a civilized person” and screaming “Fuck these women!” while one of them viciously hurls circular saw blades into a wall. With perhaps one exception (a spectacular onstage suicide by a bereaved widow in Euripides'
Suppliants
), no Greek tragedy of which we know represented acts of violence onstage—let alone violence on the order of the graphically depicted sex and then murder that Mee shows us in the wedding-night climax of the second,
Egyptians
, part of his play.

And yet you left
Big Love
with the feeling that you'd seen, if not a Greek tragedy, then a play that had the theatrical and intellectual vigor that Greek tragedies must have had when they were first produced—a work that grappled with all the big social and political issues that Aeschylus grappled with, and made you grapple with them, too. The humor, physicality, and inventiveness of Mee's play, the way he chose to represent, visually and gesturally, sexual anxiety and masculine aggressiveness, the mysterious power of love, the whimsy and violence
and beauty of life, made you care about what was happening onstage, and hence about the underlying issues, which not surprisingly turned out to be the very ones that Aeschylus's play is about; which is to say, the most pressing questions about relations between the sexes, and the true nature of power. You didn't leave Shepard Sobel's
Iphigenia at Aulis
worried about the moral corrosiveness of war, and you didn't come out of Tadashi Suzuki's sober and beautiful
Oedipus
at the Japan Society ruminating about knowledge and fate and self-determination, but you did emerge from Charles Mee's adaptation of Aeschylus's Danaid trilogy arguing (as people were doing as they left the Brooklyn Academy of Music) about women and men and violence and sex and power. About
eros
and
kratos
, that is, the twin poles around which Aeschylus's trilogy was organized. If Mee's production seemed to be about something (something other than giving people the edifying feeling that they'd been to a Greek play, that is), it was because he'd thought hard about not only what this tragedy meant, but
how
it meant—about the figurative forms and allusive structures that might allow tragedy, twenty-five centuries after the demise of Athens, to keep signifying, just as those forms and structures allowed the dramas, in their original productions, to investigate so much more than the lives and feelings of a few unfortunate heroes and heroines and their families.

The tensions and negotiations between the demands of the past and the needs of the present are, as it happens, a very Aeschylean concern: one that drives not only the
Oresteia
, as we know, but also, according to at least one critic, the trilogy that Mee has so idiosyncratically resuscitated. In her discussion of the Danaid trilogy, Froma Zeitlin remarks that the fifty sisters' anxiety about embarking on lives as sexually mature females is paired with, and enhanced by, a morbid obsession with the past—in particular, with the tale, the
mythos
, which they keep repeating, about their illustrious ancestress Io, another famous female victim of male desire. (She was turned into a cow when Zeus tried to hide her from his wife.) As Zeitlin observes, awareness of the past, as expressed in myth, anchors and perennially renews our sense of who we are; yet obsession with the past cuts us off from the present—and the future.

What we, like Aeschylus's Hypermnestra and Mee's Lydia, want—from life but also from art—is a complex negotiation, one in which, as
Zeitlin puts it, “myth remains the
mythos
, the primary story and the plot of the action, but it is also coded to speak about the present.” It would be hard to find a better description than that of what tragedy was in its heyday, and of what Mee accomplished with
Big Love
. His new work is a model of how to present tragedies today: preserving their primary stories while imaginatively reconfiguring the codes—the ancient, formalized theatrical vocabularies of the telling gesture and potent symbol and striking image—in a way that allows the works, after so many centuries, not merely to speak but to be heard.

—The New York Review of Books,
March 29 and April 11, 2002

A
talent to amuse” or “
just
a talent to amuse”? Even before Noël Coward's death in 1973, the former phrase—a line from one of his songs—had become the standard celebratory summation of Coward's contribution to popular culture during a half century as a playwright, actor, songwriter, diarist, composer, autobiographer, novelist, and cabaret entertainer.
A Talent to Amuse
is the title of Sheridan Morley's admiring but judicious 1969 biography of Sir Noël;
A TALENT TO AMUSE
is the epigraph that adorns the Westminster Abbey memorial stone dedicated to him (located—appropriately, you can't help thinking, for this master of light verse—not in, but just adjacent to, the Poet's Corner).

But “a talent to amuse” is not what Coward actually wrote. Or at least, not all of what he wrote. The phrase that has come to summarize Coward was, in fact, snipped from its context in a song called “If Love Were All” that Coward composed for his 1929 “operette,”
Bitter-Sweet
. It's sung by a lovelorn café chanteuse after she's been reunited with a former lover who has since remarried. Here is the entire verse:

In its proper context, then, “a talent to amuse” is not so much a self-celebration as it is something more wistful and self-ironic, and not a little sad. A talent, yes, but a talent for something relatively minor:
just
a talent to amuse. A gift, yes, but one with limited power: the
most
she can offer.

