A Song at Twilight should be Noel Coward's saddest play. Written as part of his farewell trilogy – Suite in Three Keys (1966) – it's the study of an ageing novelist who has founded his considerable success upon a life-lie.
From the moment dry-as-dust Sir Hugo Latymer makes an appreciative aside to the handsome young waiter attending him in his Swiss hotel suite, we can guess what's lurking in the cordoned-off annexes of his private passions. It takes a spikily uncomfortable dinner with actress and former flame Carlotta, though, before the truth about his past, and the damage done to others and himself, is dragged out in the open. Carlotta asks permission to publish his love letters to her in an autobiography, a request that's met with fierce outrage. She then goes on to reveal that she also possesses – cue interval curtain – Hugo's letters to the now-dead, male love of his life.
The scene is set for a piercing burst of self-confrontation – when the low sob heard in the background of a life suddenly breaks into a roar of regret. And yet Coward confines all the pain to the show's silent, dying minutes so that the dialogue is conducted in much the same grinding register: Sir Hugo flatlining in a state of stiff, sanctimonious denial, Carlotta attempting to apply electrodes to his conscience with a mixture of elegant witticisms and stinging rebukes.
In Nikolai Foster's ponderous new touring revival, Peter Egan struggles to lift Sir Hugo's tetchy, rebarbative disposition above a terminal dullness. Angular, poised and limp-wristed, Belinda Lang's Carlotta gives us the evening's saving comedy and its finest conversational caviar: "You're positively stampeding towards the quiet grave," she drawls. Yet it's as if her character knows from the outset that she can't hope to turn obdurate granite stone into remorseful, quivering jelly. An air of premature disappointment hangs over her manner.
The critic Nicholas de Jongh, whose surprise hit Plague Over England lifts the lid with far more élan on the anguish of closeted homosexuality in illiberal Britain, makes a spot-on observation in his book about theatrical treatments of gay experience, Not in Front of the Audience. Coward, he argues, fatally avoids self-disclosure in the character of Sir Hugo: "A Song at Twilight mourns a loss without quite knowing what had gone missing or why."
The play still has a curiosity value, certainly, but that value owes too much to the fact that it's so perversely evasive about a subject so close to Coward's heart.
Rating: ***
