The late Bennett Cerf once reported a conversation he had with playwright Noël Coward one evening during the London Blitz; Coward, it seems, told Cerf he had appraised his own dramatic career: “I know two things about my plays: one, they are the best of their kind being written today; two, posterity will judge them worthless.”
Like the uneasy mixture of wit and despair that marked much of Coward’s writing, his appraisal was overly ambivalent. Posterity may prove the author as wrong as it has his critics. For five decades, Coward was lambasted for being clever, but frivolous— technically excellent, but altogether quite superficial—by those who regularly dissected drama. A more detached view, particularly in light of recent revivals of his work and his newly produced final play, reveals that Coward’s drama always was an intricately balanced combination of high comedy, an acute delineation of human absurdity, and theatrical professionalism.
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