Word: 70th
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INTERVIEWER: Mr. Coward, you've referred to the days of festivity surrounding your 70th birthday as "Holy Week." Are you looking forward...
...celebrations was a retrospective of Coward's career that was unprecedented even for as oft-revived a writer as he is. A parade of his plays and revues flickered past on BBC-TV. The National Film Theater began to spin out a series of his films. Occasions like 70th birthdays tend to bring out hyperbole, and uncritical reassessments blossomed in the press. Some critics went so far as to rank him with Sheridan and Wilde, or to call him England's greatest living playwright. Such judgments overlooked the extent to which Coward's work is sheerly theatrical...
...what John Osborne meant when he said that Coward "is his own invention and contribution to this century." This is what makes it idle to scan the man or his works for the "real" Noel Coward. The mask of supreme entertainer has become the man. With Coward's 70th birthday, the legend is sealed. As Carlyle said of the universe, we had best accept it-as gratefully as Coward does...
Preparing for his 70th birthday, Master Farceur Noel Coward made it clear that one of the blithest spirits of the age is still blithe. Defending his lack of an Oxbridge education to London newsmen, he said: "It is of little help at the first rehearsal to be able to translate Cicero." What of T. S. Eliot's complaint that Coward had never spent an hour in the study of ethics? "I do not think it would have helped me," said he. Had he ever tried to enlighten his audience instead of just amusing them? "I have a slight reforming...
...CRIMSON was fat and sassy and the 70th anniversary was an occasion of unstated-self-congratulation. The President of the United States took time out to write: "As an old CRIMSON man... I am sure that I voice the sentiments of all of that company of happy men when I say that none of them would exchange his CRIMSON training for any other experience or association of his college days...