Bringing out the Acid: Nol Coward, Harold Pinter, Ivy Compton-Burnett

and the Uses of Camp

Sos Eltis
Modern Drama, Volume 51, Number 2, Summer 2008, pp. 211-233 (Article)
Published by University of Toronto Press
DOI: 10.1353/mdr.0.0041
For additional information about this article
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http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/mdr/summary/v051/51.2.eltis.html
Bringing out the Acid: Noel Coward,
Harold Pinter, Ivy Compton-Burnett
and the Uses of Camp
1
SOS ELTIS
These notes are for Oscar Wilde, wrote Susan Sontag in her famous essay
on Camp (277). Wildean epigrams intersperse her observations, both as
illustrations of the workings and mindset of the sensibility she defines
as camp, and as an indication that camp can be seen not merely as a
matter of taste, but as a mode of operating and a philosophy of life. Noel
Coward dismissed Wilde as a tiresome, affected sod, silly, conceited,
inadequate and, worst of all, a beauty-lover, his distaste hardly suggest-
ing a close affinity between the author of Private Lives and Sontags camp
aesthetic of artifice and frivolity, of which Wilde is for her the epitome.
2
Cowards plays receive glancing mention in Sontags Notes as an example
of intentional camp, that which means to be funny, as opposed to Genuine
Camp, which is always na ve and takes itself entirely seriously (282). Yet
Sontags Notes on Camp repeatedly evoke an ethos and style that lies at
the heart of Cowards theatrical technique.
The essence of camp sensibility, Sontag declares, is a love of the unnatural,
of style and artifice. Rooted in passion, it is the glorification of character:
Character, she writes, is understood as a state of continual incandes-
cence a person being one, very intense thing (286). Urban not rural,
closely related to boredom, playful, witty and frivolous, Sontags camp
describes the essence of so many of Cowards characters, inhabiting the
Riviera and the cocktail hour with careful insouciance, raising a finely-
shaped eyebrow at the obtuseness of others and themselves (275292).
Camp captures both the mode of his plays and their mood; it incarnates
a victory of style over content, aesthetics over morality, of irony
over tragedy (287), which springs, not from the sterility and emotional
aloofness that such priorities could suggest, but from a generous joy that
mocks seriousness and lightly reveals the brutality that underlies moral stric-
tures. Camp taste is, above all, a mode of enjoyment, of appreciation not
judgement, according to Sontag, and it offers a comic vision of the world,
not a bitter or polemical comedy, but comedy as an experience of under-
involvement, of detachment (291, 288).
Modern Drama, 51:2 (Summer 2008) doi:10.3138/md.51.2.211 211
From the early works Ill Leave it to You (1919), The Young Idea (1921),
and This Was a Man (1926) through to his most celebrated comedies Hay
Fever (1924), Private Lives (1929), Design for Living (1932), Present Laughter
(1939), Blithe Spirit (1941) and encompassing numerous revue sketches
along the way, frivolity, irony, and poise are at the heart of Cowards writing.
3
The sensibility that Sontag celebrates breathes through them, not just as the
element they inhabit but as a technique they very deliberately employ. Many
of Cowards plays, of course, eschew this sensibility and style, all those, in
particular, that were written with deliberately serious intent Post Mortem
(1930), Cavalcade (1931), This Happy Breed (1939), and Peace in Our
Time (1947), for example. But the absent-minded insouciance of plays like
Blithe Spirit and Present Laughter, disdaining to ask the audiences love or
approval for their protagonists, is unmistakably camp. In Hay Fever,
for example, no curtain speeches expound the superiority of the Bliss
familys values; audiences are left to be entertained or irritated by them
and their ability to run rings round the staid and self-important. The
plays comic resolutions are incomplete: Blithe Spirits Charles Condomine
fleeing the furious ghosts of his dead wives; Elyot and Amanda at the
end of Private Lives, escaping hand-in-hand to an uncertain future of pas-
sion and intense irritation; the Bliss family self-centredly oblivious to the
discomfiture of their surreptitiously departing guests. This is the ironic dis-
engagement of camp, operating outside the conventional borders of comedy
and tragedy, lacking the emotional and social commitment that gives them
meaning.
Sontag identifies two kinds of camp: na ve or pure camp is unintentional,
innocently vulgar, good because its awful (292); conscious camp,
on the other hand, is intentionally funny, a self-performance she
describes as Being-as-Playing-a-Role . . . the farthest extension, in sensibil-
ity, of the metaphor of life as theatre (280).
4
Sontag cites Coward as an
example of this self-conscious camping, and his characters are, indeed,
knowing self-performers, commenting on the success or otherwise of their
effects (282).
Present Laughter is Cowards comic critique of self-performance as
a modus vivendi. Garry Essendines existence is an unceasing theatrical
performance, his matinee idol persona leading him to seduce women as
an almost Pavlovian reflex. He is trapped by the mechanism of his own
charm a charm and persona that, the play reveals, are constructed and
maintained with considerable expertise not only by Garry himself but by a
team of friends and employees, who guard his sleep, answer his mail, and
prevent him from playing Peer Gynt. Having spent so much of the play
delivering theatrical set pieces as his own spontaneous thoughts, Garry
tries to dismiss a string of unwanted admirers with tirades of declarative
emotion, only to have each of them reject the bits that dont suit their
purposes as insincere acting and select the bits that do as truth. Yet the
question of where performance ceases and interiority begins is never
SOS ELTIS
212 Modern Drama, 51:2 (Summer 2008)
answered. The play breaks down such simple binaries. In keeping with
Harold Pinters famous declaration that there can be no hard distinctions
between. . . what is true and what is false . . . it can be both true and false,
so Garry Essendines instincts, emotions, and needs lie in uneasy but not
necessarily contradictory relation to his hyper-articulacy, self-awareness and
self-construction (Writing for the Theatre 11). The play is a comic analysis
of theatricality and identity, which challenges both performers and audience
to determine the relation between sincerity and style, essential self and
performance.
5
Present Laughter is itself an exercise in Being-as-Playing-a-Role, for just as
Garrys self-performance defies any simple division between life and theatre,
so the play as a whole hovers provocatively between dramatic reality and
metatheatricality. Challenged to identify the note of truth or sincerity in
Garrys utterances, the audience is further baffled in struggling to determine
on what level of reality to receive the play itself. When Joanna, another
would-be lover offering her services to Garry, is interrupted by the doorbell
and wonders who it is, Garry exclaims, With any luck its the
Lord Chamberlain, as if calling on the theatrical censor to rescue him
from this excess of sexual opportunity (237). When Garry informs
Morris that provincial audiences have often proved to be more intelligent
than London ones, Morris warns him to Be careful! Someone might hear!
a line which plays equally well inside or outside the capital (243). Thus
when Garry tiptoes out with his ex-wife Liz, leaving his aspiring lovers
to argue it out between themselves, the echo of Elyot and Amandas
exit in Private Lives offers a further challenge to the search for authenticity
and truth. In this sense, Cowards play is not just an exercise in life-
as-theatre but an examination of it, not just knowingly camp but self-
questioningly so.
