Tuning in…
Tuning in…
Castaway
1 appearance
Playwright, actor, and composer best known for his comedies such as Private Lives and Blithe Spirit, as well as the musical Bittersweet.
On the island
Eight records
The keepsakes
No book or luxury recorded for this episode.
In conversation
Presenter asks
0:50Mr. Coward, you were a professional actor as a child, and before that you entertained at amateur functions. Was there any one occasion, like a visit to the pantomime, that gave you this early fascination for the theatre?
Oh yes, I used to be taken to the theatre … on my birthday by my mamma … either in the gallery or the pit … ever since I was five … and I used to be taken mostly to musical comedies. I got, I suppose, the theatre bug then.
Presenter asks
1:17How old were you when you made your first professional appearance?
Ten, eleven.
Presenter asks
1:25Do you ever regret that you didn't have a childhood like other children?
Not at all, no. I enjoyed my own childhood very much. Theatrical digs and the lot.
Presenter asks
By the age of twenty-two or twenty-three you were a star playing in your own plays. Which are your personal favorites?
Awfully difficult question to answer because they are so very different … Private Lives, obviously, was one of my favorites because it was an enormous success and I liked playing it, and I wrote it for Gertie and me, and that was that … Hay Fever I think is a very good comedy … Blythe Spirit technically I think is the best comedy I've ever wrote. I say technically advisedly because it is instinctively, I did not plan it. It happened like that … and of course, musically speaking, I suppose I love bittersweet better than anything else I've done from the point of view of musicals.
Presenter asks
3:11In recent years you've spent a lot of time working away from the theatre, in cabaret, for example. Do you enjoy cabaret entertaining or do you look on it as a profitable sideline?
That should be done. Oh no, I enjoyed it … I don't know whether I enjoyed it for a long period of time … I loved appearing at the Café de Paris. It was very exciting … and I very much enjoyed appearing in Las Vegas. I think I was largely prejudiced by the fact that I was a success … I think that if I wasn't a success, I shouldn't enjoy it very much.
Presenter asks
5:22What do you think of the so-called Kitchen Sink School? John Osborne, Arnold Wesker, Harold Pinter?
I think that Harold Pinter is a very extraordinary and original writer … with immense talent, I think that Wesker is, too … I think that Wesker's play The Kitchen is a very, very fine piece of work … I think that when he treats the officer class, he's a little self-conscious and not quite accurate, because I think it is a sort of hatred going on, which is rather a bore … Pinter, on the other hand, is a very different type of mind. He is using the stage and the English language in a very fascinating and original manner … I have seen some of his earlier plays: The Caretaker, which I think very fine, and The Collection, which I was profoundly impressed by … [John Osborne] — I think his first play that he wrote in collaboration, [Epitaph for] George Dillon, had some very good stuff in it, and I think that Look Back in Anger [is] vital … I think there was a little bit too much invective … highly pardonable because it was a very dramatic presentation. His other plays I've not cared for so much.
Presenter asks
6:50Your last few plays in London have had a poor critical reception, but the public have liked them very much indeed. Do you think the critics have been doing a disservice to the theatre lately by going for the far-out plays?
Yes, I don't think really all that much a disservice. I think that they've got a bee in their bonnet about the far out plays … and I think that is rather a disservice. But of course, as nobody pays very much attention to them, I don't think it matters.
Presenter asks
7:25Have you any big ambition in your career that's so far unfulfilled?
Yes, but it sounds a little … pompous … I want to go on writing … better and better and better … and that ought to keep me happily occupied for the next few years.
“I enjoyed my own childhood very much. Theatrical digs and the lot.”
“Blythe Spirit technically I think is the best comedy I've ever wrote. I say technically advisedly because it is instinctively, I did not plan it. It happened like that.”
“I think that if I wasn't a success, I shouldn't enjoy it very much.”
“I want to go on writing … better and better and better … and that ought to keep me happily occupied for the next few years.”