by Noel Coward
Produced by The Public
Theatre
May, 2004
A STUDY GUIDE
PREPARED BY
MARTIN
ANDRUCKI
Charles A.
Dana Professor of Theater
Bates College
Born in 1899, Noel Coward was a successful child actor by 1911. He learned the
techniques of playwriting by first learning the art of performance.
His first play, I'll Leave It to You, was produced in 1920 when Coward was barely 21 years old. By 1924 he had achieved notoriety as the author of The Vortex, a lurid study of drug- addiction and perverse sex that reflected the moral turmoil of the 1920s. Indeed, much of Coward's early work, including Fallen Angels (1925), produced at the Public Theatre in 1999, explores the sexual and social taboo-breaking of that decade.
After The Vortex, Coward's career as a playwright was assured. However, he soon abandoned the dark themes of that early work, turning to comedy instead. By the end of his career he had become one of the most prolific and successful authors of light comedy and farce in the history of English theater. Among his best-known plays are Hay Fever (1925), Design for Living (1933), and Blithe Spirit (1941). Private Lives (1930) is considered by many his finest work. He died in Jamaica in 1973.
Coward, an actor as well as a playwright, often performed in his own plays, while in real life he assumed a public persona that closely resembled one of his own characters. As Sarah Duerden tells us, "the name 'Coward' has become synonymous with a certain English style: the elegant silk dressing gown, the cigarette holder, charm, wit, clipped phrases, upper-class accents, and sex appeal." What gives Coward's work its peculiar flavor is the way British suavity and social polish are juxtaposed in his plays with the violent and absurd behavior produced by his characters’ clamorous sexual desires and their uncontrollable feelings of jealousy, anger, and spite. Out of this conflict between elegant sang-froid and the hot-blooded madness of passion arises the essential comedy of Coward.
II.
THE SETTING. Act
One takes place on the terrace of a luxury hotel in Deauville, France. Divided in two by a line of potted plants,
each half of the terrace serves one of two adjoining suites which open to the
outside by French doors. Each suite, in
turn, is occupied by a pair of honeymooning guests. On either side of the line of potted plants is a “set of
suitable terrace furniture, two chairs, and a table. There are orange and white awnings shading the windows, as it is
summer.”
As the Frommer travel guide to the region tells
us, “Deauville has been associated with the rich and famous since it was
founded as an upscale resort in 1859 by the duc de Morny, Napoléon III's
half-brother. In 1913, it entered sartorial history when Coco Chanel launched
her career here by opening a boutique selling tiny hats that challenged the
then-current fashion of huge-brimmed hats loaded with flowers and fruit.”
Although the script does not name the hotel at
which the characters are staying, chances are it is either the Royal Barriere
or the Hotel Normandy.
The latter, again according to Frommer, “is the
most famous hotel in Deauville, with a legendary chic that dates back to the
Edwardian Age. The Anglo-Norman design, from 1912, includes half-timbering,
dovecotes, turrets, gables, and a decor that resembles a cozy but stately
English country house. . . . Originally built to house well-heeled gamblers
from the nearby casino, it continues to draw the gambling crowd today.”
On the other hand, if the honeymooners are
staying at the Royal Barriere, built in 1913, they are enjoying a location
that, “adjoins the casino and fronts a park near the Channel.” Moreover, says Frommer, “It rises like a
palace, with columns and exposed timbers. Although it doesn't have the
‘insider’ cachet of the Hôtel Normandy, it is a grander and more opulent
hotel.”
In either case, a top-class suite at one of
these hotels at 2004 prices will cost between $1200 and $1600 per night. Allowing for inflation, the rates would no
doubt have been comparably high in 1930.
Act Two is set in Paris in a “charmingly
furnished flat” on the Avenue Montaigne, a street that has been described as
“well-known for its couturiers and perfume shops . . .one of the most
fashionable in the capital.” This flat,
large enough to accommodate a grand piano and a full complement of tables, chairs, sofas, settees, and china
cabinets is, like the hotel in Deauville, comfortable, spacious, and ultra
deluxe.
