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Memory lane: James Roose-Evans, founder of Hampstead Theatre, escorts Noel Coward to a special performance of Private Lives at the theatre in 1962 |
An audience with the Master
Veteran actor and Coronation Street star Edward De Souza tells Gerald Isaaman about the day Noel Coward dropped in at the Hampstead Theatre...
DOYEN actor Edward De Souza, now 76 and starring in Coronation Street, recalled this week the momentous day when Noel Coward visited the Hampstead Theatre to see the revival of his iconic comedy Private Lives.
As the famed theatre celebrates its golden anniversary this year with a new production of Coward’s play, De Souza told me: “It was a great moment in my life – rather like playing Hamlet in front of Will Shakespeare.”
It was in 1962 that James Roose-Evans, founder and first artistic director of what was then the Hampstead Theatre Club, brought Coward’s 1929 razor-sharp comedy of manners back to life in a production hailed by the critics.
It was such a rave success that Coward sent a telegram from his home in Switzerland saying that he was due in London to dine with the Queen Mother and had to see Private Lives at all costs. And he had only one day available.
So a special matinée performance was put on before an invited audience at the then tiny prefabricated theatre in Swiss Cottage for the Master to see his own magnificent wit sparkle into action.
“Hampstead was very much an experimental theatre and I can recall Jimmy putting on what was then considered this pot-boiler by Noel Coward,” De Souza recalled. “There was nobody who was anyone then in the cast and the set was very minimal because there was no money for something better.
“Jimmy asked the cast of five to get all our friends to come along to see Private Lives, which we did, but I had no idea Coward was coming to see us perform.
“It was a nice spring day and the sun was shining. There were two intervals and Coward came round to the dressing room in the first one. He was so nice, very sweet and funny, and said to me, ‘Your best moment was in the scene at the piano!’ He joined us on stage at the end, and later he said that production was the ‘renaissance of old Dad’.”
Roose-Evans, now 81, remembers the day in more detail. “The performance was due to start at 2.30,” he told me. “At exactly 20 minutes past two a limousine drew to a halt at the entrance to the theatre and out stepped the Master, followed by the actress Joyce Carey, Graham Payne, Noel’s companion, and Lesley Cole, his secretary.
“Photographers began clicking their cameras while the Master paused to say a few works to the waiting journalists. It was exactly 2.25 and the curtain rose promptly five minutes later. Even a royal visit to the production, which was to follow in the person of Princess Margaret, could not have been more precisely timed. And, as one reporter the next day observed, ‘the Master’s first chuckle came at 2.49’.”
It was an appropriately poignant moment too for Coward since his first acclaim as an actor and playwright came in 1924 when his play The Vortex, the first ever to concern drugs, made its debut at Hampstead’s Everyman Theatre, now the noted cinema in Hollybush Vale.
Roose-Evans added: “At the end of Private Lives there was loud and affectionate applause followed by cries of ‘Author!’. Coward stepped on to the stage, joining hands with the five actors. ‘Ladies and gentlemen! This has been a lovely afternoon in the theatre’ he said.
“And here he shot up the famous finger of admonition, adding: ‘It wouldn’t have been were it not for this delightful cast and this finely judged and beautifully paced production of Mr Roose-Evans!’ Then he drove off to dine with the Queen Mother.”
The following day impresario Peter Bridge phoned offering to take the production to the West End with an all-star cast including David Niven, Coral Browne, Ian Carmichael and David Tomlinson. “But I decline saying that I owed it to the actors to stand by them – after all they had received rapturous notices.”
In fact Private Lives went on to play for seven months at the Duke of York’s Theatre – De Souza’s West End debut – before going on tour. “And we had the same terrible set,” said De Souza. “We were all full of tension that afternoon with Coward and it was quite scary for us when he arrived.
“But it all worked beautifully. Of course it was Private Lives that mattered, not us. It is one of those perfect plays in which Coward rules and the cast is unimportant.”
Surprisingly, De Souza did not benefit directly from the hit production, but he did go on to appear in a stream of film and TV shows, including The Sweeney, The Avengers and Doctor Who as well as horror films like Phantom of the Opera and the Bond movie The Spy Who Loved Me.
“Now I’m playing a bit of a flirt again, the awful old scallywag Colin Grimshaw making eyes at all the women in Coronation Street,” he said. “It’s my first soap and quite a different life from Private Lives.
“So Coronation Street is something of a renaissance for this old Dad. And I’m really loving it. Actors don’t retire. They go on until they reach the time when they can’t remember their lines. Then they have to stop.”
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