The Young Idea
One of Coward’s early plays risks upsetting the biggest playwright of the day. Robert Hazle investigates…
In 1921, Coward appeared in the comedy Polly With A Past with Edith Evans. He recalled later that he was “bored early in the run” and spent his time writing songs sketches and plays. One of these was to finish The Young Idea, a ‘comedy of youth in three acts’.
This was not its original title. As usual, it took a while to match a catchy title with the play’s themes. When Coward began writing it, in 1920, it started life as Do Let’s Talk About It, a very Edwardian phrase and echoing I’ll Leave It To You - his then recent West End success - in its conversational tone.
Looking at one of Coward’s notebooks (notes and drafts of The Young Idea were spread over multiple, amongst the many other developing ideas), clearly one working title was After All. On the page below you can see some of these developments, with titles and character names crossed out and edited. Even more intriguing are the casting ideas on the right. He suggests several cast members of Polly With A Past, including Helen Haye and Edna Best. While Best did not take the role of Gerda, she would perform several Coward roles during her career, including the original, controversial production of Fallen Angels. Some names are scratched out and replaced, but you might notice there’s no doubt about the ‘Noël Coward’ along from Sholto, one of the lead roles!
The Young Idea was, by Coward’s own admission, very heavily based on the play You Never Can Tell by George Bernard Shaw.
The play concerns two young adults who attempt to prise their father away from his second wife and reunite him with his first wife, their mother. Shaw was sent a copy of the play and wrote back with suggestions, including never to read one of his plays again, in order to develop his own voice as a playwright.
detail of original contract (c) NCAT
The play was produced by Robert Courtneidge in 1922 as a regional tour before settling into the Savoy Theatre in London for a run of 60 performances in 1923. Despite the Courtneidge’s reluctance, Coward insisted on playing the lead role of Sholto himself. Other cast members included Kate Cutler and Muriel Pope, brought with him from I’ll Leave It To You, and Ann Trevor, who later appeared in the original production of Hay Fever.
George Bernard Shaw (c) NCAT
SPOTLIGHT ON… George Bernard Shaw
Lived 1856 - 1950.
Irish playwright, critic and political activist.
Awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1925.
Wrote Pygmalion (1912) which was adapted into a film in 1938 and won him an Academy Award. Coward might have (but didn’t) adapted the play into a musical. It was later transformed successfully into My Fair Lady by Lerner and Loewe.
detail of letter from Coward to his mother Violet (c) NCAT
Of the original production at the Savoy Theatre, James Agate, the renowned theatre critic wrote: “if you examine it closely, [it] reaches after more than it can grasp—a good fault in a young writer … exhilarating and great fun”.
In 1926, Coward wrote to his mother about a potential film adaptation of the play:
“We’ve had an offer for the film rights of The Young Idea, which was very surprising. It will mean about three thousand pounds so that’s quite cosy!”
The film never happened.
Detail of The Young Idea in 1922, courtesy of NCAT
In 1922, Coward adapted the idea into a short story, published in the US magazine Metropolitan with illustrations by Douglas Duer. As you can see, the opening exchange between Cicely and Roddy is almost identical to the early draft of Do Let’s Talk About It.
Coward later took the role of King Magnus in Shaw’s The Apple Cart in 1953 and would later record excerpts of the play with Margaret Leighton. In 1967, he appeared in the American TV adaptation of Androcles and the Lion.
The Young Idea is still available for performance and has been described by Simon Callow in The Guardian as “a remarkable play, alternately vivacious and painful, expressing all the young Coward's restless, almost violent, impulsiveness”.
