Playwrights From England

"Rosemary was only a spinster in the strict sense of denotation. She was eminently, eminently nubile."

"Rosemary’s reputation was known; he would, by obscure logic, become retrospectively a cuckold."

"I decide that the East has definitely spoiled me for women."

"…English translation of the Koran. I wonder how, with such a repetitive farrago of platitudes, expressing so self-evident a theology and an ethic so puerile, Islam can have spread as it has."

"My dear Hardman, It was pleasant... I am sorry that your Oriental venture has not been going as well as you expected. But, then, I think that the days when a man could expect to make his fortune in the East are dead and gone. Indeed, the time seems to have come for the reverse of the old process to apply, and for the East to dominate the West."

"…the whole world here breathed easy concupiscence…"

"He would milk the white man....The white man had more money than sense."

"Europeans had sometimes invited him to dinner and given him stuffed aubergines and onion soup and Nuits St Georges and what they said was good coffee.…They had evinced, in their curious French mixed with Malay (both were foreign languages, both occupied the same compartment, they were bound to get mixed), a nostalgia for France which amused him slightly, bored him much, flattered him not at all."

"In China he had spoken good Mandarin, and in ten years this had become his first tongue. Here he found himself with a parish of Hokkien and Cantonese speakers and a few English people whose language he could hardly talk. His French, severed from its sources of nourishment, grown coarse through lack of use, halted and wavered, searching for the right word which Mandarin was always ready to supply."

"He forgot that the Malays revere cats and that the Chinese merely relish them."

"‘...You know what they call you expatriates? White leeches.’"

"…the British. Haughty, white, fat, ugly, by no means sympathique, cold…"

"...he became one with his Chinese parishioners, announcing a trade as honest as that of the dentist, the seller of rice-wine, the brothel-keeper, the purveyor of quack rejuvenators and aphrodisiacs, or the vendor of shark’s-fin strips."

"...with Indians there is an unhealthy love of the law..."

"She gave the lie to the European superstition - chiefly a missionary superstition - that the women of the East are downtrodden."

"Her face was that of a boy gang-leader, smooth with the innocence of one who, by the same quirk as blinds a man to the mystery of whistling or riding a bicycle, has never mastered the art of affection or compassion or properly learned the moral dichotomy."

"...an Empire now crashing about their ears. The Sikh smiled at the vanity of human aspirations."

"'The country will absorb you and you will cease to be Victor Crabbe. You will less and less find it possible to do the work for which you were sent here. You will lose function and identity. You will be swallowed up and become another kind of eccentric. You may become a Muslim. You may forget your English, or at least lose your English accent. You may end in a kampong, no longer a foreigner, an old brownish man with many wives and children, one of the elders whom the young will be encouraged to consult on matters of the heart. You will be ruined.'"

"“...reality’s always dull, you know...”"

"It had, perhaps, not been a very edifying life. On the booze in England, in India, in Malaya… And then a couple of gins for breakfast and then the first beers of the day in a kedai … He had been driven out of that Eden…because of his sinful desire to taste what was forbidden."

"The East would always present that calm face of faint astonishment, unmoved at the anger, not understanding the bitterness."

"Around them the gawping locals sat, amazed with an amazement that never grew less…"

"His real wife, his houri, his paramour was everywhere waiting, genie-like, in a bottle. The hymeneal gouging-off of the bottle-top, the kiss of the brown bitter yeasty flow, the euphoria far beyond the release of detumescence."

"“…as the cinema shows us, they are much more accessible and, for that matter, much more wanton than our own women""

"‘Quite all right, sir. Plenty of time. You have a sleep, sir.’ Hood turned over with his fat bottom towards Nabby Adams. Thank God. Nabby Adams tiptoed over again to the serving-hatch, ordered another, downed it. He began to feel a great deal better. After yet another he felt better still. Poor old Robin Hood wasn’t such a bad type. Stupid, didn’t know a gear-box from a spare tyre, but he meant well. The world generally looked better. The sun shone, the palms shook in the faint breeze, a really lovely Malay girl passed by the window. Proud of carriage, in tight baju and rich sarong, she balanced voluptuous haunches. Her blue-black hair had some sort of a flower in it; how delicate the warm brown of her flat flower-like face. ‘What time is it, Nabby?’...."

