There is hardly ever one of Noël Coward’s old plays not on tour or in the West End. Sometimes you think the commercial theatre would collapse without him. A ‘new’ Coward is therefore an event. Never performed or published, Volcano was written in 1956 when Coward was living permanently in Jamaica as a tax exile. The play is the result of his life out in the tropics well away from the Angry Young Men in their winklepickers who were ruling the roost back in Britain.
What a life it was! After a hard day’s snorkelling, Noël would sit outside his house, sipping a cocktail served by a white-coated native, the sun setting over the Caribbean, no cheap airline tourists to pollute his coral-fringed paradise.
On the page Coward’s lost play exudes heat, sexual intrigue and the chink of ice in long drinks. The show is directed by the actor Roy Marsden (who played P.D. James’s Commander Adam Dalgliesh on TV), something of a patron saint of theatrical lost causes, who first came across the piece when it flopped on to his doormat some years back.
‘Graham Payn, who was Coward’s lover, sent it to me. I looked at this yellowing script typed on old imperial foolscap and thought this is a very odd piece of writing. Then I read it more and thought, “Mmmm… this is very good.” It’s set on Coward’s make-believe Pacific island, Samola. I thought this would be very interesting if we could just get rid of the native characters who talk in a sort of embarrassing bwana-speak, the most dated aspect of the piece.’
The proof of the pudding is in the eating, of course. But the quality of the gossip that inspired Volcano is top-notch.
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