The action thus unfolds in settings that embody
glamorous fantasy. Casinos, renowned couturiers, and Parisian chic form
the context for this erotic farce, providing a gilded backdrop to hormonal
chaos. This is the world of dreamlike
opulence that would be captured in escapist Hollywood films of the 30s, the
kind of setting where Fred and Ginger might go waltzing by in elegant evening
wear as a society orchestra plays the buttoned-up jazz of Paul Whiteman.
Apart from creating an aura of stylish luxury,
the settings also provide an ironic contrast to the shenanigans of the
characters. You can install human
beings amid palatial architecture, house them at swank addresses, or surround
them with pricey furniture, but none of this will prevent them from falling
prey to the demons of desire. The
baronial hotel or chic flat is just as likely a venue for illicit sex and
jealous violence as the dingiest dive in town.
III.
THE PLOT. Act
One opens with Sibyl, a young honeymooner, calling to her new husband, Elyot,
to join her on the terrace of their Deauville hotel. As they talk, we learn that this is Elyot’s second marriage—his
first, to Amanda, having ended in divorce five years earlier after a
sensationally stormy relationship.
Sibyl’s relentless curiosity about Amanda yields little in the way of
information from Elyot, who is irritated by her questioning. But it reveals a great deal about Sibyl’s
impression of her predecessor—an impression quite probably conveyed by Elyot
himself in previous conversations. “She
lost you,” Sibyl asserts, “with her violent tempers and carryings on.” She was “uncontrolled, and wicked, and
unfaithful.”
Elyot, however, does not join the attack on his
ex-wife. Although he says that he
despises her, mostly he claims to feel sorry for her “because she’s marked for tragedy.” Rather than tearing Amanda apart, Elyot jabs
at Sybil, playfully but caustically, insulting her bossy mother, her bad
dancing, and her kittenish feminine
wiles. Meanwhile he insists that Amanda “had some very good qualities,” which
included being “pretty and sleek” and dancing “like an angel.”
With his guarded attitude to Amanda, and his
arm’s length stance toward Sybil, we
sense a clear ambivalence in Elyot’s feelings about his second marriage. As they head back into their suite to dress
for dinner, it’s clear that romantic passion has had little to do with luring
Elyot into the arms of his new wife.
No sooner do Sibyl and Elyot disappear than
Victor steps onto the terrace from the neighboring suite, calling for “Mandy”
to join him, producing the mirror image of the play’s beginning. Within a handful of lines, we learn that an
impish fate has placed Amanda and her second husband—also on their
honeymoon—right next door to Elyot and Sybil.
The scene between Victor and Amanda is a virtual
echo of the previous exchange between Sybil and Eliot. Victor insistently harps on Elyot’s faults,
Amanda irritably evades the subject, and both convey a fundamental impression
of incompatibility. As with their
counterparts on the other side of the terrace, their scene ends with them
leaving to dress for dinner at the casino.
After a moment during which the stage is empty,
Elyot appears bearing a tray of cocktails.
As he sits on the balustrade, looking out at the view, with an orchestra
somewhere below playing a romantic tune,
Amanda appears, also with a tray of drinks. The parallel dramatic lines laid down in the first two scenes are
about to be wrenched into convergence, as the fugitives from a catastrophic
marriage meet again.
At first they are horrified to find themselves
in such proximity. After a few
strangled lines expressing their dismay, each rushes off to a respective spouse
to demand an immediate departure from Deauville.
This apparently mad whim provokes quarrels on
both sides of the terrace, first between Sibyl and Elyot, then between Victor and Amanda. Reduced to tears by Elyot’s insults, Sibyl storms off to the dining
room; driven to a fury by Amanda’s abuse, Victor exits to the bar. Equally incensed at their departed partners,
Elyot and Amanda share cigarettes, cocktails, grievances, and, eventually,
romantic memories.
One thing leads to another, and these two
volatile lovers find their old passion for each other re-ignited. In a moment of madness, they decide to
abscond together to Paris and take up residence in Amanda’s flat on the Avenue
Montaigne, living together in reckless bliss without benefit of matrimony or
social approval. But before they run
off, they decide they must make a plan to avoid “all those awful rows” that separated
them in the past. Amanda insists that
she, “won’t move from here unless we have a compact, a sacred, sacred compact
never to quarrel again.” She proposes a
“phrase or catchword” which, when spoken by either, will cut off all
conversation for five minutes. Agreeing
on “Solomon Isaacs” as the magic words, they flee into the night, headed for
Paris and unwedded bliss.
