A top-notch theatre in the suburbs of Norwich. I find it by chance, when looking into Ellis’ bookshop, and see Richard II staring from the window. ‘Sewell Barn Theatre? What’s that!’ So me and the Debs trudge up Constitution Hill to find out what’s goin’ on. And are caught in the old magician’s net. Spellbound by the mad king, I’m lost for words.
After taking months to recover, we go again. Noel Coward meets us in the lobby. Design for Living plays in the auditorium. And the Schloss, you ask; after the fireworks of an ending, and the seat-shaking applause, can he regain his head, say anything at all….
A design for living, or an advert for the bohemian life? Watching this play, I was reminded of Trilby, George du Maurier’s fin de siècle satire on the same milieu; though by the 1930s the conventions had changed; bohemia no longer a place of alien depravity, but, through the popularity of Trilby itself, an exotic location, a lifestyle, a late-adolescent holiday before the adult world of fancy flats and fame. Nevertheless, the impulses are identical. A need to appear different from the straights, that urge to épater les bourgeoisie, smirk when you should be serious; talk Significant Form when on the phone with one’s broker. So difficult to be a freak if a conventional bourgeois; for that need to conform, to belong to a set, to think the right things, is in the bones, it flows through the bloodstream; is the canal on which we cruise our lives. Then there’s the wealth. Trust funds are difficult to give away. It is why wanting the low-life Gilda walks its streets in Coco Chanel. Appearance. Façade. Expensive clothes and spacious attics, this is the Fortnum and Mason’s of bohemia not its rags and shacks. Sign no substance. These characters are from fiction, they are genre, they are Trilby; not real chancers and losers. We are being given a fantasy of the artist’s life, its playboy riches; are spared the squalor, the hard, grinding work on canvas and page. Little drama there! Unless you are a connoisseur of the semi-colon, a mistress of turps. So out! out! out! of the studio, and into the salons and a hostess’ bedroom. This is entertainment.
I was sympathetic to Gilda, though Debs disliked her throughout. More authentic than Otto and Leo, who felt like imposters, playing the role of artist for those who understand nothing about art. Gilda has of course read Trilby; her fairy isle a garret in Montparnasse. Nevertheless, when young fantasy is as real as ham, egg and chips; imagination and feeling a couple…‘are you, madam, goin’ make this child cry, tell her goblins don’t exist?’ Then we cross an age-line, and they separate, at least for most of us. Every adult feels. Only a few eccentrics transform those feelings into plays and pictures. Gilda is not one of those; a standard issue young woman, whose dreams of escape and excitement are on the fade, for Mr Respectability is calling, his finger at the doorbell. Quick! Quick! Before too late…. Alas, this heroine has no heroic qualities. No talent at all. But she needs the artistic life; for it is now the done thing, the way to show oneself interesting, déshabillé, a witch. Gilda feeds off the idea of the artist, needing the frisson he creates. And like any drug small doses are not enough, so she plays it like Oliver Twist: I want more!
An artist’s model, a muse out of which masterpieces are born. Poor Gilda. It is to confuse consumption with production; or to put it crudely: our heroine is a parasite. That said, there is something authentic about such inauthenticity: this woman’s nothingness is real. Everywhere a stage, she play-acts all the time; and this can be exciting for a while, as you think yourself Cleopatra at lunch in Claridges. When young we apt to confuse such roles with the kosher stuff seen in Chekhov and Ben Jonson. Then growing up, dawning into adulthood, it is realise that the role is false, that we don't feel or believe anything at all. If intelligent - Gilda is supremely intelligent – it is to recognise one is shallow and a fraud. But here’s the rub: to know one’s faking it is still to play a role! I make this distinction: actresses have a life off duty; their fictions are a special kind of truth, whose reality is the stage. Not so Gilda. Her reality is a fiction; unreal, empty, raddled with deceit. An actress embodies the meaning of her words and actions. There’s naught behind Gilda. To know this a hollowing insight. Gilda looks in the glass and sees through the ghost of herself.
