FEATURE OF THE WEEK:

Noel Coward, chronicler of an era

By Philip Hoare

Reading Philip Hoare's biography makes you realize that fashions in entertainment change, and once the period that inspired a work or a genre fades, so does the work or the genre, no matter how fervidly a later generation may revive it.

That, I suppose, is nothing more than a long-winded way of saying you can't recapture the past. Some of Coward's plays, notably Blithe Spirit and Private Lives, are always being performed in one part of the world or the other. But in reading about them like this you come to a stark realization of how much a part of their times they were.



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Updated: August 21, 1996
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