A moment later Victor and Sibyl return to the
terrace, looking sheepishly for their missing mates. As the curtain falls, they decide to share the remaining
cocktails, drinking to “absent friends.”
Act Two opens with Elyot and Amanda enjoying
after-dinner drinks in their Parisian apartment. Since returning from Deauville, they have spent the evenings at
home, enjoying the “strangely peaceful” consolations of each other’s
company. Given their explosive tempers,
however, such tranquility seems likely to break down sooner or later. In anticipation of which, they have decided to shorten their time-out phrase from
“Solomon Isaacs” to “Sollocks.”
Their conversation meanders along, touching
wittily but uneventfully on such miscellaneous topics as foreign travel,
religion, and the psychological hazards of marriage. Until they come to the subject of Claire Lavenham, an attractive
widow with whom Amanda often pictured Elyot “bouncing about” on a divan. Suddenly, the ashes of jealousy send up a
lick of fresh flame:
AMANDA: Did you ever
have an affair with her? Afterwards I
mean?
ELYOT: Why do you want
to know?
AMANDA: Curiosity, I
suppose.
ELYOT: Dangerous.
AMANDA: Oh not now . . . I wouldn’t expect you to have been celibate during those five
years, any more than I was.
ELYOT: (stopping his glass half-way to his mouth;
jumping) What?
And they’re off, trading darts about promiscuity
and loose behavior until they find themselves on the brink of the precipice,
about to tumble over into one of their hair-pulling rows. At which point Amanda notes, “We should have
said Sollocks ages ago.”
They calm down, and try again to make their way
through the evening as a quietly loving couple, only to work their way once
more—as if drawn by an irresistible force—to the brink of violence, as Elyot
works himself into a jealous rage over Victor.
This time he calls, “Sollocks,” halting their mad descent into conflict.
And so it goes throughout the act: they move through a kind of repetitive
dance, a cyclic sequence wherein charm leads to sarcasm, which leads to spite,
which leads to rage, which leads to “Sollocks.” Each cycle draws them closer to the edge, each escape grows
narrower and narrower, until finally they work themselves into a fit of passion
far too potent to be quelled by the feeble magic of their catchword. Words lead to blows, blows to overturned furniture,
and overturned furniture to mad grappling on the floor, until at last they
exhaust themselves in an orgy of farcical violence. At which moment Victor and Sybil appear, having finally tracked
their absconding spouses to this den, not of iniquity, but of absurdity. And so the curtain falls on Act Two.
Act Three begins the following morning, with
Victor and Sybil sleeping amid the wreckage of the previous night’s row. As Amanda and Elyot emerge from their
respective bedrooms, they realize they must confront a social situation “entirely without precedent,” as Elyot says, and for which “we have no
prescribed etiquette to fall back upon.”
The remainder of the act consists in watching these four people picking
their way awkwardly through this
no-man’s-land of manners and morals.
Will Elyot and Victor resort to fisticuffs? Will
Sybil consider a reconciliation with Elyot?
Will Victor divorce Amanda, leaving her to struggle through the
remainder of life under a cloud of disgrace?
(Under English divorce laws of the time, a man would have to prove that
his wife had committed adultery in order to divorce her. This would be a harsh step, since the woman
would then suffer an ineradicable moral blemish, becoming a pariah in
respectable society. A woman divorcing
her husband would also have to charge and prove adultery, but the man would not
be subject to the same opprobrium.) All of these possibilities are explored in
a sequence of two-character scenes, until finally the options are sorted out:
Elyot and Victor will not come to blows; Victor will do the gentlemanly thing, and allow Amanda to
divorce him; and Sybil will not move to divorce Elyot for a year, thus leaving
open the possibility of reconciliation.
