First-night nerves

Sheridan Morley keeps a diary while directing a little-known Coward play

1 December 1998

This has been an unusually high-profile year for my friends and colleagues in the Critics Circle. Four of them directed plays at the Battersea Arts Centre in the spring, while in the autumn another four got caught up in a distinctly hostile Channel 4 television series about the role of the reviewer. Having stayed unusually well clear of all that, what am I now doing in a derelict and disused saloon bar down the Goswell Road directing Corin Redgrave, Kika Markham, Nyree Dawn Porter and Matthew Bose in Noel Coward's last play Song at Twilight, due to open at the King's Head in Islington on 4 January?

We need to go back a bit. I once asked Kenneth Tynan why, as the most powerful and brilliant drama critic of my lifetime, he had thrown it all up at the Observer to become Olivier's literary manager at the National, a job which (though Ken begged for it) really only existed in wily Larry's view to keep Tynan well away from a theatre column in which he could prove vastly more dangerous.

`Because,' Ken said simply, 'I got fed up with eating night after night in restaurants where they would never let me write the menu', and that in essence is our theatrical fate; it is also why we are regularly told that a critic is someone who knows the way but can't drive the car, and that nobody ever raised a statue to a reviewer (not true, incidentally; there are at least two in America).

It is therefore not surprising that, somewhere in early or late middle age, most of us critics take to teaching or broadcasting or writing books; we can't all be Bernard Shaw, but it nevertheless is not enough to spend your entire professional life doing nothing but trying to evaluate the work of others. In my case, I began writing about Noel Coward in 1965, and that first biography, his and mine (A Talent to Amuse), led me on to his lifelong partner Gertrude Lawrence and a mini-musical called Noel & Gertie which I have sometimes directed, and which Twiggy is happily now about to open in New York to mark the Coward Centenary over there.

5 December

This, however, is my first attempt to direct a play, and I have been more than lucky in my casting; Corin and Kika are doing their first-ever Coward, and Nyree has been off the London stage for far too long, not unlike her character in the story. The play itself is something of a revelation; if you didn't know the authorship, you might well guess Rattigan or even J.B. Priestley. In essence it's a blackmail thriller, loosely built around Somerset Maugham in old age, and I do not propose to give away any more of the plot than that. Noel himself was getting very fragile when he played it briefly in London in 1966, and since then it has had only very rare road revivals here and in America. The version of Song at Twilight we are now doing is a British premiere, a heavily cut (by Noel himself in 1972, just before his death) variant on the original which runs barely 90 minutes.

10 December

I have begun to realise that Noel left this play ticking behind him as a sort of posthumous time-bomb; essentially it's about the outing of homosexual celebrities at a time when the word 'outing' had yet to be coined, and of course it is to some extent autobiographical, though in the character of the veteran novelist Sir Hugo Latymer are also strong echoes of both Maugham and Max Beerbohm.

The brilliance of Corin in this role, quite apart from his tact and talent in rehearsal for making me believe I have something to teach him, is in wrapping all those troubled literary ghosts into his performance but then creating a wholly new character with no trace of Noel at all. In my view he has also built in a certain amount of his father Sir Michael, though he would probably deny that it was done consciously; Redgrave relatives are now understandably uneasy about family crossovers.

12 December

An all-too-short rehearsal period is not helped by a prior engagement whereby both Corin and Kika have to try out new work in America, so we lose them both for ten days. My other main problem is that an already fragile Noel wrote himself an almost entirely sedentary character and play, so if I'm not careful this whole staging will look like a Radio Four readthrough. I am however now vastly helped by a set by Saul Radomsky which, on the usual King's Head budget of about 15, nevertheless manages to suggest an elegant lakeside hotel in the Switzerland of the 1960s.

20 December

Redgraves now safely home from America, and we are moving swiftly into our last few days before previews. Nyree, though physically frail, is extraordinary as Carlotta, the movie star who threatens to demolish Hugo's public life; she somehow links her straight to Elvira and Amanda and all those other Coward heroines who were versions of his beloved Gertrude Lawrence.

28 December

Minimal Christmas break and, to my amazement, a first preview for which they are already standing at the back of the theatre. Something about the Coward Centenary, the Redgraves, Nyree and an 'unknown' Coward play seems to have spread the word with, as yet, no advertising of any kind, and this in a Christmas break.

I realise that, as a critic, I have spent far too much time watching the stage and not enough looking at the audience; they in the end are the ones who teach us all we need to know about a play and its performance.

4 January 1999

Tonight we open to my colleagues in the press, or at least those kind enough to turn up in Islington on the first day after the long holiday. How do I feel ? Bloody terrified, since you ask, but fairly sure I have now done all I can for and with this amazing cast. Real (i.e. full-time) directors often note how devastated they feel when their production starts to take on a life of its own and they are no longer needed, especially in the dressing-room; I have to note a kind of relief, and that I am almost looking forward to getting back to the usual Radio Two arts programmes and the books and the reviewing of other people's productions in these pages.

Whatever happens tonight, we know that we are already more than half sold for the run at the King's Head, and that we just might even achieve an afterlife. This does not, in the end, have a lot to do with me, though I might just possibly have become a fractionally better critic by seeing what happens to actors before they get to a press night. If we have a hit, it will be entirely because of Noel Coward and this great cast; if we have a flop, I shall have nobody to blame but myself. Normal service will be resumed in this column next week.

(Song at Twilight plays at the King's Head until 24 January. Tel. 0171-226 1916.)

Copyright Spectator Jan 9, 1999
Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning Company. All rights Reserved