Announcement

Collapse
No announcement yet.

Noel Coward's Singapore fling

Collapse
X
 
  • Filter
  • Time
  • Show
Clear All
new posts

  • Noel Coward's Singapore fling

    The West Australian (Perth)
    September 21, 2005 Wednesday
    METRO

    Coward's Singapore fling

    by RON BANKS

    By the age of 29, successful London playwright Noel Coward was
    feeling exhausted. His doctor suggested that he would soon have a
    nervous breakdown if he didn't take a holiday.

    So Coward headed by sea to China and South-East Asia for a six-month
    rest and recreational tour. The travel obviously stimulated his
    creative juices because while he was in Shanghai, he wrote Private
    Lives, still regarded as one of his wittiest plays.

    As he pushed down through Asia, Coward's male companion took ill with
    dysentery and the pair hurried on to Singapore where proper medical
    treatment was available.

    Coward stayed at the Raffles Hotel while his friend was recovering
    and while in this colonial outpost, he volunteered to take part in a
    production of N.C. Sherriff's anti-war play, Journey's End.

    One of the actors from a company of English touring players named The
    Quaints had been injured and Coward, who enjoyed acting as much as
    writing, stepped into his role.

    This much is history but Perth playwright John Aitken blends these
    facts of Coward's time in Singapore with his own imagination to
    produce his new play, Imperial Facade.

    Coward will be played by John Michael Swinbank, who has made his own
    cabaret career singing the songs of the multi-talented writer, actor
    and composer.

    Swinbank has even performed his own show about Coward at Singapore's
    famous Raffles Hotel, so is well-prepared for his role in Aitken's
    play.

    Around the central character of Coward, the playwright has created
    several historical and fictional characters to tell his story. One of
    the real characters is Raffles owner-manager Tigran Sarkies, one of a
    family of Armenians who built the hotel.

    Aitken's storyline does take some liberties with Sarkies' character,
    however, weaving him into an incident in which an Asian woman was
    supposedly ordered off the dance floor for fraternising with the
    white colonials.

    There is some evidence that Coward intervened in this incident to
    remonstrate with Sarkies over his racist behaviour, though versions
    of the tale differ in the historical accounts.

    A rather more fictional character invented by Aitken is a Chinese
    princess. She comes to Singapore looking for her brother, who has
    fallen in with the Tong, or Singapore-Chinese mafia. But the Chinese
    princess is not quite what she seems and is revealed to be a male.
    The princess is played by Gary Tong, who grew up in Carnarvon and in
    recent years has become a star in the Malaysian film industry. Tong
    has also just completed a new Australian film in Melbourne.

    "The play is very much about the various facades that people build up
    around themselves," says Aitken. "The Chinese princess is obviously
    not quite what she seems and everyone in the colonial society of the
    time was not quite what they appeared to be."

    One of the most obvious facades, says Aitken, was that of Coward
    himself, whose public image was that of the romantic male lead, the
    kind of man of charm, wit and sophistication that women swooned over.

    "It was not true," says Aitken, "because Noel was really a gay man.
    In my play, he falls in love with one of the actors from the touring
    company, The Quaints."

    As Aitken explains, the real-life company was a down-at-heel bunch of
    actors who toured throughout Asia in a hand-to-mouth kind of
    existence. Among its members was a young English actor named John
    Mills, with whom the real Coward struck up a friendship that would
    later lead to Mills' roles in such Coward films as the wartime naval
    drama, In Which We Serve.

    No play about Coward would be complete without some of his songs and
    Swinbank will serve up some of his classics such as Mad About the
    Boy, Mad Dogs and Englishmen, and Don't Put Your Daughter on the
    Stage, Mrs Worthington - all written during his Far East adventures.

    The songs will be accompanied by leading Perth pianist Mark Coughlan.

    Imperial Facade runs from September 27 to October 15 at Rechabites
    Hall, William Street, Northbridge. Tickets at BOCS
Working...
X