Flashback, April 1925: Noel Coward’s ‘Fallen Angels’ Makes Controversial West End Debut

Noel Coward (pictured), enjoying his first burst of popularity, engaged the attention of London’s West End audiences in April 1925 with another frothy comedy, Fallen Angels—only this time he also attracted the notice of the national censorship arm.

In the prior two years, the playwright had made a splash with his West End debut, The Vortex. But it was his hit follow-up, Hay Fever, that led Anthony Prinsep of the Globe Theatre to reconsider and dust off an earlier effort, Fallen Angels.

The subject matter of this latter effort—dialogue among two female friends about premarital sex—raised the eyebrows of British censor Lord Cromer of the Lord Chamberlain office, which since 1737 had been tasked with approving all plays before they opened. 

This same year was a particularly active one for Lord Cromer, as he went on to veto Eugene O’Neill’s Desire Under the Elms and an English translation of Luigi Pirandello’s Six Characters in Search of an Author.

In the end, Lord Cromer ruled that Coward’s “light and unreal and humorous” approach to the material rendered it harmless. But he recommended deleted passages in order to make the saucy lines “less objectionable” to those “who disapprove of quite unnecessary frankness of expression among women.”

The Lord Chancellor notwithstanding, one female playgoer did indeed find Coward’s irreverent send-up of two friends who find they have bedded the same man to be “objectionable.” Her outburst interrupting the second act earned her immediate ejection from the building—and the production the kind of welcome notoriety that so often gooses the box office.

The play’s producers quickly capitalized on what purported to be its naughty subject matter. “IT IS NOT A PLAY FOR CHILDREN,” they announced the following year in a flyer for a Preston, England production. “It depicts the ultra-modern young women of today, with truth and realism. They may not be lovable characters, but they are essentially amusing, and decidedly daring.”

Fallen Angels premiered at the Globe Theatre (now called the Gielgud Theatre) midway through the 1920s, a decade that, as Bruce Bawer’s September 2023 article in The New Criterion observed, “belonged to Noël Coward,” as “the quintessential exemplar of Britain’s upscale youth.” Within two months of Fallen Angels’ debut, four of his plays would be running simultaneously in London, a mark rivaled only by Somerset Maugham.

The latter, older and more established in the theater than Coward, had distressed Tallulah Bankhead so much by rejecting her for the role of prostitute Sadie Thompson in Rain that, as she later related in her autobiography, she had put on the character’s costume, "gulped down 20 aspirins" and lay down after scribbling "It ain't gonna rain no more."

The day after this setback, Bankhead received a call from her friend Coward, who was experiencing a crisis of his own. The actress playing Julia, he explained, had withdrawn from the production with practically no time to spare before the opening. Could Tallulah fill in and learn the lines in the four days before the premiere?

“Four days!” the flamboyant actress drawled. “Dahling, I can do it in four hours.” Their friendship and professional association would continue for several more decades, most famously in the 1948 Broadway revival of Coward’s Private Lives.

Fallen Angels lasted a little over a month when it came to Broadway in 1928, then was revived with somewhat more success—239 performances—when it was revived on the Great White Way in 1956 with future TV stars Efrem Zimbalist, Jr., William Windom, and Nancy Walker.

Though seen more frequently in the UK, the scandal once associated with it has faded with the decades, and it has not entered the charmed circle of Coward plays like its more successful immediate follow-up, Hay Fever, not to mention Private Lives, Design for Living, Present Laughter, or Blithe Spirit.

Imagine my surprise, then, when I noticed on the Web that the Roundabout Theatre has announced it for its Spring 2026 schedule. I am not one of those people predisposed to dismiss a vintage play as “dated,” and the principals promoted for the Roundabout show—stars Rose Byrne and Kelli O’Hara, and director Scott Ellis—boost one’s confidence that they will wring every laugh out of Coward’s insult- and innuendo-laden dialogue.