This Was A Man: the play about adultery banned in Britain
In 1926 Noël was on holiday in Sicily with his then partner Jack Wilson and wrote the play This Was A Man, a candid portrayal of infidelity.
Noël himself was not particularly complimentary of his play in retrospect:
A newspaper cutting from This Was A Man at Broadway’s the Klaw Theatre in 1926
Present Indicative, Noël Coward
It was primarily satirical and on the whole rather dull; the bulk of its dullness lay in the second act, which was an attenuated dialogue between two excessively infuriating characters.
The play would go on to have some success in America, Paris and Germany, but was banned in Britain under censorship and would not be performed in the UK until 2014.
Noël told the press at the time:
In our country writers want to depict life as they see it with their own eyes, not as it was seen fifty years ago. But what can they do with this awful leash round their necks?
It was not the first time Noël’s creative endeavours were frustrated by censorship, and it would not be the last.
The Vortex was challenged by the Lord Chamberlain of the time, Rowland Baring, over a line about two women travelling together in Venice. The implication of lesbianism had not apparently been deliberate by Noël.
The notebook Noël wrote This Was A Man in
The depiction of an upper-class woman taking a lover in middle-age was “revolting” according to Baring, who worried that it would “provoke public disorder”.
Noël eventually met Baring in person and persuaded him that the play showed the flaws in such behaviour, and a licence was granted.
Reading This Was A Man almost a hundred years on it is hard to understand why this particular play was banned over others, given that it dealt with topics Coward had written about elsewhere, namely those of adultery, sex, and divorce.
Indeed, American audiences in 1926 were left dissatisfied by the lack of scandal in the play.
Noël wrote to Violet:
They were all expecting something very dirty indeed after the English Censor banning it and they were bitterly disappointed.
Noël himself later put the rejection down to the fact that at the end of the play, the husband Edward, on being told that his wife has slept with his best friend, bursts out laughing.
The first page of the play, handwritten by Noël
The board of directors, he said, like the commandments to be broken “solemnly or not at all”.
A review of the play in the New York Herald Tribune: “Weak wives misbehaved at random, disregarding the admonition to ‘sin in the shadows’”
The dangerous thing about This Was A Man was not that it dealt with scandalous topics, but that it handled them with a certain lightness not befitting the gravity of the sin.
In the play, Margot’s separation from her husband is casually talked of, and Zoe’s divorce is widely regarded as a success.
On discovering his wife Carol’s adultery, Edward’s lack of outrage is striking, and his initial reaction is boredom. When he does finally confront her, he is formal, almost disinterested:
This is not a scene – it’s a process of readjustment.
Carol is largely unrepentant of her affairs: she breaks down as though in guilt on occasion, but it is only too clear this is largely theatrics.
Only Evelyn, Edward’s friend and one of the men Carol cheats with, seems truly repentant – something both Edward and Carol see as foolishness.
The censorship of the play speaks to a rejection of the messier parts of private lives being made public. Adultery can be presented as a moral bad prompting outrage, but not as a complicated entanglement to which characters respond humanly: with humour, boredom or dramatics. The private sphere cannot be presented too boldly.
And the play too presents the society of Noël Coward’s time that is grappling with the opening of the private sphere, as talking openly about sex, infidelity, and the private aspects of marriage becomes more acceptable.
The society of the 1920s was debating what should and should not be public, and what should go unsaid; a context that would provide a backdrop to Coward’s life, and prevented him from ever being open about his relationships with men.
Edward speaks as the voice of privacy in the play:
Modern society seems to demand intimacy all in a minute. You lay bare all your private affairs to comparative strangers without a qualm.
Reticence as a national quality seems to be on the wane.
One wonders how much these are Coward’s words: a man who saw openness about his private life as a very real danger, in a society that increasingly demanded personal information about public figures.
This Was A Man also gives an insight into Noël’s own relationship of the time, with Jack. As Oliver Soden points out in Masquerade, his dedication of the play “To John C. Wilson” feels hardly complementary.
Jack was known to hit on other men when drunk, something that troubled Noël.
For a play that was never performed in Coward’s Britain, This Was A Man provides a striking insight into it.
