Noël Coward, Back in Fashion on Stage

“Cocktails and laughter, but what comes after? Nobody knows,” observed Noël Coward in his 1925 song “Poor Little Rich Girl.” But now we do know one answer to that conundrum — it’s more Noël Coward.The plays penned by the urbane British artistic polymath, which mostly take place in drawing rooms and are characterized by arch wit and droll romantic sparring, seldom seem to have been more in demand on the stage than they are at this moment in time. A production of Coward’s 1931 marital battle “Private Lives” is scheduled to run in Broadway’s 2026-2027 season; over in London “The Good Wife” actress Christine Baranski will be making her West End debut in “Hay Fever” this fall; separate productions of Coward’s debut play “The Rat Trap” have been staged in both London and New York in the past few years. A fresh staging of his 18th century French-set play “The Marquise” is currently touring the UK, a few months after a touring production of “Easy Virtue”, starring Greta Scacchi, played at British venues. Pride of place in the Coward canon currently unquestionably belongs to a revival of “Fallen Angels,” his 1925 play about two well-heeled London married women, Julia Banbury and Jane Sterroll, who are plunged into disarray by the return of a Frenchman who had wooed both of them prior to each of them getting hitched. To say “Fallen Angels,” which stars Broadway behemoth Kelli O’Hara and Rose Byrne, recent winner of a Golden Globe Best Actress award for her performance in “If I Had Legs I’d Kick You,” is a smash hit is an understatement.Coward, who died in 1973, has never gone away — Kim Cattrall in “Private Lives” and Kevin Kline in “Present Laughter” have both graced the Great White Way in recent years — but there’s been nothing quite so good for Coward’s reputation like “Fallen Angels,” which closes today following a limited run, in years. It’s such a hot show that when Sun requested a press ticket to see it in the last few weeks of its run for this piece, we were firmly told by the show’s press agent a word that rhymes with ‘go’ and means the opposite.“Fallen Angels,” being staged at the Roundabout Theatre Company’s Todd Haimes Theater, sold out for its rest of the run but we were able to get a ticket for a recent matinee, albeit at a price that Coward would doubtless have dubbed “dreadfully expensive.” It was well worth it; while “Fallen Angels” has a wafer-thin story — Johnny Oleksinski, the New York Post’s resident Addison De Wittster, pithily summed the show up as “two sex-crazed women getting wasted”— the leading ladies were so hilariously sublime that to gripe about a lack of action is to lose the plot about what is an exceptional piece of escapism.Noël Coward photographed by Allan Warren in 1972. Wikimedia CommonsI had previously seen “Fallen Angels” in a charming 2013 production staged by the Shakespeare Theater of New Jersey which happens to be currently staging a production of “Private Lives.” For this production both Ms. Byrne and Ms. O’Hara have been nominated for Tony Awards. Ms. O’Hara’s physical comedy is superb and Ms. Byrne’s mannerisms so sharp that even during the curtain call I couldn’t tell whether she was acting when she expressed shock at seeing an audience member in the middle of the orchestra. Critics have been kind to the leads, though curiously the New Yorker has not reviewed “Fallen Angels,” possibly because Mr. Coward has not featured in an HBO TV series lately.New York magazine did give it a positive notice, but a curious headline: “Fallen Angels Makes a Great Case for Irrelevance.” Yet “Fallen Angels,” while unashamedly a theatrical trifle, is packed with contemporary bite. One of the play’s subplots revolves around the anti-climatic arrival of a plumber at Julia’s house when they had been anticipating their Gallic Adonis. Jane remarks to Julia, “I shall never forget your face when, after all that suspense, the plumber arrived.”Currently in the UK, a plumber, Robert Kenyon, may well soon be elected an MP for the Reform Party in the upcoming by-election in Makerfield in the North of England. On the left of the political spectrum, another plumber, Hannah Spencer, was recently elected an MP for the Green Party in the by-election at Gorton and Denton. That plumbers are emerging as an increasing populist force in the British political circus, is an unpredictable twist straight out of the Coward repertoire.Part of the pleasure of “Fallen Angels,” expertly helmed by director Scott Ellis, who brings another revival to life with seemingly effortless ease, is watching Ms. Byrne and Ms. O’Hara’s characters get increasingly drunk on copious champagne and martinis. The matinee felt like a splendid throwback boozy long lunch, replete with dazzlingly-inebriated hostesses and a hefty bill.The giddy atmosphere was reinforced by my immediate surroundings. To my left, a punter kept shutting his eyes, seemingly dozing off, only to burst into laughter at regular intervals—something I’d only seen once before at a Tom Stoppard play in London. To my right, an Italian gentleman, who from pre-show conversation I gathered had paid even more than I had to be there, left after an hour.More fool him. Perhaps part of the extensive appeal of “Fallen Angels” is that while it was written a century ago, given the state of the world outside, the audience remains, as Julia herself declares in the play, “laughing on the very edge of an abyss.” Expect a slew of further Noël Coward productions following the phenomenal success of “Fallen Angels.” The moment I switched my phone back on after exiting the theater, an email alert flashed up from a news site headlined, “Inside ‘Coward’ Bari Weiss’s ‘Shitshow’ at ’60 Minutes’.” Too many trips into Noël Coward’s world on Broadway might send me to bankruptcy court, but give me his world over the present condition of the real one any day..

Noël Coward, Back in Fashion on Stage

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