Gilda is an authentic bohemian. Living in an artistic milieu, she absorbs the atmosphere, breathes its aroma, as she slinks around in silk petticoats, drinks the absinthe, and mesmerises the clientele with her volatility, its metamorphic twists and turns. She is a type. One of those who, precisely because not artists, embody bohemia’s spirit; bohemia a sort of louche anteroom to study and studio, where the hard work is done. I think of David Litvinoff, the Svengali of the 1960s. When it came to putting his explosive personality on paper the ink dried up. He lived the performance; he couldn’t create it. This the true bohemian, whose natural habit is the pub, a pick-up’s pad and an addict’s dive; or that week-a-day pulpit, where you deliver obscene sermons to empty pews. Such a peripatetic lifestyle brings self-disgust in the end. Gilda the victim of her own deception. A water clock that runs out of water...it is to watch one’s life drip away, its time run out. All that exuberance vanishing into other people’s memoirs.
You see why the Schloss sympathetic.
Dear old Ernest - Saint Oscar hovers above our heads - calls Gilda a Female; as if this explains her whacks and whims. Although surrounded by artists and their hangers-on, Ernest hasn't grasped the character of this place; the weird indifference that this ebullience hides. I should have shown him Persona in the foyer. In Bergman’s meisterwerk an actress sucks the personality out of her nurse; swapping roles until each becomes the mirror of the other. Role reversal, but with this difference: the artist is detached; is forever on the alert, as she assesses, adjusts, directs and performs her act. Art is mimicry, it is transference, it is a very dangerous thing indeed, for the innocents who stumble into rehearsals clutching their teddy bear ideas. Beauty? The Good? The Divine? It is the Devil who lurks around here. A true artist has no feeling for others, who exist only to be created in the image of the artist’s feelings, projected onto canvas, stage or screen.
This why they attract so many rakes, frauds, crazies, crooks and cranks. Bohemia is outside the moral order. Some find this attractive, they need it to be alive. Gilda is one such, although her garret is more well-healed than most. Bohemia-lite, shall we say?
Gilda has a talent for creating the persona of the inaccessible and irrational muse. Ernest, who must be a virgin, confuses this behaviour with all women; so mistaking a pastiche for the real thing. Although the ladies do play the enigmatic heroine to catch their beaux; the time of courtship when they have supreme power, short-lived and precarious. With no job a woman is likely to float on her feelings; Gilda, drifting through life, has nothing to discipline the instincts, which run loose across the wild west of her fantasies. Bohemia can be thrilling. But it soon wears you out; the body taking multiple hits; the mind dissolves into dreams, becoming listless and morose. To hang around all day, waiting for the next drink and bon mot, removes the will; and you free fall into inertia. A drunk and a deadhead not unusual fates. It is boredom amongst the beer barrels. Bohemia the fatal disease of old Soho and Fitzrovia.
You want to know what Bohemia was really like in the 1930s? Chris Paling tells the grim tale in The Repentant Morning.
A life of improv and experiment is suitable only for the artist, who can make most things interesting. To play on canvas, however, is way different from mucking about between the sheets, or spilling a drink over a rival’s crotch. Of course our heroine sleeps with Leo on his first night back from America. Just like an artist only the present exists for Gilda; whose materials are her body and mind. Inevitably she loses Otto, who flounces away in jealous pain. Oh well. A small price to pay, losing a lover for his best friend with identikit talents. But here’s the question Gilda: what if these two ain’t much cop? What if your canvas attracts only the second rate…thus the moods, the self-hate, the theatrics of Ibsen and Strindberg. What we see here is the emptiness and hunger of the parasite, who lives off others not herself (the exact opposite of the artist). This why she’s desperate, dependent, selfish, horrible. Not Woman - no no Ernest, you’ve got women wrong there - but Gilda, who belongs to a specific female type; that of the rebellious high-class girl crawling around the hovels of a bohemian cityscape. Short term success; long term degradation…beauty fades rapidly here; while the repartee grows stale and repetitive. It’s a bore living off the fag-ends of the famous.
You’ve forgotten Fortnum’s, says the Schloss. Gilda never to fall all the way down. Always a lift to the penthouse suite.