Sontag notes the vulgar use of the verb, to camp, and defines it
as a mode of seduction one which employs flamboyant mannerisms
susceptible of a double interpretation; gestures full of duplicity, with a
witty meaning for cognoscenti and another, more impersonal, for outsiders
(281). Cowards dialogue could thus be identified as verbal camp. The Bliss
family in Hay Fever constantly use language in a way that is entirely com-
prehensible to them but leaves their guests high and dry; Elyot and Amanda
leave their legal spouses floundering in their inability to master the acquired
layers of meaning beyond the literal level of their exchanges. This mastery
of subtext is the aspect of Cowards writing that Kenneth Tynan sums up in a
quote from Cowards one-act Shadow Play: Small talk,. . . a lot of small talk,
with other thoughts going on beneath (qtd. in Tynan 59). The original
context of this line is a broken marriage, where a painful irony derives
from the inability of each partner to read the others subtext. But when
Cowards characters camp verbally, it is a collusion that serves to isolate
and disable the forces of moral seriousness and disapproval. The whole
point of camp, according to Sontag, is to dethrone the serious, and its
Noel Coward, Harold Pinter, Ivy Compton-Burnett and the Uses of Camp
Modern Drama, 51:2 (Summer 2008) 213
power is to reveal sincerity as simple philistinism, intellectual narrowness
(288). Or, as Elyot in Private Lives puts it, Be flippant. Laugh at everything,
all their sacred shibboleths. Flippancy brings out the acid in their damned
sweetness and light (56). Elyot spends the last act of Private Lives doing
precisely that, using humour, flippancy, and irony to reveal the boorishness
and bullying that underpin Victor and Sibyls insistence on social and sexual
conformity.
Cowards humour, irony, frivolity, theatricality, and artifice thus place him
centrally in Sontags outline of the camp sensibility, and later theorists have
generally accepted these attributes as vital markers of camp. But, having
shot camp into the critical and popular limelight, Sontags 1964 essay has
been widely criticized on a variety of grounds: she was quickly accused of
appropriating an exclusively homosexual discourse and rendering it anodyne
and palatable for the heterosexual mainstream, and numerous critics have
since offered alternative and multiple definitions of camp as a mode
of performance, reception, style, cultural sensibility, aesthetic, or discourse
or as a combination of these (see, e.g., Booth; Core; Cleto). Perhaps most
importantly, Sontag has been challenged on her assumption that [t]o
emphasise style is to slight content, or to introduce an attitude which is
neutral with respect to content. It goes without saying that the Camp sensi-
bility is disengaged, depoliticised or at least apolitical (277).
6
Coward may
seem a perfect example of this airy detachment, but his use of style and
aesthetic surface was often deceptively complex, making him an interesting
test case for the power and limitations of camp.
Looking back from the 1960s at the rise of fascism in 1930s Europe,
Cowards autobiographical writings eschew political analysis for aesthetics.
The root of Germanys problem, he averred, was the absence of a Teutonic
sense of humour, as evidenced by their ability to take Hitler seriously, when
[h]is physical appearance alone should have been sufficient for a belly
laugh, with his stumpy female little legs, those rounded hips and that
comedic moustache (Past Conditional 278). Lest this frivolity should
seem accidental, Coward quickly follows it up with a description of his
own attendance at a fascist rally in Italy in 1938. He hears cries from the
stadium of Duce Duce Duce and prepares to be discreetly amused, but
I was not prepared for the actual close-up of the hero when he appeared.
He had, most unwisely, squeezed his squat little figure into a dazzling white
uniform; his face, bursting out of the top of it looked like an enormous,
purple-red Victoria plum surmounted by a black and gold tasselled forage-
cap several sizes too small. Add Mussolinis expression, his fascist salute
like a clockwork doll, and his pomposity and self-importance reduce
Coward to uncontrollable laughter (279). Coward then narrates his dash
from the stadium to release his fou rire [hysterical laughter] in the safety
of a taxi, reflecting on his good fortune that the Italians are not as quick
on the draw as the Germans, or he would have been in serious trouble.
Writing with full knowledge of the reality behind these supposedly
SOS ELTIS
214 Modern Drama, 51:2 (Summer 2008)
comedic figures and of the full consequences paid by humanity, Coward
offers a fit of the giggles as his life-endangering contribution to the war.
He leaves his own self-image deliberately uncertain: is he parodying his
own frivolity? is he irredeemably superficial? or is this refusal to engage
with fascism on any level beyond comic aesthetics the most absolute and
unanswerably final dismissal?
Coward can inject the destabilizing aesthetics of style with just one word.
As he does in his novel, Pomp and Circumstance (1960), set on the mythical
colonial island of Samolo. The British heroine muses on her own laissez-faire
attitude to the sexual morality of the Samolan islanders, and their relative
innocence compared to morally disapproving and corrupt Americans and
Europeans: There are no dope addicts or nymphomaniacs or dypsomaniacs
or pathological sex murderers in Samolo. There is a great deal of sex which
goes on all the time with a winsome disregard of gender, but there are very
few sex crimes. (16). Winsome is a masterstroke. Implying harmlessness
together with style and charm, the adjective imperceptibly shifts the terms of
judgement to the aesthetic and entirely personal, while implicitly challeng-
ing any automatic link between heterosexuality and communally agreed
moral norms.
Coward is finely attuned to the subtle links between terms of judgement
and the value schemes attached to them, and his sudden switching of terms
can offer sly challenges to assumed standards of assessment. His diary com-
ments on John Osbornes Look Back in Anger, the play at the vanguard of a
theatre movement set on proving Coward and his contemporaries obsolete,
serve as a neat example of such destabilizing tactics:
I have just read Look Back in Anger by John Osborne and it is full of talent and fairly
well constructed, but I wish I knew why the hero is so dreadfully cross and what
about? I should also like to know how, where and why he and his friend run a
sweet-stall and if, considering the heros unparalleled capacity for invective, they
ever manage to sell any sweets? (17 Feb. 1957, Diaries 349)
Starting with the mild tone of carefully fair but faintly bewildered apprecia-
tion, Cowards appeal to standards of good manners and practical realities
subtly and humorously challenges the coherence and sufficiency of
Osbornes creation.
