WATCH: Fascinating new look at Noël Coward in all his complexity

Oliver’s talk coincides with the CFT production of Coward’s The Vortex starring Lia Williams and Joshua James on the main-house stage from April 28-May 20. Oliver is promising a fascinating discussion focusing on the iconic English playwright who was renowned for his wit and his flamboyance.

“I wish I could say that it had been written for the 50th anniversary (of his death) but I'm just very lucky the 50th anniversary fell in 2023 and so gives me an excuse for the delays! This book should have come out 18 months ago but the idea was the new Noël Coward archive that the estate had put together. They went to my publisher and said ‘Have you got somebody that would write a biography?’ and fortunately they asked me but initially I huffed and puffed and I thought ‘Is it really for me?’ I had gone along with the general view that he was rather passe and outdated and had rather reactionary views.”

But Oliver said yes – and soon discovered that Coward was infinitely more interesting than that: “I had seen some of his plays, Private Lives and Hayfever and thought that they were terribly funny, and I just assumed that there would be books and books and books written about Noël Coward. But when I investigated it, I couldn't believe that there had not actually been a biography of him for 30 years. I was five when the last one came out! And so I grappled with the idea and I slowly came around to the view that I would do it – and so I actually got to see the best in him and also the worst in him. It gave me a great chance to read the plays and when I started to look at the archive, I realised just how much there was to him.I started at the beginning with the archive and there were about 40 notebooks of unpublished plays that you would loosely call his juvenilia that had not been seen except in passing by anyone at all in all those years – notebooks which completely overturned the view that Coward confected of himself as a playwright who effectively had a virgin birth. Here were 40 plays where you can see him absolutely honing his craft and working on becoming the great playwright that he became. And some of those plays were really quite shocking. There is a play called The Dope Cure that he wrote when he was 18 which is all about a drug trip. And there were also copies of the coward Diaries but for the first time the estate agreed that the biographer could look at all of them rather than just the published version. So really that meant the war diaries. The 1940 diary had never been made available at all and it was all there about his career as a spy and his time in Paris. It was literally ‘11am meet X.’ It was fascinating seeing where he was and who he was with and what he was doing literally day by day. It was a total revelation.”

What emerged was a Coward who was “utterly contradictory. You could say here was a great, kind and generous person with radical ideas for tolerance and freedom but you could also tease out a crueller, more controlling, more reactionary figure that couldn't bear modern art or social mobility. I think to understand him you have to see that full picture.”

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