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.
