Noel Coward and Sexual Modernism:

Private Lives as Queer Comedy^

PENNY FARFAN

Someday Til find you.

Moonlight behind you,
True to the dream I am dreaming.
As 1 draw near you
You'll smile a little smile;
For a little while
We shall stand
Hand in hand.
I'll leave you never.
Love you for ever.
All our past sorrow redeeming:
Try to make it true.
Say you love me too.
Someday I'll find you again.
Noel Coward, "Someday Til Find You." Private Lives (Song Book I78-79I)

The emergence of modem drama in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth

centuries was integrally linked to the development of modem sexual identities, and Noel Coward's career was at once shaped by and deftnitive of this
larger historical development. Coward began his career when male homosexuality was still illegal in England and the imprisonment of Oscar Wilde
for "gross indecency" was still a recent memory; his breakthrough play
The Vortex premiered in 1924. just four years before Radclyffe Hall's lesbian novel The Well of Loneliness was banned for obscenity. Coward's historical situation as a necessarily closeted homosexual raises the question of
whether and how the subversiveness of his sexual identity is reflected in his
work.^
Modern Drama. 48:4 (Winter 2005) 677

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PENNY FARFAN

Alan Sinfield has suggested that "[t]heatre has been a particular site for the
formation of dissident sexual identities" and that, while research on gay and lesbian theatre has tended to focus on issues of censorship and thus "'produces a
story of harassment and repression," there has in fact been "a lot more sexual
dissidence in theatre than has been properly registered" (Out on Stage 1, 2, 2).
Noel Coward serves as a case in point. Coward spent his public life trying to
pass as straight, but Sinfield recalls that to his own "lower-middle-class, scholarship-boy, Royal-Court, 1960s, Gay-Lib sensibility Coward's persona in its
entirety, and all his characters and everything to do with his kind of theatre,
appeared tinged with effeminacy" {Out on Stage roo).^ Moreover, noting the
ties of friendship between Coward and Radclyffe Hall, who was an avid theatregoer, Terry Castle has suggested that Coward may have been the inspiration for
the "increasingly sleek, androgynous look" that Hall began to affect during the
late i 920s (33). In turn. Hall's fashionable appearance, together with that of her
equally stylish but more feminine lover Una Troubridge. helped to establish the
early-twentieth-century image ofthe lesbian as. in Havelock Ellis's words, "terribly modem & shingled & monocled" (qtd. in Baker 203). Coward was thus an
important figure in the emergence of modem sexual identities over the course
ofthe early-to-mid-twentieth century and, as Sinfield notes, "managed to construct a knowing subculture of privileged insiders," "[ejven while attracting the
respectable, middlebrow playgoer" (Out on Stage 106).
As recently as 2002, however, in an echo of William Archer's T895 statement that Oscar Wilde's play The Importance of Being Earnest "imitates
nothing, represents nothing, means nothing, is nothing, except a sort of rondo
capriccioso, in which the artist's fingers run with crisp irresponsibility up and
down the keyboard of life" (190), the distinguished theatre critic Robert
Brustein described Coward's 1930 comedy Private Lives as "a comic souffle
with no plot, no characters, no theme, and no apparent purpose other than to
consolidate its author's reputation for witty sangfroid" (26). In this essay, I
want to consider how. while it continues to "pass" as light entertainment
within the theatrical mainstream, the seemingly straight and perennially popular PnVa/e Lives, in which Coward originally performed the male lead, is not
as straightforward, clear-cut, and unambiguous in its representation of gender
and sexuality as it might initially and superficially seem.
Crucial to this analysis is a consideration of how Coward's queer manipulations of conventional comic form unsettled the gender and sexual norms that
have been fundamental to comedy from its origins in ancient Greece through to
the present day, Aristophanes is the earliest comic playwright whose works have
survived, and in the Symposium, Plato represents Aristophanes as offering an
explanation of the origins of love and human sexual desire that is at once ludicrous and poignant and that provides a suggestive starting point for my reading
of Private Lives. According to Aristophanes, at least as Plato represents him,

