Sir Noël Peirce Coward was known by many titles throughout his lifetime – composer, director, actors, singer. He also held the title of playwright, and he happens to have penned BCTCO’s up-coming play, Hay Fever.
Coward was born in a suburb of London, and at the encouragement of his ambitious mother, he attended a dance academy in the city. He made his professional stage début at the age of eleven in 1911 as Prince Mussel in the children’s play The Goldfish. Coward described the experience in one volume of his three-part autobiography:
One day … a little advertisement appeared in the Daily Mirror…. It stated that a talented boy of attractive appearance was required by a Miss Lila Field to appear in her production of an all-children fairy play: The Goldfish. This seemed to dispose of all argument. I was a talented boy, God knows, and, when washed and smarmed down a bit, passably attractive. There appeared to be no earthly reason why Miss Lila Field shouldn’t jump at me, and we both believed that she would be a fool indeed to miss such a magnificent opportunity.
After The Goldfish, Coward’s young career seemed to take off swimmingly. He appeared across London in numerous productions from 1911 to 1915 – from Garrick Theatre in London’s West End to the Savoy Theatre and the London Coliseum.
Coward later began to sell short stories to magazines in order to help his family financially. Finances had always been difficult for the family as Arthur Coward, the father, lacked ambition and industry in his role as a piano salesman. Noël Coward also began writing and producing plays during this time, and his first solo effort as a playwright – The Rat Trap (1918) – was eventually produced in October 1926.
However, Coward struck gold with a show titled The Vortex in 1924. The show dealt with topics which were considered shocking in its day, and its notoriety and fiery performances attracted large audiences. It was the success of The Vortex in both London and America which caused a great demand for Coward to produce new plays.
In 1925, he premiered Hay Fever – a comedy about four egocentric members of an artistic family. The family casually invite acquaintances to their country house for a weekend, and they spend their time bemusing and enraging each other’s guests. Coward’s writing and characters must have given the audience what they came for became Hay Fever was the first of his plays to hold a long-lasting place in mainstream theatrical repertoire. By the 1970s, the play was recognized as a theatre classic, and The Times described it as a “dazzling achievement; like The Importance of Being Earnest, it is pure comedy with no mission but to delight, and it depends purely on the interplay of characters, not on elaborate comic machinery”.
BCTCO’s rendition of Hay Fever is set to open on June 4th and will run for two weekends. For show and ticket information, check out our website.
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