Noël Coward on (and in) Theatre

The 20th-century titan of English comedies and musicals dispenses trenchant wisdom on playwriting and much else in this sparkling anthology. Playwright and producer Day (The Noël Coward Reader) excerpts Noël Coward’s autobiography, diaries, letters, and articles, grouping them in loose thematic or chronological chapters held together with his own unobtrusive exposition. The topics run the gamut from playwriting strictures to flaws in Coward’s own works; tips for actors on when to accelerate the onstage pace (“[Listen] for the first sinister cough of boredom”) and how to avoid stage fright (he frowns on settling the nerves with booze and recommends the oft-neglected strategy of knowing one’s lines); and the menace of performers who manipulate authors into enlarging their roles. An aesthetic emerges: coward extols polished entertainments and technically proficient acting, scorns avant-garde plays that soapbox drearily about class oppression, and derides the “pretentious nonsense” of Method acting. (“Learn to laugh and cry—without feeling happy or sad,” he enjoins actors.) Day’s selections showcase Coward’s dazzling prose, which is always lively, urbane, and stocked with well-aimed zingers. (“It is odd that such brilliant wit should be allied to no humour at all,” he writes of Oscar Wilde.) Theater pros and fans alike will revel in Coward’s incisive, compulsively readable takes on showbiz. (Oct.)