Having settled these nettlesome, and potentially
explosive, questions in reasonably civilized fashion, the fractured couples
then sit down to a French breakfast of coffee and brioches. As they awkwardly attempt to sustain a
stream of polite small talk, we begin to see that Victor and Sybil have not
worn well on each other during their Deauville to Paris adventure. As jab leads to dig, and dig to insult, they
begin acting just like Elyot and Amanda in Act Two. Soon, they start saying the unspeakable to one another. Victor to
Sybil: “You’re one of the most completely idiotic women I’ve ever met.” Sybil in return: “You’re certainly the
rudest man I’ve ever met . . . . You insufferable great brute.” And what is the casus belli of these hostilities?
Nothing other that the relative merits of their guilty spouses, with
Victor spewing contempt for Elyot, and Sybil pouring scorn on Amanda. Simply to talk of Elyot and Amanda, it
seems, is to touch an emotional third rail, to be hit with the same sort of
behavioral voltage that regularly jolts them.
And so, as the guilty lovers exchange affectionate signals of yet
another post-Sollocks reconciliation, Victor and Sybil fall to their own Apache
dancing: “she slaps his face hard, and he
takes her by the shoulders and shakes her like a rat.” Meanwhile, their own demons on hold, “Amanda and Elyot go smilingly out through
the double doors, and—the Curtain falls.”
IV.
THE CHARACTERS.
Elyot
worries his new wife by being blasé about their honeymoon. After all, he has been this route
before. Thus our first impression is of
a man who is somewhat disengaged from what ought to be one of life’s
landmarks. Not only does he seem to be
detached from the moment, he also strikes us as emotionally distant from his
bride. “You’re very strange all of a
sudden, and rather cruel,” Sybil tells him after he accuses her of being a
calculating “little sharp-eyed, blonde kitten.” But it is not so much cruelty that Sybil detects as its first
cousin, irony—a way of standing outside experience, observing it with a mocking
smile. Earlier, for example, there is
this exchange:
SIBYL: I musn’t get
sunburnt.
ELYOT: Why not?
SIBYL: I hate it on
women. . . .
ELYOT: I hope you
don’t hate on men.
SIBYL: Of course I
don’t. It’s suitable to men.
ELYOT: You’re a
completely feminine little creature, aren’t you? . . . Everything in its place.
. . . If you feel you’d like me to
smoke a pipe, I’ll try and master it.
SIBYL: I like a man to
be a man, if that’s what you mean.
When Elyot offers to learn pipe-smoking, he is
making an ironic joke. He no more
intends to take up that sort of hearty, masculine habit than he means to fight
with Victor in Act Three. Instead, by
pretending to conventional masculinity, he mocks it, showing he stands
humorously outside the scheme of values and allegiances of which pipes and
fistfights are symbols. Such tokens of
social conformity are merely poses to be assumed and cast off as whim or
convenience dictate. Later on, an
enraged—and deeply sincere—Victor accuses Elyot of “incessant trivial
flippancy.” He is exactly right. Elyot takes nothing seriously, certainly not
marriage vows, those dreary expressions of conventional morality. Instead, he stands apart, watching himself
and others with a weary smile.
What he expects from his second marriage, he
tells Sybil, is a sort of emotional somnabulism, something “undramatic. . . .
steady and sweet, to smooth out your nerves when you’re tired. Something tremendously cosy.” A prescription, he realizes at once, for
tedium: “Oh my dear, I do hope it’s not going to be dull for you.” Clearly, he expects it to be dull for
him. His only compensation, it seems,
will be the amusement to be gained by living his life as a private joke.
It is only when he reconnects with Amanda that
he overcomes his detachment and begins to live as if he meant it. He stops posturing, and swats down Amanda’s
assertion that they are “starting afresh with two quite different people. . . .
In love all over again.” “No,” he tells
her forthrightly, “We’re not in love all over again, and you know it.” Being with Amanda shakes him out of his
ironic lethargy. Like a male sleeping
beauty awakened by a kiss, he emerges from the emotional hibernation he has
described to Sybil, and runs off with his charming princess to Paris.
Of course, real feeling turns out to be rather
strong medicine—too strong even for “Sollocks”—but no matter. Once the elixir of life is back in his
veins, he seems unable to give it up, and so off he runs again with Amanda at
the end of the play, fleeing from convention and detachment, and from the state
of suspended animation in which they imprison him.