Private Lives as Queer Comedy

679

the original human nature was not like the present, but different. The sexe.s were not
iwo as they are now. but originally three in number; there wa.s man. woman, and the
union ofthe two, having a name corresponding to this double nature, which had
once a real existence, but is now lost, and the word "Androgynous" is only preserved
as a term of reproach. (188)
As Plato's character Aristophanes tells it, these primeval humans "made an
attack upon the gods," which caused Zeus to punish them by cutting them in
two. Thereafter,
Each of us when separated, having one side only, like a flat fish, is but the indenture
of a man. and he is always looking for his other half. Men who are a section of
Ihat double nature which was once called Androgynous are lovers ot women [...]
[T]he women who are a section of the woman do not care for men, but have female
attachments; the female companions are of this sort. But they who are a section of
the male, follow the male |...] and are not naturally inclined to marry or beget
children, - if at all, they do so only in obedience to the law; but they are satisfied if
they may be allowed to live with one another unwedded.[...) (igo-91)
Aristophanes concludes that while this ancient desire for one's other half manifests itself as sexual desire, what we truly desire is in fact to "[meet] and
[melt] into one another, thus becoming one instead of two [...] And the reason
is that human nature was originally one and we were a whole, and the desire
and pursuit of the whole is called love" (192).
Despite Aristophanes' status as the father of comic drama (so to speak),
comedy has, for most of theatre history, retained little of the tolerance for the
varieties of human gender identities and sexual desires and practices that characterize his view of love as represented by Plato in the Symposium. Instead,
comedy has traditionally functioned as a means or "technology" (de Lauretis)
by which normative and interdependent ideologies of gender and sexuality
have been instilled in the audience as social body, indeed, in a passing remark
in the Poetics, Aristotle says that comedy grew out of "phallic songs" (34),
and some theatre scholars have speculated that comedy may have developed
out o f "primitive fertility rituals" (Barnet, Berman, and Burto, "Comic View"
8; see also Langer 458). This theory fmds support both in the presence of the
phallus as a key costume element in Greek old comedy and in the traditional
comic plotline from Greek new comedy onwards, in which, as Northrop Frye
distilled it, a young man desires a young woman but is obstructed in the fulfillment of his desire by a blocking figure who is often parental or in some
other way in "closer relation to established society" (903). Over the course of
the comic action, the hero overcomes the obstacles to his desires, so that comedies typically end with a wedding or some other "kind of party or festive rit-

