Champagne and Bitters

By LANCE MORROW

NOEL COWARD IN TWO KEYS

by NOEL COWARD

Noel Coward's iridescent wit sometimes did not quite conceal a quality in him that was sentimental and even heartbroken. Nothing vulgar or mawkish, of course--just a sense of life's complicated unforgiveness. These two short plays, which were among his last works and probably not his best, still glisten with the famous Coward talent to amuse. But the evening ends with a certain suppressed sadness.

The two are part of a set of three short plays in which Coward starred in London in 1966. The curtain-raiser, Come into the Garden, Maud, is a fast five-finger exercise about a middle-aged American millionaire in Europe and his vile, blue-haired wife, whose hobby is collecting titled Europeans. With a witty tenderness, Coward has the amiable golfing millionaire, clad in Hush Puppies and a loud sport jacket, fall in love with a minor Italian princess and abandon his harpy wife. The talk is frequently funny: the husband dismisses one of his wife's friends as being so buck-toothed that she can eat an apple through a tennis racket. But often Coward's celebrated champagne wit amounts to no more than, say, Asti Spumante--or even a frothy ginger ale.

The second play has an uncharacteristic darkness. Sir Hugo Latymer is a famous old British writer with a talent for elegant malice. A Song at Twilight may have been as close as Coward came to autobiography--although Latymer bears a resemblance to Somerset Maugham. While Latymer and his German wife-secretary are at a Swiss hotel, an actress whom he loved in his youth and denigrated in his memoirs appears for a sudden reunion. They share caviar and steak. Eventually, the former mistress reveals that she possesses the letters Hugo once wrote to a homosexual lover he had always concealed. The actress accuses Hugo of the sins that Coward may have charged himself with: hypocrisy and a loveless, satirical eye.

What gives the evening a high polish is the cast. Anne Baxter plays the Italian princess and the former mistress with a likable and knowing broadness. Hume Cronyn's cigar-smoking millionaire sounds a bit too much like George Burns, but his Hugo is a masterpiece of foxy pomposity. Best of all is Jessica Tandy, first as the harridan in Maud and then as the great man's dry, abused wife. She endows the woman with an odd gallantry that Coward himself may have possessed.

Lance Morrow

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