In a 1978 essay, For Interpretation: Notes against Camp, which con-
demns camp on the same grounds on which Sontag embraced it, Andrew
Britton dismisses camp as a stylistic vacuum: Camp is chronically averse to
value judgements . . . : the obsession with style entails both an astonishing
irresponsiveness to tone and a refusal to acknowledge that styles are neces-
sarily the bearers of attitudes, judgements, values, assumptions of which its
necessary to be aware, and between which its necessary to discriminate
(14142). Coward, however, has an acute awareness of precisely the way in
which value systems are embedded in language, and sudden shifts in register
Noel Coward, Harold Pinter, Ivy Compton-Burnett and the Uses of Camp
Modern Drama, 51:2 (Summer 2008) 215
are a vital element in his dramatic technique. His is not a homogeneous,
contentless emphasis on surface but a very precise and deliberate deploy-
ment of style to challenge assumed values and judgements. The terms
flippant and frivolous, so often applied to Cowards protagonists, both
inside and outside the plays, denote a lack of consonance between the
issue under discussion and the manner in which it is discussed, an inap-
propriate juxtaposition of style and subject matter. Such dissonance implies
the absence of a proper harmony between linguistic register and moral judg-
ement, between tone and vocabulary and the value scheme they imply, and
this disjunction is a deliberate and significant technique.
Cowards dialogue is, perhaps, most renowned for its subtext, for the
moments when words and meaning are at greatest remove from one
another, and display his precise control of a dramatic medium where com-
munication happens not wordlessly but in a complex and tangential relation
to the words: Elyot and Amanda on the balcony in the first act of Private
Lives, admiring the Duke of Westminsters yacht and discussing the Taj
Mahal, or Garry Essendine drawing inexorably closer to Joanna in Present
Laughter, until they sink passionately back onto the sofa while discussing the
relative merits of the Albert and Queens Halls. In a wonderfully suggestive
article, Frances Gray likens these moments (where the characters con-
sciously deliver their lines until a tiny erotic pause leads them into unity
and explicitly passionate declarations) to the dancing of Fred Astaire in his
film pairings with Ginger Rogers, Astaire always visibly thinking as he
dances, until, with a tiny magical pause, the two dancers unmistakeably
come together in the dance (Moving). These are the moments when the
dialogue most overtly camps, at a height of style over substance, coded
meanings shared by the lovers, with the audience as privileged interpreters.
Cowards central protagonists are virtuoso dancers in this sense, but their
virtuosity lies not only in the grace and artistry of their dance but in their
ability to switch with lightning speed from one dance step to another; split-
second moves are performed almost invisibly from jazz to ballet to fox-trot to
waltz. Camp is one mode of linguistic dance that Coward deploys with
deliberate and precise effect, but it is married with a remarkable ability to
change the pace, tempo, and style of dance almost imperceptibly at any
moment. These changes highlight the artificiality of every dance step,
making the audience aware of the formality of the rules that underlie the
apparently free-flowing movement. The artistry of the protagonists perfor-
mance is not just their command of the moves but also their skilful evading
of the fixity of form.
7
In A Private Life, a 1983 BBC documentary, Pinter speaks of his admiration
for Cowards objectivity of the stage (qtd. in Hoare 458), his refusing to
take sides or to validate any one character; and Cowards exploitation of
camp and other linguistic registers, his refusal to allow one language
to become the norm, is crucial in this. Coward took time to develop
this technique. In his early play The Young Idea, Eustace Dabbit, a county
SOS ELTIS
216 Modern Drama, 51:2 (Summer 2008)
hunting type, condemns the unseen Beryl: Shes got no go in her, that girl.
She borrowed the top of my Thermos, and never returned it. Shallow, very
shallow (92). Here the juxtaposition of values works as a sign of the char-
acters muddled thinking, the upper-middle classs lack of emotional depth
or self-awareness. The mercurial twins, Gerda and Sholto, are the heroes of
the piece, invading the county set to rescue their father from its stultifying
hypocrisy. Their self-mocking performances as dutiful children infuriate the
landed gentry, but the play demands that the audience be as charmed by
their mischief as their father is. Later plays like Hay Fever, Private Lives, and
Blithe Spirit do not invite approval or admiration for their central protago-
nists irritation and exasperation, they imply, are an entirely reasonable
response to the atrocious hospitality of Hay Fevers Bliss family or the
murderous antics of the ghostly Elvira in Blithe Spirit. It is judgement and
condemnation that are problematic. The sudden switches in linguistic
register, the ever-shifting pattern of language, disarm the language of
normative values and moral disapproval both onstage and off. Crucially,
Coward eschews the coded, ironic wink of complicity with the audience,
the shared superiority that invites the audience alongside the playwright
or characters in their ability to read and appreciate the campness
of the performance (Piggford 298). Instead, the plays preserve their
neutrality: eschewing complicity, they disdain to solicit audience approval,
destabilizing normative language and judgements without endorsing an
alternative.
Design for Living is the clearest example of this technique in operation.
The play charts the progress of a socially and sexually unconventional rela-
tionship: Gilda lives with Otto, sleeps with Leo, leaves Otto for Leo, sleeps
with Otto, leaves Leo and marries Ernest, leaves Ernest for Otto and Leo.
John Lahr rejected Tynans characterization of Cowards language as small
talk, with other thoughts going on behind (Tynan 59) and asserted instead
that Cowards characters live nervily on the surface of life, and say pretty
much what they mean (89). Certainly Gilda, the emotional centre of Design
for Living, spends most of the play searching for a language in which to
express her feelings accurately, and reproves others for a lack of such
rigour. Her language is often wonderfully baroque as she struggles to articu-
late the emotional and physical intensity of her post-coital self-awareness
(and most of the play is post-coital, like Arthur Schnitzlers La Ronde (1897),
which Coward referenced when suggesting that Design for Living could be
staged in a gigantic bed) (qtd. in Morley). With a vivid injection of
Websterian macabre Gilda presents herself to Ernest, their serious art-deal-
ing friend, as the [p]ortrait of a woman in three cardinal colours . . . of a too
loving spirit tied down to a predatory female carcass and invites him to
Walk up! Walk up and see the Fat Lady and the Monkey Man and the Living
Skeleton and the Three Famous Hermaphrodites! (15). When Ernest lapses
into cliches and dead turns of phrase, she rapidly picks him up on it: There
you go again! Strong as an ox! Obstinate as a mule! Just a pack of Animal
Noel Coward, Harold Pinter, Ivy Compton-Burnett and the Uses of Camp
Modern Drama, 51:2 (Summer 2008) 217
Grab thats what I am! Bring out all the other cards. Gentle as a dove!
Playful as a kitten! (1.9). What is the absolute deep-down truth of their
feelings, she demands of Leo, because, until they know that, they can only
sit here flicking words about (1.21). Similarly enraged by their articulacy,
Otto exclaims with sudden fury, Thats whats wrong with us! So many
words too many words, masses and masses of words, spewed about till
were choked with them (2.3.83).
All three ruthlessly puncture false rhetoric and verbal posturing. When
Otto banishes Leo from his sight with an ironic cry of old, old Loyal
friend, Leo mockingly applauds, Bravo, Deathless Drama! (32).
