Love from Snoop or Poj

Noël Coward owned always that luck played a part in his astonishing career alongside his various talents as an actor, dramatist, composer, artist (he described his painting as ‘Touch and Gauguin’), film director and fiction-writer.

At various times his reputation nosedived. After he catapulted to fame in his drama of society love affairs and drug-taking in 1924’s The Vortex he unwisely retrieved rather too many plays from bottom drawers before bouncing back to the top with his masterpiece, Private Lives, to launch his glittering 1930s. In the 1950s, with a new wave of playwrights emerging from the Royal Court, his work was more hurtfully dismissed as outdated, only for his stock to rise again with a 1964 National Theatre Hay Fever in his own production and then the celebrations to mark his 70th birthday (he dubbed this later-life resurgence ‘Dad’s Renaissance’).

Coward has had posthumous luck too, not least in the management of his estate, avoiding overexposure and shrewdly mixing safer revivals with unfamiliar plays (Phillip Prowse’s startling production of Coward’s Ritz-lobby world of international lost souls in Semi-Monde) or reappraisals by younger, iconoclastic directors. He has also been lucky with his biographers and editors; now Barry Day, who has already done fine work on Coward’s Collected Lyrics, has edited this rich collection of his letters with care and flair.

Coward wrote to and received letters from a varied, often stellar international group — Maugham, Shaw and Rattigan through to Pinter, Osborne, Wesker and Albee, not to mention John Gielgud, Laurence Olivier, Gertrude Lawrence, Marlene Dietrich, Alfred Lunt, Lynne Fontanne, Ian Fleming, Enid Bagnold, Lord Mountbatten, old Aunt Edna Ferber and all — but mercifully Day avoids endless footnotes, linking his mainly chronological selection with his own narrative, touching in the essentials of Coward’s career and self-invention from toothy boy to brilliantined matinée idol, international star to Grand Old Man of the British stage (‘I look like Yul Brynner’s aunt,’ he remarks of his increasingly oriental later appearance).

Kenneth Tynan, his sternest later critic, ruthlessly ridiculed Coward’s 1950s Sunday Times articles attacking the new ‘Dustbin Drama’ (ironic that Sir Gerald du Maurier once described The Vortex as precisely that) and insisting that the theatre should be ‘a house of enchantment, a temple of dreams’.