It is in Gilda we hit the buffers of Coward’s talent. I suspect he has little insight into how women feel - biographical evidence suggests this may apply to both sexes -; it is why he draws the stereotype, Gilda its arch representative. She is the principle of passion, the embodiment of pleasure; with her ecstatic rages, those acid pleasantries. Feelings are a continuous flow; they are a river falling over weirs, settling on pools, splashing amongst the rocks, before clashing with the sea across an estuary’s battlefield (the clientele like a fancy metaphor). An artist transmutes this flux into form. Gilda watches it disappear with each scene. Such performances are a drug, so she keeps up the dose; tiring of lovers and husbands when they run out of shots. We’re in a circus tent or sliding down the helter-skelter…. She wears herself out wearing them out: run for your life, Otto, Leo, Ernest! I am teetering close to another social type, which appears to linger on into the 1930s, that of fin de siècle Symbolist femme fatale; Salome her chief representative. Every man a John the Baptist. Though Debs points out a pun: Miss Hodge…a tilt towards ‘misogyny’? not uncommon amongst gay men. Does Coward know what he’s doing? Quite a lot I imagine; this cool mind a little too knowing about what it writes.
These chaps, the rationality principle incarnate? Poor Ernest! Soon to find out how flimsy is the case in which he keeps his reason. For Coward is too good a playwright to stick to stereotypes; all these men far more emotional than his glacial heroine.
Gilda is a muse; an idea inside the artist’s head, one just out of reach. Poor Otto and Leo, their muse has decided to leave. She doesn’t want to stick around these second-raters; who’ve sacrificed their modicum of talent for flashy hotel rooms and servants (not having a servant was once the sign of a bohemian). They’ve sold out. And this muse is fed up and bored. It’s not just that she’s on her own, disturbed by the telephone’s constant ringing, those appointments in town houses and on country estates, where Leo coins his clichés. This muse wants not just excitement and drama, but depth, excellence, perfection…she wants to be recreated in masterworks. Instead, she finds her portrait in cheap plays. To dream of Ibsen, and end up in Les Misérables….
Is this page a diary, Coward writing about himself?
What in the hands of a genius - Bergman in Persona - would have been an exploration, a perilous adventure, into the psyche of the muse, its inspiration and ruin, is here machine-tooled into highly accomplished farce. In Persona we witness a muse lose her identity and watch an actress in the moment of creation; the horror and its miracle. Extraordinary! Disturbing. To see someone steal a personality…Coward cannot go that far. Scare the audience? You expect the Schloss come back next Friday…. Design for Living is a light satire, it keeps to what glitters and is safe. Let go, reveal the inner chaos, the ugliness, the damnation…a terrified Noel is backing away from our Schloss’ mad demands. Artist as thief and murderer? Serial killers are not usually invited to garden parties. So he plays to our expectations about this milieu, with characters who outsize their reality.
Coward comes up with a marvellous idea: a muse let down by her artist. He plays it with panache. Though it remains an idea, not transmuted into the alchemy of a character study. Ideas clean up the territory they don’t investigate its dirt and disturbances. To go deep into Gilda’s persona is to fall into strangeness, lose control, riddle oneself with paradox and puzzle; which may expose an alarming emptiness behind the mask. Risky. We see the risks in Evelyn Waugh’s The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold; it is the paranoia of a writer who thinks himself misread by an audience. Some details are touched on, Coward too good a playwright to write candy-floss. He knows the bitchiness of bohemia; the resentment of the uncreative for those who do create, however poorly; he is intimate with the mind-freezing tedium of the smart set, whose japes have lost their youthful zing; while he scorns the platitudes of the cocktail crew who dry up his wit. Always pretending to be someone you are not. It stultifies. And the bores are always calling – Gilda forever picking up that phone. Get Miss Hodge to do it? Her lack of class grates. The tension rises. Gilda is a bomb that needs its detonator; we wait for her to explode. Oh, didn’t you know? Coward a master of scene and plot.
It is not enough. Something is missing.
We are told our heroine is intelligent and cultivated, but this is not demonstrated. And was that Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness I see in her hands…surely Orlando, a Waugh, some Proust, or even Somerset Maugham (I think of Jacqueline in Stanley Middleton’s The Golden Evening) would better suit a sophisticated and mercurial muse. Ms Hall! Coward wouldn’t speak to me again if I sat him next to her at literature’s royal table. I let it pass. Gilda is such a spectacular personality. We forget the need such details in the brilliance of her performance.
I look again….