Assumptions of martyrdom, wisdom, or philosophy are bitterly
rejected; when Gilda attempts to maintain her social poise, Leo mocks her
serene small-talk: How lonely are you in your little box so high above the
arena? Dont you ever feel that you want to come down in the cheap seats
again, nearer to the blood and the sand and the warm smells, nearer to Life
and Death? (3.1.105). That Leos appeal to Gilda to acknowledge physical
reality and immediate feeling should be phrased in terms of seats at a
theatrical spectacle is significant. The three lovers are unremittingly self-
conscious, assessing each others performances and aware of their own.
Like Amanda and Elyot in Private Lives, they are finely aware of their
expected gender roles and comment ironically on how their performances
measure up to them. Thus Gilda analyses her turn in the role of seductive
woman: Squirming with archness, being aloof and desirable, consciously
alluring, snatching and grabbing, evading and surrendering, dressed and
painted for victory. An object of strange contempt! (1.1.14).
8
They adopt
the language of romantic convention, only to unsettle it and its associated
implications:
OTTO You look so terribly sweet when youre angry.
GILDA Another illusion. Im not sweet.
OTTO Those were only love words. You mustnt be so crushing. How are we
to conduct this revivalist meeting without love words? (2.2.63)
Romantic rhetoric belongs to a different kind of theatre, which they can
wittily perform but whose roles are too confining, denying the complexity
and immediacy of their desires. When Gilda and Leo contemplate a grand
marriage and thrilling honeymoon, they slip seamlessly into a performance
of high romance, only to have Gilda interrupt it with comic brutality:
GILDA Just you and me, alone, finding out about each other.
LEO Id be very gentle with you, very tender.
GILDA Youd get a sock in the jaw, if you were! (2.2.37)
They can play the roles and speak the language of traditional lovers, but its
idealistic rhetoric falsifies the carnal realities of their relationship.
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218 Modern Drama, 51:2 (Summer 2008)
The trio of lovers switches from one mode of speech to another
at lightning speed, moving seamlessly among rhetorical styles and
leaving those unable to perform this linguistic quick-step speechless
and gasping:
OTTO One cant be too careful, you know people are so deceptive.
LEO (grandiloquently) Its all a question of masks, really; brittle, painted masks.
We all wear them as a form of protection; modern life forces us to. We must
have some means of shielding our timid, shrinking souls from the glare of
civilization.
OTTO Be careful, Leo. Remember how you upset yourself in Mombasa!
LEO That was fish.
(Helen and Henry exchange startled glances.) (3.3.10102)
The guests, however used to social performance, only know how to play one
fixed role and are outplayed by Otto and Leos mercurial transformations.
But judgement itself is unsettled, as the grounds of engagement are
constantly shifted. Dancing from one register to the next, the lovers move
from polite travelogue, to practical necessity, to extravagant metaphor, to
theatrical self-assessment:
GRACE (sinking into a chair) Where did you come from on your freight boat,
Mr. Mercure?
LEO Manila.
OTTO It was very hot in Manila.
LEO It was also very hot in Singapore.
GILDA (drily) It always is, I believe.
OTTO It was cooler in Hong Kong; and in Vladivostock it was downright cold!
LEO We had to wear mittens.
HELEN Was all this a pleasure trip?
LEO Life is a pleasure trip, Mrs Carver; a Cheap Excursion.
OTTO That was very beautifully put, Leo. I shall always remember it. (3.1103)
The duos breathtaking linguistic switches, skipping effortlessly from dogged
literalness to philosophical musing while sending up each mode
with the very ease with which they perform it, leave the guests unable to
respond at all. To engage in conversation, some shared ground is needed,
some assumption about what language is to be exchanged, but Otto
and Leos mercurial changes deny their interlocutors any stable linguistic
ground.
The play as a whole operates in a similar way, switching key so often from
flippancy to seriousness, from one rhetorical style to another, that the
very terms and language of judgement are unsettled. Ernests final outraged
condemnation of the trio, as they accept a menage a` trois as their only viable
and honest relationship, is an attempt to assert heterosexual conformity as
Noel Coward, Harold Pinter, Ivy Compton-Burnett and the Uses of Camp
Modern Drama, 51:2 (Summer 2008) 219
normative and natural. Dismissing them and their disgusting three-sided
erotic hotch-potch! as unscrupulous, worthless, shifty and irresponsible
and abominable, Ernest is further enraged by their ill-timed flippancy
(3.2.123). His frenzy of adjectives as he spits out judgements in moral outrage
becomes ludicrous and uncontrolled. In the context of the trios disruptive
linguistic playfulness, Ernests crescendo of condemnations is a poorly cho-
reographed overplaying in one mode.
The play ends as Leo, Otto, and Gilda break down utterly and roar with
laughter (124). Having revealed the inadequacy of language to express or
encompass their feelings for each other, they abandon it altogether.
Deliberately ambiguous, they could be laughing at Ernest, at themselves,
at the preceding action, or (as Coward noted some saw it) in lascivious
anticipation of some sort of carnal frolic (qtd. in Morley, Introduction).
The instability is crucial. The audience is not asked to approve or disapprove
of the trio; in fact, they are not asked to judge at all. The language of moral
and sexual strictures, and along with it the naturalized norm of heterosexual
monogamy, have been disabled, and Coward simply offers their relationship
as fact though exactly what the facts of their relationship are remains for
each reader or viewer to determine.
9
The trio does not desire social approval
and neither does Cowards play. It does not present the trios relationship or
their sexuality as tolerable, admirable, natural or satisfactory to do so
would be to admit the validity of any such judgements or the audience or
societys right to make them. Instead, it disrupts and renders painfully self-
conscious the very use of such terms.
Contemporary reviewers were puzzled by precisely this combination of
unstable language and by the problem it posed as to the level on which to
receive and judge the play. As one reviewer wrote in the New York Times,
musing on the playwrights way of his own:
It is a decadent way if you feel obliged to pull a long, moral face over his breezy
fandango. It is an audacious and hilarious way if you relish the attack and retreat
of artificial comedy that bristles with wit. Occasionally Mr. Coward appears to
be asking you to look upon the volatile emotions of his characters as real, and
that if it is true would be a pity. For he is the master of impudence and tart
whimsy, of plain words that leap out of the dialogue like shafts of laughter.
(Atkinson 178)
The reviewer insists on fixing the play in the mode of light comedy, while
being forced to acknowledge its instability, the problem of determining how
to take it. Reviewing the London opening several years later, a critic in the
London Times was similarly challenged by dialogue that dips and swings
and glitters, noting uneasily that [b]oth moods, the serious and the flip-
pant, are good, each in its kind, but they are dangerously joined (179).
Unable to dance gracefully from one level to another like Cowards trio,
the critics were left painfully aware of the inadequacy of any one mode of
SOS ELTIS
220 Modern Drama, 51:2 (Summer 2008)
judgement to encompass the play. George Piggford neatly sums up the rela-
tion between a camp performance and its audience:
Camp celebrates alienation and distance because it moves beyond the boundaries
outlined by dominant ways of understanding identity, gender and sexuality. Those
who cannot read the camp in a performance (whether framed by a text or not) are
bound to become disoriented, mystified, frustrated. . .. Those who can read the
camp will also be disoriented; the difference is that they will revel in and celebrate
the sensation. (297)
Contemporary reviewers certainly displayed little inclination to enjoy this
disorientation.
