Quote of the Day (Tom Stoppard, on Life, ‘A Gamble’)

“Life is a gamble, at terrible odds. If it were a bet you wouldn’t take it.” —Czech-born English playwright and Oscar-winning screenwriter Sir Tom Stoppard (1937-2025), Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (1966)

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.

Theater Review: Harold Brighouse’s Witty ‘Garside’s Career,’ at the Mint Theater

Nearly 50 years ago, Alan Alda’s screen debut as writer, director, and star was entitled The Seduction of Joe Tynan, a step-by-step examination of how a liberal politician becomes caught up in the Washington vortex of ambition, playing to the crowd, and sex. Except for the public niceties still observed in pre-WWI Britain, Harold Brighouse might just as easily have called his anatomy of the same wayward instincts in London “The Seduction of Peter Garside.”

Garside's Career, like other plays mounted at the Off-Broadway venue the Mint Theater, is a lost and neglected play. After premiering at London’s West End in 1914, it enjoyed a successful run on the other side of the Atlantic in Boston five years later.

For some reason, plans to bring it immediately to Broadway were scuttled, and it seems to have disappeared from British stages too, even though Brighouse lived until 1958. So New York audiences are getting their first look at a clever, century-old send-up of a different form of inflation: a young striver’s sudden burst of ego.

If you’re an American TCM fan, you probably know just a little of his work, through David Lean’s 1954 film adaptation of his most successful play, Hobson’s Choice. (An interesting bit of trivia, from the Mint’s playbill for Garside’s Career: Hobson’s Choice was also adapted in 1966 as a Sammy Cahn-Jimmy Van Heusen Broadway musical, Walking Happy. Maybe that one will be revived someday by Encores!? Please?)

But Brighouse wrote more than 30 plays, as well as fiction, journalism, and memoirs. His output is well worth sampling if this production is any indication.

His title character, “silver-tongued” Peter Garside (played by Daniel Marconi) thinks his “genius” for oratory will take him to a station that his newly acquired license as a skilled mechanic (or, in the phrase of the time, “engineer”) can’t even remotely match.

But fiancée Margaret Shawcross, noticing that his gift for public speaking is dangerously intoxicating, warns him against depending on it.

None of this can stand in the face of the irresistible temptation presented by Garside’s Socialist labor group: a chance at a Parliamentary seat in a by-election. Seizing it gives him the opportunity he craves but at the price of his engagement.

Before long, as an MP, he has a comfortable apartment in London, with aspirations for more money, political power—and a permanent end to living in the dingy northern England town of Midlanton. He even makes advances on Gladys Mottram, a provincial siren as bored with her status as the daughter of the most influential family in town as Garside is with his distinctly lower standing.

Garside’s oratorical quelling of rioters about to break into the Mottram home only hardens belief in his political wizardry. But his neglect of meetings and votes that matter to constituents back home trigger a dizzying fall from power.

American audiences of the 21^st century might not be able to identify with the class tensions of pre-WWI Britain, which found their ultimate expression in social welfare legislation passed by the Liberals and the eventual rise of the Labour Party.

But the underlying conflict that Brighouse depicted retains its transatlantic relevance: At what point does the desire to better one’s self involve forgetting your working-class roots and the people who recognized your potential in the first place?

In the battle between capital and labor, Brighouse’s sympathies were decidedly with the latter—a point underscored here when Margaret refuses to back down from her Socialist activism, even when threatened with the loss of her teaching job by the formidable Lady Mottram, wife of the mayor of Midlanton.

Nevertheless, he dispensed with propaganda—one of the group supporting and then bringing down Peter is archly called “Karl Marx Jones,” and he was far more interested in the countervailing emotional and ethical instincts of politicians than their policy considerations.

In one sense, contemporary audiences may find dated the notion that an indiscretion will spell the end of a politician’s career. Nowadays, he (and more often than not, it is a “he”) will try again for public office, after a year or two biding his time—as former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo is doing now.

But Brighouse exposed in the modern political animal a trait that remains intact: egotism that swells with even the slightest audience and deflates with none.

The cast (largely veterans of past Mint productions) play their roles adeptly, starting with Marconi, who expertly navigates Garside’s transition from earnest laborer to pompous MP to political has-been.