"‘Sir, we are trying to work because we are having to take the examination in a very brief time from now, but the younger boys are not realizing the importance of our labours and they are creating veritable pandemoniums while we are immersed in our studies. To us who are their lawful and appointed superiors they are giving overmuch insolence, nor are they sufficiently overawed by our frequent threatenings. I would be taking it, sir, as inestimable favour if you would deliver harsh words and verbal punishing to them all, sir, especially the Malay boys, who are severely lacking in due respectfulness and incorrigible to discipline also.’"

"…it was a cardinal rule in the East not to show one’s true feelings."

"“I should want to go home, like Fenella. I should be so tired of the shambles here, the obscurantism, the colour-prejudice, the laziness and ignorance, as to desire nothing better than a headship in a cold stone country school in England. But I love this country. I feel protective towards it. Sometimes just before dawn breaks, I feel that somehow I enclose it, contain it. I feel that it needs me. This is absurd, because snakes and scorpions are ready to bite me, a drunken Tamil is prepared to knife me, the Chinese in the town would like to spit at me, some day a Malay boy will run amok and try to tear me apart. But it doesn’t matter. I want to live here; I want to be wanted. Despite the sweat, despite the fever, the prickly heat, the mosquitoes, the terrorists, the fools at the bar of the club, despite Fenella.”"

"Sultan Aladdin… had few illusions about his own people: amiable, well-favoured, courteous, they loved rest better than industry… their function was to remind the toiling Chinese, Indians and British of the ultimate vanity of labour."

"Relief brought an aching desire to be sitting in a kedai with a large bottle of Tiger or Anchor or Carlsberg in front of him...."

"His heart beating faster, his throat drying, Nabby whispered to the driver, ‘Not so bloody fast.’ ‘Tuan?’ ‘All right, all right.’ One of these days he must really get down to the language. There never seemed to be the time, somehow...."

"‘What you could do with is a nice strong cup of tea, sir. I’ll tell the kuki to make you one.’ ‘Does it really do any good, Nabby? (That was better.) ‘I’ve tried every damn thing.’...."

"Vorpal had the trick of adding a Malay enclitic to his utterances. This also had power to irritate, especially in the mornings. It irritated Nabby Adams that this should irritate him, but somewhere at the back of his brain was the contempt of the man learned in languages for the silly show-off, jingling the small change of ‘wallah’ and charpoy..."

"'And make up your mind about what bloody race you belong to. One minute it’s all about being a farmer’s boy in Northamptonshire and the next you’re on about the old days in Calcutta and what the British have done to Mother India and the snake-charmers and the bloody temple-bells. Ah, wake up, for God’s sake. You’re English right enough but you’re forgetting how to speak the bloody language, what with traipsing about with Punjabis and Sikhs and God knows what. You talk Hindustani in your sleep, man. Sort it out, for God’s sake. If you want to put a loincloth on, get cracking, but don’t expect the privileges --’ (the word came out in a wet blurr; the needle stuck for a couple of grooves) ‘the privileges, the privileges…’"

"Nabby Adams, supine on the bed, grunted. It was four o’clock in the morning and he did not want to be talking. He had had a confused coloured dream about Bombay, shot with sharp pangs of unpaid bills. Over it all had brooded thirst, thirst for a warmish bottle of Tiger beer. Or Anchor. Or Carlsberg. He said, 'Did you bring any beer back with you?'"

"The lifestyle presented in Hay Fever, Design for Living, Private Lives and Blithe Spirit is somewhat more acceptable now than it was in Coward's day, but the plays can never be either controversial or dated. Coward emphasized entertainment, not message, and the principal appeal of these scintillating comedies arises from their bantering dialogue (with just a touch of malice and cynicism) and their amusing situations (with just a touch of sexual spice). The artificiality of both is part of their charm. The carefully wrought machine runs on jewels of wit, and charming little figures parade before us at the appropriate times with striking effect. That it also indicates The Times is almost incidental, but useful."

"Now I'm off to Sibyl to meet Noel Coward, with whom I am slightly in love."

"Did I tell you about Noel Coward? He is in search of culture, and thinks Bloomsbury a kind of place of pilgrimage. Will you come and meet him? He is a miracle, a prodigy. He can sing, dance, write plays, act, compose, and I daresay paint.—He rescued his whole family who kept boarding houses in Surbiton, and they are now affluent, but on the verge of bankruptcy, because he spends so much on cocktails. If he could only become like Bloomsbury he thinks he might be saved."

