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by Noël Coward, directed by Tom Littler

Orange Tree Theatre, Richmond, GBR

May 30-July 6, 2024

Hugo: “I am a commentator not a moralist”

Noël Coward wrote his trilogy of plays, A Suite in Three Keys, in 1966 as his farewell to the theatre. He played the main male roles in the plays’ world premiere in London but was too ill to appear in the plays’ transfer to Broadway which subsequently was cancelled. Those who know Coward only from his most popular plays like Hay Fever (1925) or Private Lives (1930) will be quite surprised by the seriousness of the subject matter of the first two plays in which the male protagonist uncompromisingly confronts his sexuality, his reputation and the imminent approach of death. The plays show Coward in a very different light and reveal the themes in his earlier plays that have made them so enduring.

A Suite in Three Keys consists of one full-length play, A Song at Twilight, and a double-bill of two one-act plays, Shadows of the Evening and Come Into the Garden Maud. The full-length play and the double-bill were meant to be played in repertory as they were in 1966. Yet, of the three, A Song at Twilight has most often been staged as a separate work. The current production at the Orange Tree Theatre in Richmond marks the 50th anniversary of Noël Coward’s death and the 125th of his birth in nearby Teddington and is the first complete revival of A Suite in Three Keys for a generation. The plays are an absolute gift to the three main actors, who play different roles in each play, and the Orange Tree revival directed by Orange Tree Artistic Director Tim Littler is hilarious, powerful and illuminating.

The conceit of A Suite in Three Keys is all three plays take place in the same luxury suite 354 of the Beau Rivage Hotel in Lausanne, Switzerland. When Neil Simon wrote Plaza Suite in 1968, Coward was quick to point out that he had used the idea two years earlier. Use of the same location is not the only similarity among the plays of Coward’s trilogy. Each is focussed on a central Male Figure, roles that Coward had written for himself. Each features the Wife of the Male Figure, and each features the Other Woman in the Male Figure’s life. In casting, the Male Figure is played in all three plays by the same actor, the Wife in each by the same female actor and the Other Woman by the same second female actor. One might think that such constraints were too restrictive, but Coward takes these constraints as a challenge and has created three plays that could not be more different.

A Song at Twilight

The first play concerns a famed elderly British author, Sir Hugo Latymer, who has recently been suffering from ill health. Hilde, his German wife of 20 years, is also his secretary and general caretaker. On the particular day of the action, both Hugo and Hilde are concerned with a meeting that Hugo agreed to with Carlotta Gray, a woman Hugo had had an affair with long ago for a period of two years. Why Carlotta should want to see Hugo after all these years is a mystery. It was her success in a play written by Hugo that launched Carlotta’s career as an actress. Carlotta never became the great star that everyone expected. She has since been married three times and lives off the alimony from her third husband.

As it turns out, Carlotta is very unhappy with how Hugo portrayed her in his autobiography. She has planned to write her own autobiography, has already secured two publishers and intends to include Hugo’s love letters to her during their affair. Hugo, of course, refuses her permission, but Carlotta has other ammunition. In the exciting Act 1 conclusion, Carlotta reveals that she also has in her possession another collection of love letters that Hugo has written – these to a young man.

Up to this point the play has seemed like a version of Coward’s Present Laughter (1942) seen 24 years on with Hilde as the secretary, Carlotta the woman from Hugo’s past and Hugo an older edition of the childish Garry Essendine. In Act 2, after Carlotta’s revelation, A Song at Twilight takes on an entirely different nature. The remarks the three characters made to each other now become more cutting and less amusing. The whole tone changes from comic to serious with a real worry that there will be no happy ending.

As we discover the man who was the great love of Hugo’s life was also friends with Carlotta. She was with him when he died two years earlier and he made over possession of the letters to her to do with what she thought best. What she has thought best is to confront Hugo with evidence of a passionately romantic side of his nature that clashes completely with the cynically satirical writerly façade he has so carefully constructed and reinforced in his autobiography.

The play turns into a surprisingly relevant debate about whether a great public person has any right to privacy and whether material necessary to understanding that person should be hidden or come to light. Coward’s plays have previously featured characters who are implied to be gay, such as the two men in Design for Living (1933) or the ardent male fan of Essendine in Present Laughter. This is the first play in which Coward definitively identifies a character as a homosexual and actually uses that word to describe him.