Verbal indirection, the ability to work by implication and nuance, was a
quality that Coward also admired in other writers. In a 1957 diary entry, he
counterpoises the freedom and formlessness of contemporary writing with
the constraints and style of the past, while gently sending up the conserva-
tism of his own taste:
I have just finished the first volume of The Portrait of a Lady and have been entirely
charmed by it. Mr Jamess urbanity, taste and sense of behaviour are so consoling
in these jagged Look Back in Anger years . . .. I know that all those rigid social codes
and snobbishness of the immediate past were frequently frustrating and hypocri-
tical, but compared with the unreticence and hurly-burly of today, they have a
delicious nostalgia. How agreeable it is to grow older.(12 May 1957, Diaries 353;
emphasis in original)
His dislike of the work of new wave playwrights such as Beckett, Wesker,
and Osborne is well known, and he gave it full expression in a series of
articles for the Sunday Times in 1961. More interesting are the precise
terms in which he expressed his dislike and the values he propounded.
Musing in his diary on the mixed reviews and muted success of his new
musical Sail Away, later in 1961, Coward devoted an unusually long
entry to analysing the strengths and weaknesses of the play and production
and exploring the extent to which his tastes matched those of public and
critics:
I dont care for the present trends either in literature or the theatre. Pornography
bores me. Squalor disgusts me. Garishness, vulgarity and commonness of mind
offend me, and problems of social significance on the stage, unless superbly well
presented, to me are the negation of entertainment. Subtlety, discretion, restraint,
finesse, charm, intelligence, good manners, talent and glamour still enchant me.
(29 Oct. 1961, Diaries 484.)
There is a recurrent emphasis here on control, on style rooted in restriction
and indirection. Significantly, Dan Rebellato, in his revisionist 1956 and All
Noel Coward, Harold Pinter, Ivy Compton-Burnett and the Uses of Camp
Modern Drama, 51:2 (Summer 2008) 221
That (1999), has argued that playwrights like Osborne and Wesker
were celebrated for their direct and overt (or as Coward would put it,
unreticent) declarations of heterosexual emotion and desire. Rebellato
redefines the new wave as an attempt to reclaim the theatre from a
covert homosexual domination, manifested in the proliferation of mean-
ings, the apparently secret coding, the hidden audiences, the self-conscious
fictionality of the stage discourse (223). Cowards interest in precisely such
writing, which operated within social and stylistic constraints playing
the game perfectly while revealing the narrowness, prejudice, and power
underlying the game can thus be located as resisting this reassertion of a
supposedly transparent and normative heterosexuality.
Coward picked out one new writer as an exception to his disdain for new-
wave writing. In one of his Sunday Times articles, after railing against the
bigoted assumption that reasonably educated people who behave with
restraint in emotional crises are necessarily clipped, arid, bloodless, and
unreal, he singled out Pinter as the one writer who, despite repetitiousness
and obscurity, displayed an unmistakeable sense of theatre (qtd. in Russell
91). Coward saw The Room and The Dumb Waiter in March 1960 and found
them completely incomprehensible and insultingly boring, but when he
saw The Caretaker two months later he revised his opinion entirely, writing
that, after seeing this Id like to see them again because I think Im on
to Pinters wavelength. He is at least a genuine original . . .. The writing is
at moments brilliant and quite unlike anyone elses.
10
He was again
immensely impressed by The Collection and expressed his admiration in
material terms by providing financial backing for a film of The Caretaker
in 1962 (29 July 1962, Diaries 510).
11
Four years later, Coward again picked
out Pinters use of language: Pinter is a very curious, strange element. He
uses language marvellously well. He is what I would call a genuine original.
Some of his plays are a little obscure, a little difficult, but hes a superb
craftsman, creating atmosphere with words that sometimes are violently
unexpected (qtd. in Esslin 24). Tynan recognized an affinity between the
two writers when he noted that Pinters spare, allusive dialogue owes a
great deal to Cowards sense of verbal tact, and other critics have linked
their comic use of place names like Sidcup and Budleigh Salterton (59). But
the vast majority of critics writing on Pinter either fail to mention Coward at
all or place him in contrast, embodying the distance between old-school,
well-heeled privilege and the well-made play, on the one hand, and the new-
wave avant garde, on the other, who rejected the constrictions of form,
injecting a tougher realism and wider social relevance into their drama.
12
But actors and directors, working closely with the texture of Coward
and Pinters language, have noted much deeper affinities in the styles and
patterns of their dialogue. David Jones, directing Pinter himself as Deeley in
Old Times, noted that Harold played it very fast and light and inconsequen-
tial and what I heard was Noel Coward (qtd. in Billington 214). Similarly,
Douglas Hodge, who has acted in numerous Pinter productions, insists that
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222 Modern Drama, 51:2 (Summer 2008)
there are striking similarities in the experience of performing Coward and
Pinter because Pinter has an ear for old-fashioned, proscenium-arch,
stand-up Noel Coward drama, together with an incredible theatrical
sense of both comic and dramatic timing, like Noel Coward and the Marx
Brothers combined! (qtd. in Smith 202).
The old-fashioned, proscenium-arch, stand-up, for which Pinter has
such an ear could conversely be described as linguistic camp, an exercise
in style, a flawless surface that stands in problematic relation to its content.
Pinter, just like Coward, uses style as a lever: his characters can reproduce
perfectly the surface patterns of social exchange, only to render them sud-
denly strange and artificial; they switch from one linguistic mode to another
in a split second, disarming those who cannot follow their moves and under-
mining the values and assumptions that underpin their language.
In The Caretaker, Mick is the master of such techniques. In Act Three,
when he finally turns on Davies, he does so by cutting the ground from
under his every statement, switching linguistic registers to leave Davies stut-
tering and uncharacteristically speechless. When Davies says that Mick has
got sense, not like his brother Aston, Mick picks him up on it: You saying
my brother hasnt got any sense? (68). Mick refuses to let Daviess comment
remain careless or off-hand, instead pinning it down as a reference to
Astons history of mental illness. He then progressively disables Daviess
capacity to engage in conversation at all, constantly shifting the linguistic
coinage of their exchanges:
MICK What did he say then, when you told him Id offered you the job as caretaker?
DAVIES He . . . he said. . . he said. . . something about . . . he lived here.
MICK Yes, hes got a point, en he?
DAVIES A point! This is your house, ent? You let him live here!
MICK I could tell him to go, I suppose.
DAVIES Thats what Im saying.