Madeline Seidman endows faithful Margaret with appropriate steely love, able to endure in turn Peter’s growing appetite for power, narcissism, brush with scandal, self-pity, and even a gorgon of a mother (with Amelia White making the most of the play’s most hilarious lines). And Sara Haider and Avery Whitted offer a nice contrast as the to-the-manor-born Gladys and her cheerfully superficial brother Freddie.

In the three decades of its existence, I have managed to see more than a dozen productions by the Mint. It has approached each with the kind of attention and loving care that these stepchildren of modern theater have deserved. Harold Brighouse’s play is no different. I urge you to see it before it closes on Theater Row on Saturday, March 15.

Directed adeptly and confidently by Matt Dickson, Garside's Career nicely complements Hindle Wakes, another dramedy by Brighouse’s friend and fellow Northern England playwright, Stanley Houghton. The Mint is offering on-demand screenings of a three-camera HD recording of their 2018 production through Sunday, March 16. Viewing is free after providing your email address and zip code; donations are welcome.

Quote of the Day (George Bernard Shaw, on a Common Failing of Young Men)

“Like all young men, you greatly exaggerate the difference between one young woman and another.” — Munitions manufacturer Andrew Undershaft, in Anglo-Irish playwright George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950), Major Barbara (1907)

This Day in Theater History (Wilde Enjoys Last Triumph With 'Earnest')

February 14, 1895 – Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest opened in London at the St. James Theatre—appropriately enough, for this rather bent love story, on Valentine’s Day. The farce was reduced from four acts to three, at the insistence of the St. James’ producer-manager, George Alexander.

But, unlike the disastrous Henry James drama, Guy Domville, which Alexander had produced only the month before, Wilde’s comedy of manners was a roaring success, the moment when all his subversive wit and wordplay coalesced into the theatrical equivalent of a light but perfect soufflé. Like fellow Irish Protestant George Bernard Shaw, he tweaked British Victorian values from his standpoint as an outsider.

With An Ideal Husband still running at the Theatre Royal in Haymarket, the young writer who had told an American customs official, “I have nothing to declare but my genius,” had finally made good on his boast.

It was also, alas, to be Wilde’s last hour of triumph. The Marquess of Queensbury (yes, the same man who drew up those famous boxing rules), the father of Wilde’s feckless young lover, Lord Alfred Douglas, was so enraged by his son’s relationship that he had planned to show up at the play’s opening and ruin the proceedings. 

Wilde got wind of the idea and had the irate parent banned from the theater. Instead, Queensbury left a calling card on the board at the gentleman’s club that Wilde frequented: “To Oscar Wilde, posing somdomite.”

Instead of laughing off the feeble spelling, Wilde took Douglas’ insane advice and swore out a warrant for Queensbury’s arrest on a charge of libel. 

In the ensuing sensational trial, Queensbury’s attorney, Sir Edward Carson (later, the intransigent opponent of the Irish Free State), demonstrated—through Wilde’s indiscreet correspondence with Douglas and a parade of witnesses that prominently featured young boys patronized by the playwright—that Queensbury’s charge was true.

Wilde lost his case and ended up in Reading Gaol, where his health was broken. He died five years after the premiere of his greatest play. 

Several variations have been given of his final words: "My wallpaper and I are fighting a duel to the death. One or other of us has got to go" (my favorite), "I am dying beyond my means," and, "I can’t even afford to die."

Though I had read much of Wilde’s writings, I never knew about the missing act in The Importance of Being Earnest until, in the fall of 2000, I attended a rare performance with this section restored at the marvelous Stratford Festival in Canada. The repertory company mounted the play in the centennial year of Wilde’s death.

Superficially, Alexander’s instinct to cut the play was correct – the additional section, lodged between what became the second and third acts of the revision, did nothing to advance the plot. 

But plot is hardly the reason for being of a Wilde comedy—it’s the wonderful lines. And this had them in abundance.

Moreover, this act includes plot twists ironic in light of what was about to happen to Wilde. It features a bill coming due and an arrest, almost as if Wilde sensed that his increasingly open life of “feasting with panthers” would exact a price.

You may have noticed that I’ve referred to the play’s “missing act.” Don’t I mean “discarded”? Well, no—for years after Wilde’s death, the act was nowhere to be found. 

Then, in 1953, it was rediscovered in, of all places—drumroll, please—New Jersey. (Don’t ask me how it got there!) The 2002 film, starring Colin Firth, Reese Witherspoon, Rupert Everett and Frances O’Connor, featured the restored act.