The elision of that “just” over the years, the gradual loss of the phrase's original, piquant context, can be seen as a symbol of our increasing failure to understand just what “amusement” meant for the author of those words. Noël Coward's distinctive sensibility, as both writer and performer, was, in fact, a particularly complex one. Shaped in his Edwardian boyhood but ripened in his Jazz Age youth, it owed much to the revues of the late 1910s and early 1920s, like those of his early producer André Charlot, with their swift shifts in mood and tone. It's a sensibility that's poised, we might say, on the fulcrum between “a talent to amuse” and “just a talent to amuse”—between self-assertion and self-deprecation, merriment and melancholy, sweet and bitter. This curious hybrid is difficult to sustain in the present era of popular entertainment, with its effortfully ironic tone, its brittle carapace of postmodern knowingness, and its omnipresent violence and explicitness. To us, Coward's light touch, like the “light” genres at which he excelled—light comedy, light verse, the latter in particular nearly extinct today, both aiming above all to provide pleasure, gaiety, amusement—is bound to come off as trivial, un-hip.

As a result, we tend to get Coward wrong: we find the elements that appeal to us, and forget the rest. Coward tends to be played as camp these days; the brittleness of his dialogue appeals to our own desire to appear knowingly world-weary. But emphasizing the cold glitter leaves out the strong feelings that run just beneath the surface, the sentimen
tality that lurks in the background of the comic plays and explodes into the foreground in the 1945 film
Brief Encounter
, based on one of his 1935
Tonight at Eight-thirty
sketches, or his patriotic paean
In Which We Serve
(1942).

 

Coward's estimation of his own talent to amuse was itself characterized by a mix of celebration and deprecation. On the one hand, he had the healthy self-regard of talented people who have achieved success through tremendous hard work. (“I am bursting with pride, which is why I have absolutely no vanity.”) Born just before Christmas 1899—hence the given name—to a lower-middle-class Teddington piano salesman and his strong-willed wife, he first stepped on a stage at the age of ten, and throughout his life he was proud to have been in the business of giving pleasure. When he described his five canonical comic masterpieces—
Hay Fever
(1924),
Private Lives
(1930),
Design for Living
(1932),
Present Laughter
(1939), and
Blithe Spirit
(1941)—as being “important,” it was because they gave “a vast number of people a great deal of pleasure.”

He himself took unabashed pleasure in the success that his ability to amuse had brought him already at a very tender age. He composed that bittersweet lyric for
Bitter-Sweet
when he wasn't quite thirty; by then, he'd been an international celebrity for five years, having rocketed to stardom in 1923, at the age of twenty-four, with his sensational cocaine-addiction melodrama
The Vortex
, which was followed the next year by a solid comic hit in
Hay Fever
. “The world has treated me very well—but then, I haven't treated it so badly either.”

Yet Coward's satisfaction in what he did so abundantly well (and so abundantly: sixty published plays, three hundred published songs, a multivolume autobiography, dozens of short stories, a novel) was balanced by a healthy lack of illusions about the nature of his gift. “I don't write plays with the idea of giving some great thought to the world,” he wrote on the eve of his sixtieth birthday, “and that isn't just coy modesty…. If I wanted to write a play with a message, God forbid, it would undoubtedly be a comedy.” That “God forbid” reminds you of Coward's distrust of weighty messages, his fervent belief that amusement could
have nuance and substance; and it explains why, even after the rise of John Osborne and the kitchen-sink drama, he went on insisting, with perhaps pardonable shrillness, that the theater must above all amuse, must be what it surely seemed to him in his Edwardian boyhood, “a house of strange enchantment, a temple of dreams.” “Nowadays,” he wrote in his late fifties,

His characterization of what makes a play bad reminds us of what makes his own best work so good: verbal precision and economy (he declared himself “one of the few remaining guardians of the English language”), merriment and humor, elegance of construction, all of them showcased by an acting style that is gossamer, playful, blithe—a technique that easily reflects the many colors that shimmer across the surfaces of his lines. (“The befeathered sheen of a pheasant's neck” is how Kenneth Tynan described Coward's dialogue.) A technique, that is to say, that understands that his plays consist of nothing but surfaces—and that takes their superficiality with, of course, the utmost seriousness.

The difficulty of getting just right Coward's many complexities—the paradoxical ways in which wistfulness can be entwined with glitter, and meaning can exist in surfaces—is all too evident in two new productions. One of them is easy enough to dismiss, since Coward himself dismissed it: the world première of
Long Island Sound
, a 1947 play whose value even as a curio is, however, marred by a vulgar, tasteless staging. The other is a shiny new production of
Private Lives
. The fact that the latter manages to make this finest of Coward's comedies seem verbose,
humorless, and ill-constructed—to say nothing of the fact that it has received rave notices on both sides of the Atlantic—indicates how far from Coward we now are, and how fragile his legacy is.