And find what is lost in Otto: his character doesn’t feel right. There is something about him; something pompous, stiff, upright; while his ideas on art and bohemia are drippily conventional. Do I spy a three-piece suit under that smock! Yes. It is why he travels to New York on a freight ship. A tourist in art, not a native. Certainly not the fons et origo of all this, that demon Paul Gauguin, who did give up the stockbroking life to paint his immortals in Tahiti. I have no sense of Otto as a creative person. Rather, he is like the vile bodies of Evelyn Waugh, copying their lines from Trilby or some other popular tale. The art world is filled with these characters; who usually make the most money, catering to tastes not far from their own. It is to provide highly polished versions of fashionable designs, for clients who cannot tell the difference between platitude and profundity. Coward has found his target. Every shot a dead pheasant: Otto and Leo are not artists, they are technicians, who just happen to work in paint and words. Virtuosos? Socialites.
There is poison in the arrowhead.
Otto and his muse talk to each other like a philistine expects an artist and muse to talk; in those vague and grandiloquent gestures, whose lack of detail and originality prove their vacuity. For Geoffrey Grigson, Auden demonstrates his taste by choosing for his favourite poets not a Shakespeare or a Donne, but two from the second rank, Campion and Barnes. It is to know the material. Coward is in a double bind. Because his characters are not esoterics he has to use the commonplace; but to satirise clichés you have to use them yourself, thinning the work. Coward knows this. But he also knows that an audience has come to see a cartoon version of a bohemia they have read about in the newspapers and magazines. Not its nausea, its evil, its ugliness – a ravaged Nina Hammett screwing chaps on a rat-infested bed; David Litvinoff, the archetype Sixties bohemian, catch a glimpse of him in Performance, torturing a trick - but the slight frisson, the pinprick pleasantries, of bad behaviour; or those fluffy perversions perfumed with sex (this is the 1930s) one associates with the exotic. Coward does the business, adding his trademark wit.
Is this why he puts all his self-disgust into Gilda? Ironies of ironies! a man who doesn’t understand women acts out the woman in himself. But I’d forgotten, the man’s an artist, and art - I nick from Martin Amis - has no gender.
In Gilda we have reached the limits of Noel Coward’s talents. Intimations of the muse’s complicated psyche, but no more; this writer isn’t going to take his kecks off on stage. Instead, he settles for a full fancy dress in New York (with costumes from Manila, Tokyo and Paris). Our society-author has written a society-play, where the art is decoration. Poor Gilda. Disappointed by such mediocre talent she runs away.
And marries Ernest.
The last act is the best, and is sensational. It is here we see the genius of Noel Coward, who cuts out his character’s pretensions with the precision of an engraver. Nice kind camp Ernest Friedman comes home to find Otto and Leo in bed in his pyjamas. Two years away playing at bohemia they have arrived in New York to reclaim Gilda. Naturally upset Ernest blows up like a burst boiler. Poor Ernest, the only nice chap in the place. Alas, goodness isn’t welcome here. Our muse is bored playing the role of a society hostess, dabbling in interior decoration – everything about Gilda is showcase and second-hand; even the flat’s furniture is on sale. Empty Gilda needs someone to fill her up, and these two lightweights are what she’s got. A life of dreams and illusions and not much else (though Schloss reminds me about the gilt-edged stocks). The ending is brilliant and terrible. Our three ghouls laughing over a wretched husband who runs out of the door.
Never has Coward so hated himself.
Too strong? I turn to the title: Design for Living. It suggests artifice, calculation, surface; the appearance of a thing, not the thing itself; not the art of life but its design…how one appears to be, not how one is. When young we tend to mix these together. I think of a pop band from my Welsh valley, who’ve made a career confusing these two qualities. Although perfectly acceptable in pop. In pop the surface is real, the inauthentic authentic, because the lyric emotion carries a song through. The ideas may be thin, but they embody emotions which are true, strong and oftentimes refreshingly crude. But in art ideas must go deeper; slogans to give way to subtleties and magical insights, if they are to capture the mysteries and the spirits, the meanings inside feelings. Literature a work philosophy whose arguments are characters. Coward, I suspect, was closer to pop than art, and he knew it. Not quite the artist. Only - only! - a topflight entertainer.
Never has Coward seen himself so clearly.
Review: Design for Living
Performed on April 11th 2025, at The Sewell Barn Theatre. Directed by Clare Howard.