Amanda
too seems to be merely playing at life when she is apart
from Elyot. As she says to Victor by
way of explaining the failure of her first marriage, “I suffered a good deal
and had my heart broken. But it wasn’t
an innocent girlish heart. It was
jagged with sophistication. I’ve always
been sophisticated, far too knowing.”
Clearly this is pure camp, a self-mocking
performance. Only a joker—or a
pretentious fool—would call herself “jagged with sophistication.” And Amanda is certainly no fool. Like Elyot, she seems to be standing outside
herself, making fun of what she sees,
and pulling Victor’s leg. Poor square
that he is, his leg is always there, waiting to be yanked by his mocking
wife. Thus, in their first exchange on
the terrace, her tongue is always in her cheek, while Victor’s foot seems stuck
in his mouth:
VICTOR: You look
wonderful. . . . Like a beautiful
advertisement for something.
AMANDA: Nothing
peculiar, I hope. . . . (rubbing her face
on his shoulder) That stuff’s very
rough.
VICTOR: Don’t you like
it?
AMANDA: A bit hearty,
isn’t it?
VICTOR: Do you love
me?
AMANDA: Of course,
that’s why I’m here. . . .
VICTOR: I couldn’t
love you more than I do now.
AMANDA: Oh, dear. I did so hope our honeymoon was going to be
progressive.
VICTOR: Where did you
spend the last one? . . . Did he start
quarreling with you right away? . . .
You poor child.
AMANDA: You must try
not to be pompous, dear.
Seen through Amanda’s ironic gaze, poor Victor
becomes a cartoon Englishman: a humorless, pompous bore, wrapped in excessively
fuzzy tweeds. He is a sort of yarn ball
that Amanda plays with as long as it amuses her, and then drops in a sudden fit
of indifference. Only Elyot’s arrival
knocks her off kilter, upsets her perfect, mocking poise. Upon first sight of him, she flies into a
panic, and spins absurd falsehoods in an attempt to persuade Victor to leave
the hotel immediately. Staid Briton
that he is, he refuses to act on such flimsy premises, and Amanda flies into a
rage. On the spot she seems to validate
her theory about the real nature of our private lives, which, she maintains,
are dictated by the operation of “various cosmic thingummys,” thanks to which
“there’s no knowing what one mightn’t do.”
She and Elyot, in fact, were like “two violent acids bubbling about in a
nasty matrimonial bottle.”
The enemy of irony, then, is chemistry—or
rather, the heat produced by the chemical interaction of such dangerous
elements as love, jealousy, lying, and recklessness. In passing from Victor to Elyot, Amands passes from a state of
chemical inertia to one of explosiveness.
But even as she makes this transition, the ironic part of her stands
back, amusedly observing the pull of the thingummys. Having quarreled with Victor, she stands on the terrace with an
equally vexed Elyot, looking out at the gorgeous view and listening to the
orchestra play a romantic tune they remember from their past lives as
honeymooners together. It’s a
perfectly cliched moment (“Darling, they’re playing our song!”), and Amanda
knows it. But if she cannot resist the
cliché’s seductiveness, neither can she resist commenting ironically on
it. “Strange how potent cheap music
is,” she says—as if watching herself in
the mirror while she falls in love.
So Amanda replicates Elyot, and as everyone
knows that’s not supposed to work in romance where, as the commonplace has it,
opposites attract. Which also means
that similars ought to repel.
Eventually, in Act Two, they do, and, as we have seen, the fur flies as
cosmic thingummys and violent acids splatter the walls.
Elyot’s response to the embarrassments of Act
Three is, as Victor notes scornfully, flippancy. Amanda’s, as we might expect, is further camp performance. At first, with Victor, she plays the role of
fallen woman—an echo, perhaps, of La
Dame aux Camelias:
I ought never to have
married you; I’m a bad lot. . . . I
won’t make any difficulties. I’ll go
away, far away, Morocco, or Tunis, or somewhere. I shall probably catch some dreadful disease and die out there,
all alone—oh dear!
