As a 12-year-old child actor, Noël Coward featured in a dance number at the Savoy theatre in London playing the part of a mushroom. A photograph of him in his fungal finery – “grey silk skin tights, a large grey silk hat like a gargantuan muffin, and a diaphanous frill round my middle” – was put on display by his proud mother at whichever house the family were billeted in. It was perhaps the only picture in the son’s long career that he told his mother not to show when distinguished visitors called.
The tension between display and concealment is a central motif of this lively, affectionate but by no means adoring biography of the man who would eventually insist on “Master” as his preferred form of address, “as if he had an unhealthy belief in the reality of his own myth”. Oliver Soden has timed its publication to mark the 50th anniversary of Coward’s death in March 1973 and, granted access to his subject’s previously unpublished diaries and letters, he makes a sound case for reappraising a writer who, rather than a “talent to amuse”, was in fact a radical teller of truths about love, art and class. Those truths came at the cost of a painful and necessarily private life.