 

“Fragile” is a very good way to describe
Private Lives
. Its plot is as thin as any that Coward concocted—the most tenuous of structures on which to hang his mousseline wit. In the first act, Elyot Chase, an elegant young man of “about thirty, quite slim and pleasant-looking,” is honeymooning at a luxe hotel in France with his second wife, Sybil, a pretty blonde of twenty-three. The adjoining suite, of course, turns out to be occupied by Elyot's firecracker of a first wife, Amanda, who's honeymooning with
her
new spouse, Victor Prynne. Storming onto the terrace after fights with their respective mates, Elyot and Amanda catch sight of each other and, in the course of some verbal sparring realize they're still mad about each other; and then proceed to flee their nice if somewhat conventional new spouses. The second act, set a few days later in Amanda's Paris flat, suggests why Elyot and Amanda divorced in the first place: tart-tongued, volatile, inventive, restless, each is the other's best audience—but who wants to live onstage? The third act, typical of Coward's finales, is less a resolution than an escape: Victor and Sybil catch up with their wayward mates, growing to loathe each other into the bargain, and during a furious breakfast-time fracas Elyot and Amanda laughingly sneak off together as Victor and Sybil start hammering away at each other. How they will actually live together is of no concern.

Typically, Coward had few illusions about the weightiness of this work, which was written in four frantic days in Shanghai after a vision of his acting partner and beloved friend Gertrude Lawrence “in a white Molyneux dress on a terrace in the South of France” came to him as he readied himself for bed. (He'd promised to write a play for her while he was traveling in the Far East; leaving nothing to chance, Lawrence slipped a photograph of herself into the Cartier desk set that she'd given him as a going-away present.) In the first volume of his au
tobiography,
Present Indicative
, which he published at the tender age of thirty-seven, the playwright, with his usual blend of self-deprecation and self-celebration, characterized his creation as “a reasonably well-constructed duologue for two experienced performers…. As a complete play, it leaves a lot to be desired…. From the playwright's point of view, [it] may or may not be considered interesting, but at any rate, from the point of view of technical acting, it is very interesting indeed.” And again, later: “a shrewd and witty comedy, well-constructed on the whole, but psychologically unstable; however, its entertainment value seemed obvious enough, and its acting opportunities for Gertie and me admirable.”

It's significant that Coward always rates the work's “entertainment value” and, particularly, its “acting opportunities” more highly than he does its structural or psychological coherence. The real hero of Coward's best comedies is, after all, Coward himself. A lot, if not most, of his oeuvre was composed with himself in mind as the male lead. (You'd think that this would alert directors to the fact that an appreciation of Coward's performance style is likely to be crucial to the success of his plays.) The repeated characterization of his plays as vehicles for interesting acting is one of the many things that distinguish Coward from Oscar Wilde, that other homosexual British master of crisp wit, to whom Coward is often, and for the most part inaccurately, compared. Wilde's plays are the creations of a playwright; Coward's are those of a performer. If the former's work achieves a hermetic perfection of structure that Coward's never does, it's because Coward is ultimately more interested in the performance than in the play.

And yet Coward's shrewd spotlighting of entertainers was more than a matter of giving himself work; it goes to the heart of what his plays are about. If he couldn't imagine writing plays with a weighty underlying “message,” it was because in his plays, the medium was the message: entertainment, amusement are our weapons against the vagaries of life. “Laugh at everything,” Elyot tells Amanda, as they plot to abandon their brand-new spouses. “We're figures of fun.” In part, this emphasis on laughter and fun reflected the outlook of a well-balanced person who had an agreeably optimistic view of life. (Of his longtime acquaintance Somerset Maugham, Coward wrote that “he believed, rather proudly, I think, that he had no illusions about people but in fact
he had one major one and that was that they were no good.”) But the omnipresent self-consciousness about fun and laughter in his work—his characters' amused awareness of being performers in a delicious play—was also his “message”: his serious response, as a popular entertainer (and no doubt as a homosexual, too) to what Elyot calls “all the futile moralists who try to make life unbearable.”

 

The sense that Coward's favorite characters are performers in some way or another is particularly strong in
Private Lives
. Anomalously among this playwright's characters, neither Elyot nor Amanda has a career, and yet there is a strong sense throughout the play that the core of their enjoyment of each other (when they're not fighting) is their dramatic and verbal fantasy. They're writers, or perhaps playwrights, manqués, and they can't be together for two minutes without launching into a decidedly theatrical playfulness. Snuggling in Amanda's Paris flat in Act Two, Elyot starts the gramophone and asks Amanda to dance, and they're immediately off and running: