Noël Coward’s comedy Fallen Angels was so shocking to bourgeois morality a hundred years ago it was nearly banned. Now restaged in London as a period piece about two “girls behaving badly” on a champagne-fuelled night, bemoaning their stale marriages to golfing husbands and lusting after a Frenchman both regard as the great love of their lives, it has garnered good reviews. Written when Coward was 23, he had a precocious grasp of the tensions of wedlock, and the trade-off between respectability and the hungers of the flesh. (The Lord Chamberlain’s office only reluctantly granted it a performance licence, alarmed by its allusions to premarital and extramarital sex.)
Coward, playwright, composer, director, actor, and singer, known for his wit, flamboyance, and what Time called “a sense of personal style, a combination of cheek and chic, pose and poise”, was born 16 December 1899 2.30am Teddington, England into a poor background; and started performing on stage as a child, prompted by his mother.
He had a packed communicative 3rd house with an outspoken Sagittarius Sun conjunct Saturn opposition a 9th house Neptune; as well as a sharp-tongued Saturn conjunct Mars in Capricorn and Venus in Capricorn so he would not be backward about expressing his opinions. He also had a restless, mischievous Gemini Moon conjunct Pluto opposition Uranus Mercury in Sagittarius adding another layer of penetrating and upsetting insight and wit to his repertoire. With Uranus Pluto he liked to upset conventional ideas. He also had a lucky Jupiter in Scorpio in his financial 2nd house making his adult life more secure than his childhood. The generation signature Neptune Pluto in Gemini sat either side of the North Node making him notable in the culture of his time.
He achieved enduring success as a playwright, publishing more than 50 plays from his teens onwards – Hay Fever, Private Lives, Design for Living, Present Laughter, and Blithe Spirit, have remained in the regular theatre repertoire. He also composed hundreds of songs, in addition to well over a dozen musical theatre works (including the operetta Bitter Sweet and comic revues), screenplays, poetry, several volumes of short stories, the novel Pomp and Circumstance, and a three-volume autobiography. In the Second World War, he ran the British propaganda office in Paris.
A life well lived. Coward had penetrating insights and a talent to amuse and entertain.
Quotes: “It’s discouraging to think how many people are shocked by honesty and how few by deceit”.
“Never trust a man with short legs his brain is too near his bottom.”
It seems synchronous (or on purpose?) that you publish this piece about Noel Coward on the day the full moon is conjunct his natal moon.