The biography Noël Coward deserves

‘In the prison of his days,’ W.H. Auden wrote, ‘teach the free man how to praise.’ Noël Coward’s last performance, possessing, like so much of his work, a scene-stealing quality, was in the 1969 film The Italian Job. He plays the gangster Mr Bridger, masterminding a gold robbery in Turin from his prison cell. In his final appearance he walks like a Ziegfeld heroine down the central stairs of the jail to the fervent acclamation of the other inmates, acknowledging the ovation to left and right. Coward had abundant worldly acclaim; and he knew very well where the walls lay, and the doors that would not be breached.

That knowledge has served him extremely well. Many of his contemporaries thought that his dedication to the ephemeral, responding to the fads of the moment, would prove fatal to his claims on posterity. The opposite has proved to be the case. Though most of his 50-odd plays are forgotten, the best of them are indestructible: Blithe Spirit, Private Lives and Hay Fever are universally acknowledged masterpieces, and others turn up regularly, including Design for Living, Present Laughter and The Vortex. In Which We Serve and Brief Encounter are classics of the cinema; and dozens of the enchanting songs have held their own. His impact was immediate, and enduring. The repartee in Waiting for Godot and Endgame, or in many of Harold Pinter’s plays, owes much to the absurd exchanges in Private Lives. And what is the hit TV series Schitt’s Creek but six seasons of Hay Fever?

He was extraordinarily original. Hay Fever may be squarely within the sublime English tradition of stage comedies about precisely nothing, but its cadences are astonishing. Has there ever been a curtain fall like the one at the end of the first act, with the characters’ small talk failing, and them staring at each other aghast? Coward went on being innovative, even when fashion turned against him.