When even Victor sees through her self-pitying
histrionics, she changes her tune, and declares, “I’ve changed my mind, it’s
the wrong time of year for Tunis. I
shall go somewhere quite different. I
believe Brioni . . . is very nice in the summer.” [Brioni being an idyllic archipelago in the Adriatic Sea.] Victor
is not having any of this either, demanding, “Why won’t you be serious for just
one moment.” But her seriousness is
pretty much reserved for Elyot—or, at least, for quarrelling with Elyot.
In her next role, she offers her unwelcome
guests a parody of the gracious hostess, handing about coffee and brioches, and
chatting airily about the pleasures of travel:
AMANDA: (with great vivacity) Do you know, I
really think I love travelling more than anything else in the world! It always gives me such a tremendous feeling
of adventure. . . . [T]he thrill of . . . trundling along on trains and ships,
and then the most thrilling thing of all . . . arriving at strange places, and
seeing strange people, and eating strange foods—
ELYOT: And making
strange noises afterwards.
At which point, the synergy of Amanda’s parody
and Elyot’s flippancy produces a dynamic result: she explodes with laughter,
choking on her coffee. The two lovers
reunite over a joke that undermines the bourgeois proprieties of the breakfast
table.
Sybil
doesn’t like to get suntanned, finding it unfeminine. She likes a man to be a man, and vice versa. She hates “half-masculine women who go
banging about,” has a mother who seems to intimidate Elyot, and claims a
“talent for organization.” Despite
which, she loses her trunk on the trip from Deauville to Paris, a misadventure
she blames on Victor, who failed to tip the porter adequately. So despite her managerial skills, she
depends on men to get things done right.
Victor finds her “an ass,” “one of the most
completely idiotic women” he’s ever met, “a silly, scatter-brained, little
fool.” Finally, in a superb burst of
invective, Victor empties both barrels at Elyot’s pretty, blonde bride:
It’s a tremendous
relief to me to have an excuse to insult you.
I’ve had to listen to your weeping and wailing for days. You’ve clacked at me, and sniveled at me
until you’ve nearly driven me insane. I
always thought you were stupid from the first, but I must say I never realized
that you were a malicious little vixen as well.
Poor Sybil.
Is she guilty of this monstrous indictment? Or is Victor simply driven over the edge of civility by his
raging hormones?
The answer is doubtless somewhere in
between. In Act One, Elyot worries that
Sybil will manage him—that is, turn him into her idea of a suitably conformist
male. That would be vixen’s work
indeed, the project of a sly little fox.
But in the end she is defeated, no match for Elyot’s elusive
ironies. Like Elyot and Amanda, the
thingummys seize her by the scruff of the neck, and hurl her into a battle
royale with Victor. But unlike them,
she has never engaged in any elegant verbal sparring before the slugfest.
Victor
is in many ways the male counterpart of Sybil.
He dislikes suntanned women, too.
And he also likes men to be men, as he demonstrates with his vigorously
fuming pipe and scratchy tweeds.
Indeed, among his most ardent moments in the play is his declaration
that, “I’m glad I’m normal.”
Amanda is nonplussed by that remark, normalcy
being among the lowest items on her personal list of desirable qualities. But she has chosen Victor, after all,
presumably in full knowledge of his abounding
conventionality. He is her
anti-Elyot, the man who will replace the flippant ironist in her life.
In trying to handle Amanda, however, Victor is
like a man trying to get a grip on mercury.
It simply cannot be done. He is
helpless before her. As she says in Act
Two, “He used to look at me hopelessly like a lovely spaniel, and I sort of
melted like snow in the sunlight.”
Victor is a faithful dog; Amanda is the new-fallen snow. How must a dog feel as it watches snow
melt? Confused about its disappearance,
one might guess.
And such is the case with Victor. He tries to do the “right thing” in response
to his wife’s delinquency, but nobody will deal with him forthrightly, and so
he is left befuddled, like a dog with a stick no one will toss. Elyot treats the idea of fisticuffs as
risible while Amanda treats the notion of serious moral discussion as a boorish
imposition. Amanda patronizes him, and
Elyot calls him a rampaging gas bag.
Such are the rewards of simple virtue in the land of the thingummy.
V.