68O

PENNY FARFAN

ual" (902). Because of this typically social and celebratory ending, Frye notes,
"[t]he tendency of comedy is to include as many people as possible in its final
society: the blocking characters are more often reconciled or converted than
simply repudiated" (903). As Sylvan Barnel. Morton Berman, and William
Burto state in the introduction to their anthology Eight Great Comedies, however. "Comedy often dramatises the ejection of barrenness [...] and the reassertion of fertility" (8-9); and while Bamel, Berman, and Burto are referring
to "obdurate parents who oppose their children's marriages" (8) - what Frye
calls the "blocking characters" - their phrasing makes clear that comedy has
traditionally been premised upon a narrative drive toward reproductive heterosexual union and social continuity and that it has typically had little tolerance
for non-compliance with that drive.
Feminist scholars have noted that the reassertion of conventional gender
decorum thorough the heterosexual imperative of comic resolution is not
without a certain sense of pathos and loss for some of comedy's more celebrated female characters,'' and the hint of pathos and loss that sometimes
haunts comedy as it "dwindle[s]" women into wives'" is extended to gays and
lesbians in Caryl Churchill's postmodern comedy Cloud 9 (1979). where, at
the end of Act One, which is set in nineteenth-century colonial Africa, the gay
explorer Harry Bagley and the lesbian governess Ellen are forced to marry, for
the sake of the British Empire. But as my epigraph suggests, a hint of pathos
also haunts Coward's Private Lives, tempering its elegant and witty veneer
with an undertone of wistful longing that is the keynote of its theme song,
"Someday I'll Eind You." Recalling Aristophanes' explanation of love in the
Symposium as a quest for a never fully attainable reunion with a lost other
half, "Someday I'll Find You" is, I will suggest, crucial to the queemess of
Coward's play: as Amanda says in Act One, "Extraordinary how potent cheap
music is" (207).
Eocusing as it does on two married couples. Private Lives might initially
seem less subversive than such later plays as Design for Living {1933). in
which Coward rejects neat binaries of desire in favour of a triangular relationship involving two men and a woman (Sinfield, Out on Stage 101-04; Holland 267-87), and Blithe Spirit (1941), in which he plays with but ultimately
rejects the conventional heterosexual pairings of comedy in favour of more
homosoeial arrangements (Castle 73-106). In its own way, however. Private
Lives problematizes both the conventional gender norms upon which compulsory heterosexuality depends and the complicity of conventional comic structure with that normative ideology.
Regarding Coward as "a bridge between traditional and modernist comedy" (13-14), David Edgar has argued that "the thing that Coward [did] for
the first time [was] to convey meaning entirely by the manipulation of our
expectations of what happens in the theatre" and that his "self-referential use
of theatrical technique is what set [him] apart" from earlier comic play-

Private Lives as Queer Comedy

681

Wrights (10, 13; see also Chothia 102, 107). Coward's departure from traditional comic form is indeed essential to the meaning of Private Lives and is
signalled by the fact that, whereas comedies typically end with marriage. Private Lives begins with two new marriages that promptly fall apart when the
formerly married but now divorced Amanda and Elyot abandon their respective current spou.se.s Victor and Sibyl, with whom they are honeymooning, in
order to elope together to Paris, where they enjoy a few moments of happiness in their newly rekindled relationship hefore it begins to fall apart again.
Thus, as Jean Chothia has noted, Private Lives departs from comic tradition
not only by putting "divorce and separation firmly on to the stage" but by
"refus[ing] to work through to complete reconciliation and new harmony"
(1 !2). as did the comedies of remarriage that were in vogue in Hollywood
during the 1930s.
The impossibility of marriage for the apparently straight primary characters
in Private Lives is suggestive ofthe historical fact ofthe legal impossibility of
marriage for homosexual partners, for whom Amanda and Elyot may function
as queer stand-ins. In his autobiography. Present Indicative, Coward described Amanda and Elyot not as two separate parts but as a single "part," the
two halves of which are "practically synonymous" (229), suggesting that in
Private Lives, conventional gender norms are not as unambiguous as they may
initially seem. Indeed, in Aristophanes' account of the nature of love in the
Symposium, heterosexual desire originates in the violent rending of a single
androgynous being into separate male and female halves; and through his representation of his male and female protagonists as "synonymous" - two
aspects of a single part - Coward recalls the separated halves of the lost
androgyne of Aristophanes' myth of love in Plato's Symposium.
The original production photographs of Private Lives reflect Coward's
view of Amanda and Elyot as two halves of a single androgynous whole.
Terry Castle has remarked upon Coward's fondness for a type of photograph
that she calls the "hinary portrait," by which she means "a type of fashionable
forma! portrait, loosely art deco in inspiration, with two sitters posing as mirror opposites or as a pair of overlapping, almost identical, profiles" (25), and
she explains that this mode of portraiture was
a manifestation of '20s and '30s sexual style, which so often tumed upon an
implicitly "homosexual" confounding of traditional sex roles. Unlike more
conventional double portraiture, such as the standard heterosexual marriage portrait
in which ihe husband stands behind his seated or otherwise visually subordinated
spouse, the binary portrait emphasizes the sameness and equality ofthe two
individuals portrayed. Sexual differences, including power differences, seem to be
blurred or undone; masculinity and femininity lose their emotional outlines. Men
and women meet on ihe same plane, as affectionate comrades or androgynous
reflections. (27)

682

PENNY FARFAN

To illustrate her argutnent. Castle includes a photograph of Coward as Elyot

and Gertrude Lawrence as Amanda posed as loosely mirrored opposites in the
original production oi Private Lives, both puffing cigarettes that they hold in
their right hands as they look into each other's eyes across a small table at
which they sit facing each other (27).
It may also be worth noting that Private Lives was written not long after
Coward met Virginia Woolf, whose 1928 novel Orlando he greatly admired.
Biographer Philip Hoare has suggested that Coward's pursuit of a friendship
with Woolf in 1928 is "evidence of [his] aspiration to become a more serious
writer than his public perceived him to be" (200). Inspired by Woolf's friend
and sometime lover Vita Sackville-West, Orlando is a fantasy-biography of
an androgynous, transhistorical artist-figure who changes sex midway through
the novel. Woolf's representation of gender in Orlando is closely related to
the theory of androgyny that she articulated in her 1929 essay A Room of
One's Own, in which she stated in the course of a larger discussion of literary
creativity that "it is fatal to be a man or woman pure and simple; one must be
woman-manly or man-womanly" (104).
Coward's interest in androgyny in Private Lives is evident not only in his
sense of Amanda and Elyot as equivalents, but in his representation of them as
individual male and female characters who are nonetheless ambiguously gendered. Whereas he described Amanda and Elyot as a single part. Coward
regarded Victor and Sibyl as "a couple of extra puppets thrown in to assist the
plot and to provide contrast" (Introduction, Play Parade xiii). Perhaps the
main point of contrast between the "practically synonymous" primary characters and the hyper-feminine and hyper-masculine secondary characters has to
do with their respective degrees of confonnity to conventional gender norms;
and here, it is worth remembering Amanda and Elyot's intermittent skeptical
comments about Sibyl and Victor's highly convetitional performances of gender: for example, Elyot says to Sibyl in Act One, "If you feel you'd like me to
smoke a pipe. I'll try and master it," while Amanda remarks on the fabric of
Victor's jacket, "A bit hearty, isn't it?" (188. 191). Amanda and Elyot are
matched in the play not simply through their wittiness and the vowels that
begin their names, but through their common disregard for accepted gender
decorum: most notably, in the brawl in Act Two, Amanda gives as good as she
gets, and Elyot casts all gentlemanly chivalry to the winds.
Yet at the same time that the "puppets" Victor and Sibyl are differentiated
from Amanda and Elyot through their conformity to conventional gender
norms, they are also twinned with them in certain respects. When Victor and
Sybil enter Amanda's Paris apartment at the end of Act Two to find Amanda
and Elyot on the floor, "rolling over and over in paroxysms of rage" (233),
they are horrified by what they see, and yet at the end of the play, they are
themselves erupting into a similar brawl. Thus, even the masculine and feminine "puppets" that serve to set off the less conventional and more androgy-