MICK Yes. I could tell him to go. I mean, Im the landlord. On the other hand, hes
the sitting tenant. Giving him notice, you see, what it is, its a technical
matter, thats what it is. It depends how you regard this room. I mean it
depends whether you regard this room as furnished or unfurnished. See what
I mean? (6869)
Left silent by the shift to legal language, Davies tries to bring the exchange
back to basics:
DAVIES I tell you he should go back where he come from!
MICK (turning to look at him) Come from?
DAVIES Yes.
MICK Where did he come from?
DAVIES Well . . . he . . . he . . .
MICK You get a bit out of your depth sometimes, dont you? (69)
Noel Coward, Harold Pinter, Ivy Compton-Burnett and the Uses of Camp
Modern Drama, 51:2 (Summer 2008) 223
Again, Davies is not allowed to get away with vague colloquialism. Mick
pushes him for a literal meaning, challenging him to make explicit any
reference to Astons time in hospital. He then shifts Daviess vague assertions
of competence into the threateningly definite claim that he is an interior
decorator. Davies attempts to return the conversation to a more casual
level, but Mick deflates his vague claim to turn my hand to most things
by bombarding him with the baroque and comically ornate language of
interior design: You wouldnt be able to decorate out a table in afromosia
teak veneer, an armchair in oatmeal tweed and a beech frame settee with a
woven sea-grass seat? (70). When Davies protests that I never said nothing
about that . . . you start calling me names , Mick takes names literally
rather than figuratively and re-starts the argument about Daviess also being
known as Jenkins. Increasingly bewildered and frustrated, Davies tries to
redirect Micks anger at Aston, whom he inadvisably calls nutty:
MICK Nutty? Whos nutty?
Pause.
Did you call my brother nutty? My brother? Thats a bit of . . . thats a bit of
an impertinent thing to say, isnt it? (71)
Micks unexpected use of impertinent is another neat move, giving Davies
the status of an ill-disciplined child and invoking the standards of polite
social intercourse. Silently circling Davies, Mick then polishes his opponent
off with a tirade accusing him of violence, deceit, unpredictability, and sav-
agery, delivered in a hilariously disconcerting amalgam of linguistic styles,
from the casually colloquial (Ever since you come into this house theres
been nothing but trouble), and the comically obscene (And to put the old
tin lid on it, you stink from arse-hole to breakfast time), to a cool reassertion
of calmly measured civility (Its all most regrettable but it looks as though
Im compelled to pay you off for your caretaking work) (7172). This is the
old-fashioned, proscenium-arch stand up described by Douglas Hodge, a
bravura performance in which Mick switches seamlessly from one style of
speech to another, supposedly losing his temper but always perfectly in
control. His use of the demotic is as stylized and calculated as his use of
technical jargon. Pinters characters are deliberate and precise in their use of
the obscene a trait they share with Cowards private writings and conver-
sations, in which expletives were often used with careful calculation.
Tynan described panning Cowards latest show and then dining alone
in a smart New York restaurant, only to be spotted by the playwright:
With eyebrows quizzically arched and upper lip raised to unveil his teeth,
he leaned towards me. Mr T., he said crisply, you are a cunt. Come and
have dinner with me (58).
Pinters characters, like Cowards, are able to play the social game per-
fectly, but they also render it strange, performing polite language with
ironic self-consciousness. After Mick delivers his lengthy monologue on
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224 Modern Drama, 51:2 (Summer 2008)
how Davies reminds him of his uncles brother, who had a penchant for nuts,
his I hope you slept well last night comes as a mocking assault rather than
a conventionally courteous inquiry (29). The complex power games played
by James and Bill over a bunch of grapes in The Collection (129) or between
Ruth and Lenny over a glass of water in The Homecoming (1.3335) are
similar examples of the skilful performance of polite interchange that ren-
ders it curiously unsettling and bizarre. Pinters characters, like Cowards,
can be divided into those who can and those who cant play this game, those
who can and those who cant manipulate linguistic styles and registers to
suit their purpose, disarming and disabling less skilled participants.
Cowards comment that the plays basic premise is victory rather
than defeat suggests that he identified with Mick as the emotional focus
(qtd. in Esslin, 24). Micks verbal dexterity and the subtlety and humour
of his manoeuvrings could be described as a more brutal extension of
the techniques deployed by Cowards protagonists; this is camp with the
gloves off.
Camp prioritizes style over substance, aesthetics over morality; both
Coward and Pinter exploit this disjunction, moving from one perfectly
formed verbal style to another in order to dislocate assumptions and unsettle
judgement. There is a continuity between Goldberg and McCanns interro-
gation of Stanley in The Birthday Party, disconcerting and paralysing him
with a bewildering mixture of literal, metaphorical, philosophical, sanitary,
historical, and rhetorical questions, and Ruths enigmatic farewell to Teddy
in The Homecoming Dont become a stranger whose conventionality
leaves it hovering between literal request and mockingly polite emptiness
(Birthday 2.5663; Homecoming 2.80). The disjunction between style and
substance and the disorienting switches of register disable and disarm,
as the addressee is unable to decide on what level to interpret or respond
to their words.
The Homecoming is a verbal battleground. Teddy, Ruth, Lenny, and Max
are all adept self-performers with an ability to maintain surface niceties
while acutely aware of the implications of verbal patterns and phrases.
Always conscious of their own performances, they are masters of the camp
aesthetic of life-as-playing-a-role. And, as with Cowards arch-performers,
it is often impossible to know where performance begins or ends. Ruth uses
erotic undertones to assert and protect herself, meeting the implied threat of
Lennys sexualized monologues and clearing ground between herself and her
husband. Her success in out-negotiating Max and Lenny as prospective
pimps leaves them painfully uncertain how to take her words, unsure
whether she is acting out a purely verbal power-struggle or has agreed to a
binding contract. The impossibility of locating her real intentions or feelings
leaves the balance of power in her hands as the curtain falls. Pinter makes his
audience unprivileged witnesses to this performance, as disoriented and
bewildered as its protagonists, with no access to motives, intentions, or
meanings. Just as Cowards comic disruptions included the audiences
Noel Coward, Harold Pinter, Ivy Compton-Burnett and the Uses of Camp
Modern Drama, 51:2 (Summer 2008) 225
own judgements and assumptions, so the uncertainty and threat of Pinters
plays extends offstage. No wink of complicity hints at the border between
reality and artifice; the performance is so seamless that these very terms
become dangerously redundant.
On seeing The Homecoming in 1965, Coward greeted it as an extraordi-
nary play, describing Pinter admiringly as [a] sort of Cockney Ivy
Compton-Burnett (3 Aug. 1965, Diaries 605). It is a surprising analogy but
an acute one. Compton-Burnetts novels centre repeatedly on the late-
Victorian or Edwardian family as a site of power-struggles, covert aggression,
and manipulation. In a 1960 radio interview, the novelist John Bowen com-
mented, You write of the family as being a destructive unit. To which she
replied, I write of power being destructive and parents had absolute power
over children in those days. One or the other had (qtd. in Spurling 418).
