Coward at Sea – an interview with Michael Lunts

Coward at Sea is a nautical musical comedy, based on Coward’s “P&O 1930”. You can see ‘Coward at Sea’ on October 25th at Bristol 1904 Arts or November 8th at Heron Theatre, Beetham, Milnthorpe, Cumbria.

Coward sailing to New York on the SS Majestic, 1925

For Bristol visit www.bristol1904arts.org/whats-on and for the Heron Theatre email info@herontheatre.com.

How long have you been doing the show?

I started as a two man show with Susan Flannery, probably around 15 years ago, and when she retired I thought it was just too good a show to bin.

The verse it’s based on is really from the perspective of Coward himself observing everybody on the ship, so it was straightforward to turn into a one man show.

Why did you choose to base it on “P&O 1930”?

“P&O 1930” has never been done before really, and in general Coward’s long verse has been rather overlooked. There’s the famous one called “Not Yet the Dodo”.

Trying to sell anything as poetry or verse is really hard. So I don’t tend to bang on too much about that. But verse is just as accessible, if not more accessible, than anything Coward wrote in prose.

In a lot of my one man shows I like to mix light verse in with my songs and of course nobody in the audience bats an eyelid.

After all, what are you listening to when you hear a song? There’s no real difference between a lyric and a piece of verse. And Noël Coward was one of the great lyrical geniuses, so it’s no surprise he was also fantastic writing verse without music as well. That’s what this show celebrates in a way.

How did you turn the verse into a show?

I write my own scripts and perform from the piano. I act and sing and combine those things, so my work is not just songs, its fully staged dramas.

I always say that any good piece of drama or good piece of musical entertainment, even if it's only a series of songs, takes you on a journey.

And here we have a literal journey. We get on board at Shanghai and then we follow the antics of passengers. We get the descriptions as we go through the Suez Canal, we visit all these places and get home to good old rainy Britain at the end. But by that time we have all these relationships that have been made on board.

One thing that strikes me about this piece is just how beautiful the verses are. How Coward evoked the atmosphere of all the different places that they call in, and then there’s a storm at sea and everyone’s sick, whilst the entertainers are still carrying on.

I’ve entertained on cruise ships these days and I do know exactly what it’s like to be on board a ship in a force 10 storm and still trying to entertain the guests.

What was Coward’s relationship with travel?

Coward loved to travel. He was an inveterate traveller. Whenever anything went wrong, he got a bad review, or he just wanted to escape from the manic life that he led, he would book himself on board a ship and go out to Jamaica or Capri. That’s why so much of his writing is to do with being abroad.

Some of his most famous songs were written whilst traveling. “Mad Dogs and Englishmen”, and “Why do the Wrong People Travel”, were based on Coward’s own travels. They have this lovely context.

How relevant is cruise ship travel to a modern day audience?

Although we live in an age of air travel, it should never be forgotten that there are still people who remember travelling by ship. I have people come up to me and say, when I was young I remember taking the ship home from the colonies or wherever they were. They remember the journey that took weeks to come back.

We live in a world where that’s very much gone. If you go on a cruise ship these days, you’re cruising around, aimlessly. But when Coward was writing this was the only way to home. You got on a ship with a whole load of people, and for the next four to six weeks you lived with those people while you travel home to Britian. You don’t form much of a relationship on a long hall flight!

Coward describes why everyone is on the ship. There’s someone who’s going home after spending months and months as the viceroy’s wife, and she’s going home to see her children for the first time. And then there’s the inevitable Sergent Colonel. There’s all sorts of weird people who are travelling home having done a different job. It was the days of the British Empire of course, when there were many people who worked abroad and would get leave for three months of so.

“P&O 1930” gives us a lovely insight into something that is very much in the past.