THEMES. Private Lives seems to dramatize the
successful escape of its chief characters, Amanda and Elyot, from the arena of
public events into the realm of exclusively personal experience. A product of the giddy sexual upheavals of
the 1920s, Private Lives premiered in
1930, on the heels of the stock market crash, and at the dawn of a decade of
social and political turbulence that Harold Clurman would later call the
"fervent years." For Amanda
and Elyot, however, the political upheavals of the "Red Decade" lie
in an inconceivable future. The outrage
over economic injustice that would fuel the labor movements in England and
America; the looming tumult of fascism in Spain, Italy, and Germany; the
growing appeal to political "progressives" of Bolshevik Russia and
Big Brother Stalin all lurk on the far side of a horizon that these blessed
hedonists never cross. Amanda and Elyot
seem to be the favored children of history, privileged madcaps whose main
concern is preserving the atmosphere of "incessant trivial flippancy"
that cushions their unconventional lives.
The opening of the play finds them in adjoining
rooms in a posh hotel on the coast of France.
They occupy two rooms rather than one because they have been divorced
for five years, and are each on a second honeymoon with a second spouse—Elyot
with Sibyl, and Amanda with Victor. But
both for them and for their new mates, their first marriage to one another
remains an inescapable focus of conversation and concern. In spite of the passage of time and the
encounter with others, Amanda and Elyot still dominate one another's erotic
imaginations. Their marriage was brief,
intense, passionate, violent, and unforgettable. As Amanda says, attempting to describe their gorgeous
eccentricity,
I think very few
people are completely normal really, deep down in their private lives. It all depends on a combination of
circumstances. If all the various
cosmic thingummys fuse at the same moment, and the right spark is struck,
there's no knowing what one mightn't do.
That was the trouble with Elyot and me, we were like two violent acids
bubbling about in a nasty little matrimonial bottle.
These volatile lovers separate only to reunite,
like chemical elements enacting the irresistible compulsions of nature. When they discover one another across the
shrubbery
separating their terraces, the conjunction of
their "cosmic thingummys" is swift and overwhelming. The memory of the passionate love they
shared five years earlier momentarily eclipses the equally vivid recollection
of their passionate jealousies and resentments, and they decide to run off
together to Paris, abandoning their new spouses in a single instant of madness.
Thus far, Amanda and Elyot seem to function
outside the grim realities of the everyday social world. Their lives occur in a happy bubble of
deluxe resorts, swank hotels, expensive restaurants, glittering casinos, and
charming little flats on the
Right-Bank.
What propels them is pure appetite, for food, scenery, champagne, and
love—commodities on which they are apparently free to spend limitless amounts
of time and money. They are fabulous creatures, unconstrained by jobs, or
families, by moral inhibition or religious belief. As Elyot says after they have arrived in Paris:
Ì
ELYOT: You have no faith, that's what's wrong with you.
AMANDA: Absolutely none.
ELYOT: Don't you believe in—? (He nods upwards.)
AMANDA: No, do you?
ELYOT (shaking his head): No. What about—? (He points downwards.)
AMANDA: Oh dear no.
ELYOT: Don't you believe in anything?
AMANDA: Oh yes, I believe in being kind to everyone, and giving money to old beggar women, and being as gay as possible.
This is a pretty flimsy code of ethics, especially since Amanda's kindness apparently does not extend to Elyot's new wife, to her own second husband, or, through much of the play, to Elyot himself. Which leaves one wondering how old beggar ladies would actually fare at her hands.
But for all its omissions—or perhaps precisely because of them—this credo does sound a distinctively modern note. In fact, like so many of her literary siblings in the twentieth century, Amanda believes in nothing. She inhabits a universe devoid of transcendent meaning in which the only imperative is to be "gay." In his own agnostic moment Elyot asserts, “You musn't be serious . . . It's just what they want. . . . All the futile moralists who try to make life unbearable. Laugh at them. Be flippant. Laugh at everything, all their sacred shibboleths.”