The play is set in Coward’s present of 1966 when homosexuality was still a crime and when the Lord Chamberlain's Office could still prevent “offensive” plays from being staged. The characters actually discuss these facts and Carlotta states that she believes that homosexuality and the Lord Chamberlain's power of censorship will soon be abolished. Indeed, in 1967 Parliament passed the Sexual Offences Act and in 1968 it passed the Theatres Act abolishing stage censorship.

Coward’s play surprisingly turns into a plea for gay people not to hide their sexual orientation and to live happier lives because they will be truer to themselves. Sir Hugo, sadly, becomes an example of how hiding one’s true nature can lead to an entire life constructed of lies.

Shadows of the Evening

Shadows of the Evening, the first play of the double-bill, takes on an even more earnest tone than A Song at Twilight. In Song, the central male character had merely been very ill. In Shadows, he is dying with perhaps only three months left to live. The central male character of Shadows is George Hilgay, who had been happily married to Anne for 15 years until he met and fell in love with Linda, who has now been his mistress for seven years. Coward finds comedy in the notion of George’s mistress that George will wish to die knowing that both the women he has loved, i.e., herself and Linda, have become friends. For that reason, Linda has asked Anne to come to Lausanne urgently. In reality the two women hate each other. Linda resents Anne for never divorcing George so that she could be his lawful wife, whereas Anne resents Linda for breaking up her marriage, leading George to abandon her and their two children.

How the two come to some rapprochement is amusing as is how the two try so hard to pretend that they have becomes friends when George knows very well that they aren’t. On a more abstract level the play’s comedy lies in the fact that George is at ease with the notion of his impending death and has no want or need to be lulled into some false happiness by Linda and Anne pretending to be friends.

Coward may beknown for his witty banter, but he is less known for his adeptness at Shavian intellectual debate. Hugo in Song states outright that no one can make a point better than Shaw. In Shadows, George launches into a fascinating but very Shavian argument that death itself is not what distresses us but fear of death. He says that a stab of fear can suddenly strike him without warning, but other than that he has led a good, productive life and has no qualms about leaving it. What he wants most from his friends is not deceit but for them to act as they normally would. Shadows of the Evening is about as far as possible from what people think of as a Noël Coward play, but it is all the more fascinating and important because if that.

Come Into the Garden, Maud

After the sobriety of Shadows of the Evening, Come Into the Garden, Maud comes off like a frivolously fizzy drink. Rather than the famous author Hugo or the renowned publisher George, we now have the rich Midwestern American Verner Conklin and his wife Anna-Mary occupying Suite 354. In Anna-Mary, Coward satirizes that strange desire of Americans, who contrary to the democratic principles of their country, go to Europe to rub shoulders with the aristocracy. Anna-Mary is also a hilarious comic portrait of egotism where the wrong nail polish or the cancellation of a party guest count as major tragedies.

In contrast with Anna-Mary’s obsession with minutiae and royal protocols is her husband Verner, who doesn’t see what is so interesting about old buildings and ancient family trees. Verbally, his laid-back drawl is the very opposite of his wife’s constant twittering. What does intrigue Verner about Europe are its laissez-faire attitudes about sex. Maud Caragnani hosted a dinner party for the American couple in Rome and now happens to turn up at their hotel in Lausanne. The two found they were attracted to each other in Rome. How precisely with this all work out since Anna-Mary has told Verner he must dine alone in his room?

One way of looking at Coward’s trilogy is that the three plays concentrate in turn on the past, the present and the future. A Song at Twilight focusses on a past that Hugo has hidden and that he must now confront. Shadows of the Evening focusses on how George and the two women he loves can live in the present know how short that present may be. Come Into the Garden, Maud suggests that even for a 59-year-old unhappily married man a future may come along that he never expected.

Linking all three plays is one of Coward’s favourite themes, life as theatre, though here more fully explored than elsewhere. All three characters in Song know they are playing roles of wife, great man or other woman and know when they change their roles to secretary, curmudgeon and schemer. They refer to their negotiations literally as game playing and even note that they make “exits” and “entrances”. In Shadows, the two women in George’s life think they should change the roles they previously have played to please him. But as George notes, death is the time when all the masks come off. In Maud, Anna-Mary is so comical because she doesn’t know how futile it is for her to try to play the role of grande dame. Verner has always assumed he had only one role, but Maud makes him see that there are other still open to him. She herself does not disguise the fact that she has played many different roles in her life.

Reinforcing this theme is the overall conception of the trilogy where three actors each play three different roles. To set the triple-casting of the other actors in relief, Coward includes one character who appears in all three plays and is played by the same actor. In this production it is Steffan Rizzi as Felix, the butler for the suite.