Private Lives as Queer Comedy

683

nous Amanda and Elyot are not as stable, straightforward, clear-cut, and
unambiguous as they initially and superficially seem. As Amanda says early
in the play, "I think very few people are completely normal really, deep down
in their private lives" (195).
According to Nicholas de Jongh. the roots of early-twentieth-century British and American dramatic representations of homosexuality may be located
in the "modern theatre movement of social analysis, dissent and nonconformity that Ibsen inaugurated" and in the somewhat earlier genre of "Woman
with a Past' society dramas" that Ibsen's realist plays revised (10). In his 1933
play Design for Living. Coward queered the challenge to conventional morality that was definitive of modem drama as pioneered by Ibsen by extending
this challenge beyond the interrogation ofthe moral validity of normative gender ideology that Ibsen was concerned with in his "women's plays" to encompass a concomitant and closely related interrogation of the morality of
normative sexual ideology. Thus, when Gilda expresses concem that her triangular relationship with Otto and Leo is "degrading," Otto replies.
Only v^hen measured up against other people's standards [... ] We are different. Our
lives are diametrically opposed to ordinary social conventions; and it's no use
grabbing at those conventions 10 hold us up when we find we're in deep water.
We've jilted them and eliminated them, and we've gol to find our own solutions
for our own peculiar moral problems. |...] There's no sense in stamping about and
saying how degrading it all is. Of course it's degrading; according to a certain code,
the whole situation's degrading and always has been. The Methodists wouldn't
approve of us, and the Catholics wouldn't either; and the Evangelists and the
Episcopalians and the Anglicans and the Christian Scientists - 1 don't suppose even
the Polynesian Islanders would think very highly of us, but they wouldn't mind quite
as much, being so far away. They could all elub together ~ the whole lot of them and say with perteet truth, according to their lights, that we were loose-living,
ineligious. unmoral degenerates, couldn't they? (...] But the whole point is, it's
none of their business. We're not doing any harm to anyone else. We're not peppering the world with illegitimate children. The only people we could possibly mess
up are ourselves, and that's our lookout. |.. .1 A gay, ironic chance threw the three of
us together and tied our lives together in a tight knot at the outset. To deny it would
be ridiculous, and to unravel it impossible. Therefore, the only thing left is to enjoy
it thoroughly, every rich moment of it, every thrilling second - (64-65)
Through this rejection of conventional sexual morality in favour of more "relative values" (to borrow the title of another Coward play). Coward disrupted
the narrative drive toward the conventional comic resolution of heterosexual
coupling and created space for altemative paths to what Ibsen called "the joy
of life" (Ghosts 256-57, 266-67), whether through the sexual triangle of
Design for Living or through the tleeting moments of passionate connection
between sexually androgynous characters like Amanda and Elyot in Private

684

PENNY FARFAN

Lives, where marriage - or as Amanda describes it, being "clamped together

publicly" (2 [6) - is represented as an impossible situation.*"
The thing, then, in Coward's comic world, is to find one's happiness where
one can, regardless of how ab-nonmal one's happiness may seem to others
from the outside: in Elyot's rallying words to Amanda when she begins to
doubt her decision to abandon her new husband to retum to her old one even
though she knows from past experience that they cannot get along for long
and that their "nomial" private lives together are defined as much by violent
discord as by perfect harmony.
Let's be superficial and pity the poor philosophers. Let's blow trumpets and
squeakers, and enjoy the party as mueh as we can, like very small, quite idiotic
school children. Let's savour the delight of the moment. Come and kiss me darling,
before your body rots, and worms pop in and out of your eye sockets. (227)
This emphasis in Private Lives on fleeting moments of connection and on
"present laughter" (to borrow the title of yet another Coward play) is the
antithesis of comedy's traditional underlying emphasis on the future through
its narrative drive toward heterosexual marriage, fertility, reproduction, and
social continuity.
John Lahr has suggested that "|o]nly when Coward is frivolous does he
become in any sense profound" (3), and indeed, in the context oi Private Lives.
what is dismissed by Victor as Elyot's "damned flippancy" (238) is. for Elyot,
more than a series of witty epigrams and retorts: as he entreats Amanda during
her moment of doubt in Act Two, "You mustn't be serious, my dear one; 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. Flippancy brings out the acid in their damned sweetness and light" (22627). In Private Lives, flippancy is thus a moral response to those who don't
know the truth about the artificiality of the "normal" and who haven't the courage or sense to seize their happiness wherever and with whomever they may
find it, before the worms set in or the irritations and petty jealousies that mar our
mundane existence transform love into hate despite ail the best wisdom and
calm sagacity of Solomon Isaacs, the invented figure that Amanda and Elyot
agree to invoke when they need a time-out to put the brakes on their bickering
(212). "Soloman Isaacs" - or "Sollocks," as he is soon nicknamed (216) - is,
after all, a strategy for prolonging the pleasure of the moment, but "Sollocks"
rhymes neatly with "Bollocks"; and it is this fme line between harmony and discord, and the fleetingness of all relationships in the grand scheme of life and
death ("Come and kiss me darling, before your body rots"), that endow our rare
human moments of blissful connection with the pathos of transience. Aristophanes' story of the primeval beings who were as yet undivided and who
therefore pre-dated love, loss, and longing was, after all, a myth to account for

