I’m an enormously talented man, and there’s no use pretending that I’m not,” Noël Coward once said. The trailblazing playwright may not have been humble, but he was correct. Since his death at 73, half a century ago today, his words and music have not lost their capacity to dazzle audiences around the world with their crisp wit and sense of mischief.
Coward’s brag, long after he was acclaimed as a playwright, composer, novelist, singer, painter, librettist, stage producer, film director and cabaret artist, typified the bravado of a born show-off, a polymath who insisted his main concern was that “you must never, never, never bore the living hell out of the public”.