"Noel Coward, whose brain is so delicate that it is intoxicated by the slightest waves in the ether, has, in desperation, taken a header in the wrong direction. He ought to be a white-hot pacifist. But somebody waved a Union Jack in front of him, and he tripped up, and he wrote Cavalcade. That play is about the finest essay in betrayal since Judas Iscariot jingled his thirty pieces of silver in the moonlight a number of years ago. And the tragedy of it is heightened by the fact that it is Noel who has been betrayed, and not his public. His public, which is deservedly vast, adored the flags and the streamers, the blood red, ice-white and royal blue which, in varying patterns, he threw across the stage of Drury Lane. And he, I am quite sure, adored the thirty thousand pieces of silver which, as a result of this play, he was able to jingle in his pocket. But the play was a tragedy, none the less. And the tragedy was not on the stage. It was in the Royal Box. It was focused in the thin, nervous face of the young man who had created this glittering tissue of dramatic lies, as he turned to his adoring audience, and said, "It's pretty exciting to be English nowadays.""

"My big break came the next year with Bitter Sweet, starring . I had a dress with a plunging neckline. Noël Coward said he could see the and I felt devastated. If you're blind, you'll miss me in that one."

"I asked Coward about a famous anecdote about him. He was alleged to have been sitting under cover from the heavy rain next to his close friend Princess Marina, Duchess of Kent, prior to going to Westminster Abbey for the Coronation service. Opposite them was another queen who had made her way into the affections of the British public, the vast Salote, Queen of Tonga. "Noël, who is that little man sheltering under Queen Salote's umbrella?" asked his companion. Coward peered through the rain. "Oh, her lunch, my dear." He laughed. "That was said by somebody at White's, and immediately attributed to me. That was very flattering of course, except I had intended to visit Tonga the following winter, and after that of course it was quite impossible.""

"Coward's influence spread even to the outposts of Rickmansworth and Poona. Hearty naval commanders or jolly colonels acquired the "camp" manners of calling everything from Joan of Arc to Merlin "lots of fun," and the adjective "terribly" peppered every sentence. All sorts of men suddenly wanted to look like Noel Coward—sleek and satiny, clipped and well groomed, with a cigarette, a telephone, or a cocktail at hand."

"Coward himself said of Bitter-Sweet: "disdaining archness and false modesty, I knew it was witty. I knew it was well constructed, and I also knew it would be a success." That description can suffice for a great many of Coward plays (and other achievements) and makes the main points. That comedy, and not tragedy, should have been his métier may convince the injudicious that he is brittle and trivial – but neither the chic nor the wise can trouble themselves about people like that."

"Coward played a supporting role in a poorly received comedy movie SURPRISE PACKAGE(1960). When someone approached Coward and told him that he had stolen the picture,Coward replied---"Thank you,My Dear, but it was only petty larceny"."

"Morris: I'll never speak to you again until the day I die! Gary: Well, we can have a nice little chat then, can't we?"

"Gary: Beryl Willard is extremely competent. Beryl Willard has been extremely competent, man and boy, for forty years. In addition to her extreme competence, she has contrived, with uncanny skill, to sustain a spotless reputation for being the most paralysing, epoch-making, monumental, world-shattering, God-awful bore that ever drew breath...I will explain one thing further - it is this. No prayer, no bribe, no threat, no power, human or divine, would induce me to go to Africa with Beryl Willard. I wouldn't go as far as Wimbledon with Beryl Willard. Liz: What he's trying to say is that he doesn't care for Beryl Willard."

"Gary: You ought never to have joined the Athenaeum Club, Henry: it was disastrous. Henry: I really don’t see why. Gary: It’s made you pompous. Henry: It can’t have. I’ve always been too frightened to go into it."

"So if I could employ A little magic that will finally destroy This dream that pains me and enchains me But I can't because I'm mad... I'm mad about the boy"

"Will it ever cloy This odd diversity of misery and joy I'm feeling quite insane and young again And all because I'm mad about the boy"

"Lord knows I'm not a fool girl I really shouldn't care Lord knows I'm not a school girl In the flurry of her first affair."