no, el coward

Our play-reading group just finished our second play by Noël Coward. We've all agreed that it will be our last.

Some time ago we read Blithe Spirit, and despite the degree that it's about the staging rather than the dialogue, we enjoyed it and decided to pick another one some time. I argued against Present Laughter, because I'd watched a tv presentation of that and found it boring and tedious, despite the fact that it starred Kevin Kline. The amount of bad writing required to make Kevin Kline boring and tedious is unimaginable.

Instead, we picked Private Lives, which as a play with only four characters (essentially: there's a maid with a brief walkon) was ideal for a four-reader group. It's the one about a divorced couple who run into each other while each on their honeymoon with a new partner, who rediscover first why they got married in the first place and then why they got divorced.

But no, it's more than that. They actually reunite, then split up again, then reunite again, meanwhile revealing themselves as both truly unpleasant people whom we felt bespoiled by trying to impersonate by reading their lines. This is the play with the infamous line so beloved by Brett Kavanaugh's frat brothers, "Certain women should be struck regularly, like gongs."

It should be noted that the woman addressed replies to the man saying it, "You're an unmitigated cad, and a bully." But he returns, "And you're an ill-mannered, bad-tempered slattern." We couldn't say that either of them were wrong.

As the play went on it turned out that the discarded partners, instead of sympathetic innocents, are just as bad as the other two. And we noticed retrospectively how the general air of nastiness and inhumanity infects Blithe Spirit as well: it was just disguised by the comic situation. This one is not so well-disguised. Coward's world turns out to be an unpleasant one we just don't want to spend any more time in, and so, no more.

And so, having done all of Shakespeare's history plays, we're turning to Marlowe's Edward II. Those people are also nasty and brutish, but they're not pretending to be oh-so-cleverly witty about it, and that makes all the difference.