Arts & Manners: Rule Nostalgia

London town, doubtless influenced by winds that blow from Broadway and points west, is in the throes of nostalgia. No, No, Nanette is not here yet, but former pop impresario Larry Parnes, who has just taken over one of the West End’s larger theaters, the Cambridge, says he is trying to get it for us. So, probably, are dozens of others. But in any case the nostalgia syndrome has taken a heavy hold, spurred on partly by “Auntie” BBC, celebrating this year her fiftieth birthday and relentlessly determined to tear away the veil of the years with a grand festival of hindsight—old radio programs at which we marvel we ever laughed, flickering TV reminiscence from the early Fifties, pop songs the banality of which make today’s efforts sound like astute social comment.

In the playhouse it is just as though Osborne, Pinter and off-Broadway had never existed. Last autumn Sir Noel Coward was king. Back in July the Mermaid, the City of London riverside theater which opened in the Fifties with Lock up Your Daughters, a success which, with the exception of Hadrian the Seventh, it has never quite repeated, put on, to commemorate some occasion which escapes me for the moment, a compilation of Coward’s work which it entitled Cowardy Custard. I must admit that I did not find it entirely to my taste, for “the Master” has always seemed tometobea practitioner of dexterity without heart. But I was obviously in a minority of one, for London has clasped Cowardy Custard to its newly nostalgic bosom. So captivated have Londoners and their visitors been by Mad about the Boy, The Stately Homes of England and various self-congratulatory items about how well London stood up to the blitz that Cowardy Custard’s scheduled six-week run was prolonged indefinitely.

PH

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Peter Hepple

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London town, doubtless influenced by winds that blow from Broadway and points west, is in the throes of nostalgia. No, No, Nanette is not here yet, but former pop impresario Larry Parnes, who has just taken over one of the West End’s larger theaters, the Cambridge, says he is trying to get it for us. So, probably, are dozens of others. But in any case the nostalgia syndrome has taken a heavy hold, spurred on partly by “Auntie” BBC, celebrating this year her fiftieth birthday and relentlessly determined to tear away the veil of the years with a grand festival of hindsight—old radio programs at which we marvel we ever laughed, flickering TV reminiscence from the early Fifties, pop songs the banality of which make today’s efforts sound like astute social comment.

In the playhouse it is just as though Osborne, Pinter and off-Broadway had never existed. Last autumn Sir Noel Coward was king. Back in July the Mermaid, the City of London riverside theater which opened in the Fifties with Lock up Your Daughters, a success which, with the exception of Hadrian the Seventh, it has never quite repeated, put on, to commemorate some occasion which escapes me for the moment, a compilation of Coward’s work which it entitled Cowardy Custard. I must admit that I did not find it entirely to my taste, for “the Master” has always seemed tometobea practitioner of dexterity without heart. But I was obviously in a minority of one, for London has clasped Cowardy Custard to its newly nostalgic bosom. So captivated have Londoners and their visitors been by Mad about the Boy, The Stately Homes of England and various self-congratulatory items about how well London stood up to the blitz that Cowardy Custard’s scheduled six-week run was prolonged indefinitely.