Their withdrawal from the everyday world of
their fellow mortals is thus complete: they have removed themselves physically
from contact with daily banality, and spiritually from any communion with the
believers and moralists whose convictions roil the world outside their private
sanctuary. All that matters to them is feeling, the individual drama of
love. And even that has its
limitations:
Ì
AMANDA: What is so horrible is that one can't stay happy.
ELYOT: Darling, don't say that.
AMANDA: It's true. The whole business is a very poor joke.
ELYOT: Meaning that sacred and beautiful thing, Love?
AMANDA: Yes, meaning just that.
And of course the whole thrust of the play is to
show what a colossal joke love is, how tenderness and romance can change in an
instant to bickering and violence, and then, just as irrationally, change back
again. The whole second act is just
such a sequence of oscillating emotions, culminating in a ludicrous explosion
that shatters their Parisian idyll. The
tides of feeling ebb and flow pointlessly in their pointless universe, and yet
this flux is all they live for.
Thus, Amanda and Elyot, seemingly carefree
children of the naughty 20s, might actually be viewed as older cousins of that
absurdist duo of the 50s: Beckett’s Vladimir and Estragon . Though they are blessed with fatter
bankrolls and better clothes (and exhibit no interest in Godot), they have approximately the same goals,
namely to pass the time while waiting for their private lives to end.
Eventually, though, the world does catch up with
them in the persons of their pursuing spouses, an encounter Elyot and Amanda
have been dreading from the outset of their escapade. Victor and Sibyl bring with them a middle-class concern for moral
and legal propriety, for some semblance of meaning and rationality in life. Theirs
is the voice of the community, of the universe of social values at which the
fugitive lovers have been thumbing their noses throughout the play.
Victor and Sibyl arrange for divorces, and
devise face-saving strategies that will avoid humiliation and
"mud-slinging." Victor even attempts to achieve something like a
moral accounting in the wake of the chemical chaos of Elyot's and Amanda's
passions:
AMANDA (turning away): I see you're determined to make me serious, whether I like it or not.
VICTOR: I married you because I loved you.
MANDA: Stop it, Victor! Stop it! I won't listen!
VICTOR: I expect I
love you still; one doesn't change all in a minute. You never loved me. I see
that now, of course, so perhaps everything has turned out for the best really.
Evidently Victor hasn't heard that one does
change all in a minute, and that we are powerless to resist this natural
volatility.
And so the play approaches its conclusion,
Amanda and Elyot chastened by the realization of their folly and by the sobering
influence of their betrayed spouses.
The social world seems in the end to have triumphed over their private
insurrection—until,
that is, the two fractured couples sit down to
eat breakfast together, a civilized ritual that will send them all on their
ways back to sanity.
Beneath the rattle of small-talk, however, we
begin to hear the ominous buzz of irrational feelings. Unsuspected resentments break into the open,
insults begin to fly, and with them blows. The Vesuvius of passion erupts yet
again, demolishing the tidy solutions and sensible arrangements so painfully
cobbled together just moments before.
And under cover of the smoke and thunder created by this volcano, Amanda
and Elyot once again slip away from the clutches of the bourgeois universe.
For Noel Coward, then, life is a kind of giddy
chase, with the winners eluding the deadly embrace of respectability. Fortunately, explosive nature, more powerful
than any social norms, is always there to assist the fugitives. Like our feelings, which ebb and flow, our
relations with the social world are also variable, creating a sort of cyclical
drama: the world is always catching up with its gay escapees, but if they are
determined enough to flout the moralists, they are always breaking free again.
VI.
QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION
1. Why
did the playwright set the action amid such glamour and luxury?
2. What
is the significance of the title?
3. Why
are Sybil and Victor so interested in their spouses’ first marriages?
4. What
does Elyot do for a living? Victor? Amanda?
Sybil?
5. What
is the significance of the answers to the previous questions?
6. What
will happen to Amanda and Elyot after they flee from the flat in Paris?
7. Should
we feel that Amanda and Elyot are behaving badly, or immorally, when they run
off together at the end of Act One?
8. If
Sybil and Victor had met each other before meeting Elyot and Amanda, is it
possible they would have fallen in love, married, and been happy together?
9. What
is irony? How does it work? Why do people engage in it?
10. Who
is the most sympathetic character in the play?
The least sympathetic? Why?