Under a surface of polite conformity, the older generation stifles their off-
spring, arbitrarily wielding power or imposing unceasing emotional
demands, while siblings, cousins, and lovers are equally capable of destruc-
tive egotism and uncompromising ruthlessness. Incest, infanticide, stolen
inheritances and lovers, suicide, and betrayal, all participate in a narrative
of calm detachment, almost entirely handed over to dialogue, without nar-
rative interpolations or judgements. Motives, thoughts, and intentions
remain opaque, while the reader is left to interpret and negotiate the possible
meanings and impulses behind each speech.
There is an undeniable campness running through Compton-Burnetts
novels. The inhabitants are knowing self-performers, prone to commenting
on their own artistry and the impression created. In A Family and a Fortune
(1939), Dudley discusses his image as man of property benefactor or
miser as he dispenses or retains his newly inherited wealth according to
the demands of circumstance, staging himself ironically as he assesses
the nuances of his offers and retractions and the impression they create
(see esp. chs. 4, 6, 7). Less benignly, in A House and Its Head (1935),
Duncan drags his frail wife from her deathbed in order that the proper
family unity may be preserved at the breakfast table and then assuages the
feeling of guilt that follows by framing himself retrospectively as a perfect
husband, while his daughters and nephew assess his performance with
humorous irony:
Mother is not here to console him for her death, said Nance to Grant. It will be
his last grievance against her. Or I cannot imagine a later one.
If his married happiness goes on increasing, I dont know what we are to do.
The contrast must also increase. (87)
Everyone is, to some degree, creating, projecting, or preserving a role for
him- or herself; the crucial difference is between those who do so knowingly
and those who are dangerously unaware and who believe in their own crea-
tions. Not even children are exempt: Julius and Dora, two adolescents whose
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226 Modern Drama, 51:2 (Summer 2008)
mother has just died, pray to their invented god for freedom from their
imposed performance of childish na vete:
As we have not yet put away childish things, grant that real childhood may content
our father, and that he may not require of us the strange strange pretence of it
Travesty, supplied Reuben, in a rapid undertone.
Strange travesty of it that his heart desires. (235)
Indeed, a belief in the reality of ones self-creation is dangerous; the most
destructive characters in many of the novels are those who fail to understand
life-as-playing-a-role, becoming absorbed instead in the idea of their emo-
tional sincerity and the inevitability of their feelings, like self-congratulating
Aunt Matty in A Family and a Fortune or the inconsolable and smothering
widow Sophia in Brothers and Sisters (1929). The inscrutability of the narra-
tive means that the reader can only speculate as to the real feelings or
thoughts that underlie these performances Anna in Elders and Betters
(1944) burns a will in order to inherit her dying aunts money and drives
the rightful beneficiary to suicide by ruthlessly destroying her sense of self
(a particularly Pinteresque form of violence), while, at the same time, she
presents herself as plain-dealing and straight-talking. The discrepancy is
painfully clear, but where one version of her self blends into the other is
indecipherable, as is the degree of self-deception or deliberate manipulation
involved. Aware, like Cowards Elyot Chase, that flippancy is a highly effec-
tive form of defence, Compton-Burnetts characters repeatedly respond to
the enormity of events with an apparent carelessness, evading and disarming
explicit moral judgement. The dislocating disjunction between the style of
their speech and the weightiness of the subject matter their deliberate
frivolity and humour calls into question the adequacy of any language
to encompass their experiences. Their dialogue sets style over content, aes-
thetics over morality, and serves to emphasize the inadequacy of the avail-
able moral templates. In Brothers and Sisters (1929), the three siblings learn
that their parents were actually half-brother and sister, sharing the same
father, and announce the news to their friends with characteristic humour:
You simply have to tell us who your other grandfather was.
Simply that, said Dinah. It is too simple. The lack of variety is the trouble.
They all began to laugh. (218)
Duncan, the overbearing pater familias of A House and Its Head, is a match
for the younger generation, switching subtly from the figurative to the literal,
ignoring or picking up nuances with assured force, as his daughters and
nephew use flippancy and irony in an attempt to side-step his authority:
What is that book, Grant?
Grant uttered the title of a scientific work, inimical to the faith of the day.
Noel Coward, Harold Pinter, Ivy Compton-Burnett and the Uses of Camp
Modern Drama, 51:2 (Summer 2008) 227
Did you remember that I refused to give it to you?
Yes, Uncle. That is why I asked somebody else.
Did you say I had forbidden it in the house?
No, or I should not have been given it.
Duncan took the book, and walking to the fire, placed it upon the flames.
Oh, Father, really! said Nance.
Really? Yes, really, Nance. I shall do my best to guide you to force you, it must
be, into the way you must go. I would not face the consequences of doing otherwise.
Would not the consequences be more widely distributed?
I shall really do what I can to achieve it, went on Duncan, as if he had not
heard, and I trust it will not be impossible. I do not do it in my own strength.
How untrue! murmured Grant. As if more strength than he has, is
possible! (17)
Duncan declares he consigned his own copy to the flames, having found
that on every page there is poison a hypocrisy that the children can
only respond to with humour, as Grant observes, It keeps the home fires
burning (22). When his uncle takes him publicly to task over making an
exhibition of himself with a maid-servant behind the house, they once again
fight a duel through linguistic nuance and subtle shifts of meaning:
Surely you have enough decency and dignity, enough respect for your aunt and
cousins, for womanhood in general, to hold you from such a depth? I am unable to
think my training has brought you to it.
I am glad, Uncle.
It will go hard with me, if I have to believe it. But do not stoop to deceit. If that is
of any good, you have stooped far enough.
Well, what am I to do? said Grant.
I should have been able to repudiate such a rumour. But in the face of what I
have known of you, I could not. I found myself in that humbling place. I cannot
discuss such a matter before my daughters.
I am very glad, said Grant. I feel a great respect for womanhood. More than
you do, perhaps. I was beginning to think you could discuss the matter before
them. (20)
13
Grant evades his uncles authority by responding with careful literalness to
selected sections of his speech, avoiding the hammer blows of meaning
by spinning out alternative nuances.
Like Private Lives, Design for Living, and Present Laughter, The Collection,
and The Homecoming, Compton-Burnetts novels leave judgement sus-
pended. No poetic justice shapes their ends, no tragic closure is offered,
nor is there even measured discussion or recognition of what has passed.
All three writers offer power games played out in dialogue, from ruthless
verbal duels to playful skirmishes, their characters depending on an ability
to shift register, to switch seamlessly between styles, to disarm judgement
SOS ELTIS
228 Modern Drama, 51:2 (Summer 2008)
and deflect and destabilize antipathetic sets of values. Readers and audi-
ences are unprivileged witnesses, left to negotiate meanings, motives, and
deceptions with as little certainty or security as the protagonists.
