THE PLAIN DEALER, WEDNESDAY, MAY 18, 1966

Noel Coward Comes Roaring Back in New London Play

By PETER BELLAMY

LONDON Noel Coward for more than 30 years has been the entertainment world's most versatile talent.

He has written stage plays, operettas, musicals and screen plays. He has been a producer, director, composer, actor, singer, dancer, comedian, record-

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ing artist and cabaret entertainer. He has also written a best selling autobiography.

Yet until the second act of his new play, "A Song at Twilight," at the 'Queen's Theater, one has the terribly sad feeling that Coward is past the twilight of his career and has lost his touch for the brilliant, clever comic line and epi-

gram.

But he comes roaring back in the second act to show he's still got it in a drama which features exciting acting, sharp character delineation and a blazing virtuoso performance by

PETER BELLAMY

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Irene Worth. She is reminiscent of the young Tallu lah Bankhead haughty, flamboyant, redolent with sex and fascinating.

"A Song At Twilight" is a variation on the theme of the vulnerability to blackmail of the successful creative artist. In some ways it does for homosexuals what the play, "The Killing of Sister George," does for lesbians. These two subjects are certainly uppermost in English playwrights' minds these days.

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Coward's play invokes memories of Oscar Wilde, who was both disgraced and revealed as a homosexual after an ill-advised suit for slander.

THE NOVELIST in the

play publishes ungallant play publishes ungallant things about a former mistress even as the late Somerset Maugham wrote ghastly things about his wife, except in the case of the latter his wife was dead and couldn't give her side and couldn't give her side of the story. A recent book by Maugham's nephew suggests other unhappy parallels to the play.

Coward obviously knows a great deal about homosexuality among creative artists and those victims of it who marry or have heterosexual love affairs as a cover up. One of the lines sums up the curse of the homosexual as being a perpetual struggle between "natural instincts and the laws of society."

AS THE PLAY opens, and all of it takes place in a Swiss hotel, the novelist's old flame in the person of Miss Worth appears to ask permission to print his love letters to her in her autobiography. When he refuses, she reveals that she possesses the love letters he wrote his former male secretary.

The novelist is driven nearly dotty trying to discover whether her motives stem from revenge, jealousy or thoughts of blackmail. She turns him on a conversational spit like a barbecuing beef.

Although she looks marvelous, it is only because she has had her face lifted twice and is taking injections to preserve what youth she has left. Actually, she hasn't one of her own teeth left in her head, but she taunts the novelist with his appearance of decrepitude and her semblance of youth.

THE FIRST act and

what a drag-has such unCowardlike lines as "if we had met under earlier circumstances we might have been friends." It is a strain on an audience prejudiced in Coward's favor to experience the first act. Lili Palmer scarcely ap-

pears on stage until the latter part of the second act, but is a mental and ocular magnet when she does. She is the wife, who like almost all wives, knows more about her husband than he does or cares to admit to himself.

Sean Barrett, a young

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and handsome Latin type, completes the cast as a waiter. Coward gives Barrelt, in no way referred to in the program notes, an assist in writing the play.