Director Tom Littler has assembled an ideal cast. Stephen Boxer has appeared in virtually every British mystery series ever made, but not until now have I had the pleasure of seeing him in person and enjoying his expressive range. His work in Song is perhaps his greatest. He begins as a grumpy old man who seems to enjoy being a grumpy old man. Sometimes his remarks are witty. Sometimes they are merely rude. But always he shows us a shrewd intelligence shining in Hugo’s eyes. Boxer has Hugo move from pleasure at game-playing with Carlotta to exasperation. Both Carlotta and Hilde say Hugo lives behind a façade and Boxer demonstrates this. Brilliantly he shows that it takes Hugo increasingly more energy to maintain this façade as Carlotta’s arguments grow stronger. At the moving conclusion the façade drops entirely and Boxer makes us feel the tragedy of a man who has never been able to be himself.

Boxer’s George and Verner are a study in contrasts. Boxer has George counter the sentimentalism of his two loves with a not always dry-eyed rationality, since, as he says, fear can suddenly overtake him without warning. His Verner is an easy-going type whose drawl seems to be modelled after James Stewart both in its pace and sense of irony.

Emma Fielding has to act each of her roles in a different accent. As Hugo’s wife Hilde she uses one of the most convincing German accents I’ve heard on stage. In Song while Hugo and Carlotta are poking at old wounds and insulting each other, Fielding shows that Hilde is the most dignified of the three, the most rational and the most honest with herself. It is Hilde who sees through the ruses of Hugo and Carlotta and she who clears the air at the end. Yet even though Hilde is such a reasonable person, Fielding also makes clear that she, too, has feelings and can tolerate only so many insults and still suffers from the unhappiness of her own past.

In Shadows, Fielding shows how Anne Hilgay, George’s wife, gradually moves from suspicion and disdain for Linda to an acquiescence to her point of view. In Maud, Fielding is so different from Hilde and Anne that you might not know it was the same actor. Fielding gives her voice, her gestures, her movements an amusing studied prissiness totally absent from Hilde and Anne. As Anna-Mary Fielding is as flouncy and frivolous as Hilde and Anne were staid and serious.

Tara Fitzgerald is excellent at playing the mysterious woman in Song. Fitzgerald always intimates that Carlotta is up to something, but to precisely what is never clear. Eventually, it dawns on us that what Carlotta intends by visiting Hugo may not be certain even to herself. What Fitzgerald seems to indicate is how Carlotta’s mind is continually revolving what to do with the information she has until, with Hilde’s help, its best use suddenly becomes clear.

As with Boxer’s George and Verner, Fitzgerald’s Linda and Maud are another study in contrasts. Fitzgerald’s Carlotta may have been cunning and calculating in Song, but in Shadows her Linda is a bundle of nerves ready to collapse in tears when the pressure becomes too much. Fitzgerald’s Maud, however, is the nearest to a hippie in any of the three plays. Maud is completely her own woman and cares nothing for what others think of her. Maud may initially be drawn to Verner because of pity, but Fitzgerald suggests that Maud is aware enough of her own emotions that if pity turns to love, she won’t censor herself.

When we enter the small theatre-in-the-round that the Orange Tree is, the door is labelled Room 354. Steffan Rizzi, who plays Felix, also entertains us with songs from the ’60s at the bar before the show and even during the double-bill. Designer Louie Whitemore has chosen furniture and clothing that will take you right back to the styles of ’60s, both the chic and the outlandish, if you were lucky enough to have lived through them.

You will emerge from Suite in Three Keys with a much greater understanding of Coward than you will have had before. As with Oscar Wilde, there is a flipside to wit which is a profound inquiry into life. More than in any of his other plays, in Suite in Three Keys Coward shows us that life is a stage and that our best strategy in getting through the action with grace is to find the role that lets us act with the greatest authenticity.

Christopher Hoile

Tours to the Theatre Royal Bath, July 9-13, 2024, and available online July 9-12 at orangetreetheatre.co.uk.

Photos: Emma Fielding as Anne, Tara Fitzgerald as Linda and Stephen Boxer as George in Shadows of the Evening; Stephen Boxer as Hugo in A Song at Twilight; Tara Fitzgerald as Carlotta in A Song at Twilight; Emma Fielding as Anna-Mary in Come Into the Garden, Maud. © 2024 Steve Greyson.

For tickets visit:orangetreetheatre.co.uk or www.theatreroyal.org.uk.