Private Lives as Queer Comedy

685

Noel Coward and Gertrude Lawieiice m Frivale Lives. Originally published in

The Play Pictorial 57.344 {r93O). Reproduced from Cole Lesley, Graham Payn, and
Sheridan Morley, Noel Coward and His Friends (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson,
1979) 117.^

our desire for a perfect union that we can never completely attain, either within
or beyond the socially sanctioned bonds of marriage.
In closing, then, 1 will retum to the theme song from Private Lives with
which 1 began. One of Coward's signature pieces, "Someday I'll Find You"
was introduced as a solo by Gertie Lawrence in the role of Amanda in Act One
of the original production of Private Lives and then reprised in Act Two as a

686

'

PENNY FARFAN

duet between Amanda and Elyot in a kind of moment of calm before the storm
of their big brawl. Bringing Lawrence's mezzo-soprano together with Coward's light baritone that slides so easily into falsetto, this duet version of "Someday I'll Find You" is the queerly poignant heart of Coward's comedy, capturing
a sweet and fleeting moment of harmony through its tenuous interweaving of
delicate lovely voices that are dual aspects of a single androgynous whole, but
also admitting the inevitable passing of this precious moment both through the
overarching tone of longing and loss and through the piano coda, which trails
off to suggest the continuation of the quest beyond the resolution of the duet:
Someday I'll find you.
Moonlight behind you.
True to the dream I am dreaming.
As 1 draw near you
You'll smile a little smile;
For a little while
We shall stand
Hand in hand.
I'll leave you never,
Love you for ever,
All our past sorrow redeeming:
Try to make it true.
Say you need me too.
Someday I'll find you again. (Coward and Lawrence)
NOTES
1 Thanks to Mary Cutler for inviting me to the University of North Dakota to see her
production of Private Lives and talk ahout Noel Coward.
2 In England, the Sexual Offences Act of 1967 allowed homosexual acts between
consenting adults in private: the Lord Chamberlain continued to censor plays prior
to public performance until 1968.
3 See also Sinfield, "Private Lives/Public Theater" and "Noel Coward and Effeminacy."
4 Susan Carlson, for example, has pointed out in Women and Comedy: Rewriting the
British Theatrical Tradition that in many comedies featuring central female characters, "the status quo is disrupted, and in the upheaval of role reversals the women
characters acquire an uncharacteristic dominance" (17).
[y]et when comedy ends, the role reversals are reversed, the misrule is curtailed,
and any social rebellion is tempered hy the good feelings presumably attached to
the reestablishment of order. For comedy's free-wheeling women, the ending
usually marks their retreat to more conventional activities. In an overwhelming

Private Lives as Queer Comedy

687

percentage of cases, the comic ending, for women, is marriage. And while
marriage has been represented as a happy ending, even the highest reward,
the comic heroine usually finds love and happiness only at Ihe price of freedom
and power. (21)
5 I am adapting the words of Millamant in William Congreve's The Way ofthe
World (2^-j).
6 In suggesting how Coward queers conventional comic form by disrupting its traditional emphasis on marriage, with its associations with permanence, I of course do
not mean to deny the existence of long-term gay and lesbian relationships.
7 The author has made every effort to obtain permission to reproduce materials subject to copyright; she apologizes for any omissions and would welcome these being
brought to her attention.
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