Susan Sontag made Coward her prime example of conscious camp, and
her list of [r]andom examples of items which are part of the canon of
Camp included Tiffany lamps, old Flash Gordon comics, and the
novels of Ronald Firbank and Ivy Compton-Burnett (27778). It took
Cowards expert eye to detect Pinters unlikely place in such company. Yet
their camp is not, as Sontag would have it disengaged, depoliticised, but is
a means of evading and challenging hostile ideologies most significantly
heterosexual social conformity and the suffocating demands of the family.
Cowards is closest to the playful camp described by Sontag, a mode
of enjoyment, of appreciation not judgment (291); but his apparent
insouciance covers a skilful and deliberate unsettling of moral and sexual
judgement. Pinters and Compton-Burnetts characters similarly deploy
camp in their more desperate fight for emotional survival against bludgeon-
ing and stifling forces whose threat resonates beyond the personal and emo-
tional; as Edward Sackville-West wrote of Compton-Burnett after the war,
Apart from physical violence and starvation, there is no feature of the total-
itarian regime which has not its counterpart in the atrocious families
depicted in these books (qtd. in Spurling 419). The evanescent, boundary
blurring of camp makes it a powerful means of disrupting and denaturalizing
imposed ideologies, be they sexual, social, or political. Camp, as deployed
by Coward, Pinter, and Compton-Burnett, is a vital defensive strategy.
Camp in their hands can become a potent ideological weapon. The verbal
acrobatics of Coward and Compton-Burnett undermine orthodoxys claim to
normality, unsettling assumptions and disabling judgements. But Pinter
chillingly demonstrates that camps power is not inherently tied to any poli-
tical allegiance; it can be used aggressively or defensively, to resist confor-
mity or to deprive the individual of any sense of value or fundamental truth.
The sinister Goldberg and McCann use verbal camp in the interrogation that
reduces Stanley to the gibbering wreck carried away at the end of The
Birthday Party. Most disturbingly, in One for the Road (1984), the state tor-
turer Nicholas uses the lightning switches, irony, slippery theatricality, and
disarming stylistic detachment of camp as part of his armoury of techniques,
alongside physical torture, rape, and murder. Pouring occasional glasses of
whisky, Nicholas addresses the bruised and helpless Victor:
NICHOLAS Ive heard so much about you. Im terribly pleased to meet you. Well, Im
not sure that pleased is the right word. One has to be so scrupulous about
language. Intrigued. Im intrigued. Firstly because Ive heard so much
about you. Secondly because if you dont respect me youre unique.
Everyone else knows the voice of God speaks through me. Youre not
a religious man, I take it?
Pause.
Noel Coward, Harold Pinter, Ivy Compton-Burnett and the Uses of Camp
Modern Drama, 51:2 (Summer 2008) 229
You dont believe in a guiding light?
Pause.
What then?
Pause.
So. . . morally . . . you flounder in wet shit. You know. . . like when youve
eaten a rancid omelette.
Pause.
I think I deserve one for the road. (37677)
With a terrifying combination of wit, obscenity, brutality, banality, cruelty,
and empty platitude, Nicholas systematically disorients and humiliates his
victim. In the hands of a ruthless and oppressive state, camps potential for
disrupting any sense of the self-evident becomes a means of depriving the
individual of any instinctive sense of human decency, justice, or rights.
The camp disengagement of Coward, Pinter, and Compton-Burnett refuses
to offer the audience a safe and stable platform from which to view the
action. In One for the Road this camp detachment is taken to its extreme;
to share Nicholass knowing wink of complicity is to glance into a moral
abyss.
NOTES
1 With thanks to the Noel Coward Society and to the English Society of St Hughs
College, Oxford.
2 Diary entries, 14 July 1946, 11 Nov. 1949, Diaries 60, 135.
3 Dates given for Cowards works denote year in which composition was
completed.
4 Frances Gray notes that the unfortunate consequences of misinterpreting the
element of camp in Cowards work are self-parodying performances of the plays,
where lines are delivered with detached condescension (Noel 12022).
5 Though not discussed in Jonathan Dollimores Sexual Dissidence, Cowards work
relates closely to Dollimores analysis of Oscar Wildes and Joe Ortons use of
performance to challenge a depth-model of identity.
6 See, e.g., Newton; Butler, Gender Trouble; Bodies That Matter; Sedgwick, on
camp and drag as subversion of gender norms.
7 The metaphor of musical rhythm also recurs frequently in actors and directors
descriptions of Cowards language. Corin Redgrave, Christopher Newton,
Malcolm Sinclair, and Juliet Stevenson all talk of the musical score of his lines,
where every syllable is crucial to the effect. Newton notes also that [h]is
characters think in quarter seconds; see Practitioners 18687, 188, 190,
21215.
8 Their knowing performance of gender roles fits closely with same-sex camp,
theorized by Pamela Robertson as a camp critique of normalized gender roles
that avoids the potential misogyny of drag.
9 Exactly what those relationships are remains deliberately ambiguous especially
in the possibility that the sexual triangle is completed by Otto and Leo. So, for
example, Sean Mathiass 1994 production at the Donmar Warehouse ended
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230 Modern Drama, 51:2 (Summer 2008)
Act Two with Otto and Leo in a passionate kiss, whereas Alan Sinfield describes
the lovers as being allowed to be charming in their heterosexuality, while Ernest
is a humourless queen. (58).
10 Diary entries, 27 Mar. 1960, 2 May 1960, Diaries 431, 436.
11 Other backers included Richard Burton, Elizabeth Taylor, Peter Sellars, and Peter
Hall; see Billington 142.
12 No mention of Coward in, e.g., Merritt; Batty; Begley. Brief mention of Coward
as part of middle-class theatre of manners in, e.g., Thompson; Peacock.
13 For a detailed analysis of similar verbal manoeuvrings in Elders and Betters,
see Pittock.
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SOS ELTIS
232 Modern Drama, 51:2 (Summer 2008)
ABSTRACT: Noel Cowards most famous plays fit closely with Sontags description of the pri-
mary attributes of camp: flippant, stylized, ironic and self-consciously theatrical, artificial. But
where Sontag defines the camp sensibility as disengaged and depoliticized, this article argues
that Coward deploys a form of linguistic camp to destabilize judgements and challenge
orthodoxies. As his characters switch rapidly and seamlessly among different linguistic registers
and their associated sets of values and assumptions, any sense of normative or self-evident
values is dissipated. Coward singled out Harold Pinter from all the new wave dramatists of
the fifties and sixties, admiring him as a genuine original using language brilliantly and describ-
ing him as a sort of Cockney Ivy Compton-Burnett. Pinter and Compton-Burnett share
Cowards particular form of linguistic camp, and their characters can be seen to deploy it to
similar disruptive ends, unsettling moral and sexual judgements and challenging orthodoxys
claim to normality.
KEYWORDS: Coward, Pinter, Compton-Burnett camp, style, self-performance, detachment,
flippancy
Noel Coward, Harold Pinter, Ivy Compton-Burnett and the Uses of Camp
Modern Drama, 51:2 (Summer 2008) 233