Playwrights: Outpatient of the Year

The master speaks. "There are only two great playwrights in Britain today —Terence Rattigan and myself. Perhaps Peter Shaffer is a third, but he doesn't really write enough. There has to be output, not just one or two plays. I have been in fashion, and people have said I have gone out of fashion. Beware of fashion. Staying power is what counts." Staying power Noel Coward surely has. He will be 65 this month. Less than a year ago, his doctor told him to take a thoroughgoing sabbatical, since he had been suffering from savage gastritis. So Coward slowed down to a run, and this fall he has been busy with a spread of enterprises that obviously make him the outpatient of the year.

Britannican Lyrics. To demonstrate his fitness, Coward took over this week as master of ceremonies on a 90-minute BBC television tribute to Sir Winston Churchill on the eve of his 90th birth day. Noting all this, the Times of London felt moved to write a tribute to Coward too. "Here, through and through, is a craftsman," explained the Times, "who has remained at the top of his profession for longer perhaps than any other living English playwright, simply because he has dedicated his life not to attitudes or to transient theatrical movements but to getting on with his work to the best of his ability." Coward has just finished supervising the London production of his High Spirits, which is a long-running hit on Broadway. BBC television has done four Coward plays, full length, in successive weeks. And a fresh revival of his Hay Fever, produced by the National Theater and directed by Coward himself, is a sellout. Of this new production, one critic commented: " Thin' and 'trivial' is what the critics said of this play when it first appeared. So it is. And so is Beethoven's Eighth Symphony." Coward takes all this without the pretense of surprise or the arrogance of conceit. He describes his modern popularity as "Dad's Renaissance." He has a collection of short stories that is selling briskly, and another half-written. "And they're doing a collected volume of my lyrics," he says with sculpted indifference. "I'm embarrassed to report that that looks like being the size of the Encyclopaedia Britannica. We shall have to do something about it. I fear I've written far, far too many lyrics." A Bit Far. Still he goes on writing them like a mad dog in the midday sun. He has a coop above Lake Geneva in Switzerland and another pad in Jamaica. The Jamaica setting is apparently perfect for glib, swift masters. The late Ian Fleming, after lolling in Coward's guesthouse for a time, bought his own place near by. "God, I miss him," says Coward. "He was so fabulously intelligent. Nobody quite appreciates how very, very good his descriptive passages were. His plots went a bit far, of course.

I mean Goldfinger. Really. But he could extract the sense of a place so terribly well. He asked me to play Dr. No. Not Bond—Dr. No. How wonderful. I wish I could have."