Noel Coward: The Man Behind the Mask

Tuesday 6 July 2027 at 2.00 pm at the Lowther Pavilion. Guests may attend the lecture – £10 pp (pay on door)

Lecturer: Simon Whitehouse

Simon is a (recovering) actor, lecturer, presenter, Alexander Technique and voice teacher and award winning London Blue Badge guide. He has worked as a guide lecturer in house at Shakespeare’s Globe, the Royal Opera House, the BBC and the National Gallery guiding both public and private tours. He is on the faculty of Ithaca College and also lectures for the Blue Badge Guide training course on the performing arts and English literature. Simon’s specialisms and passions are theatre, literature, fashion and art history but whatever the subject, he will weave a story from it.

The Lecture:

“I don’t know what it is, but I’ve got it!”
‘It’ was ”star quality”, and the person that had ‘it’ was Noel Coward! On the surface, Coward appeared to be just a camp man swanning about in a dressing gown, dropping acerbic one liners like cigarette ash from a long cigarette holder.  But Noel Coward was one of the most versatile cultural figures of the 20th century and his career is the history of 20th century British theatre.

As Lord Mountbatten put it, there may be greater painters, greater comedians, greater novelists, only “the Master” had combined 14 talents rolled into one. In any given week, his plays such as Private Lives & Hay Fever are being performed somewhere in the world, and we can all quote Mad Dogs and Englishmen and Mad About the Boy, but still the range of his work is underestimated.

TS Eliot said that there are things that you can learn from Noel Coward that you won’t learn from Shakespeare.  Like Shakespeare, some of Coward’s most moving lines are in his poems which will be shared in the lecture. Coward said, “I’ll go and see anything so long as it amuses me, or moves me. If it doesn’t do either I want to go home.”

Caption: Noel Coward. Photo by Allan Warren. Creative Commons