KEY POINTS:
A biting satire of sexual morality written by Noel Coward but never published has been found by two Welsh scholars researching the history of small-scale theatrical productions in London.
The one-act play, titled The Better Half, was completed in 1921, and has lain untouched in an archive at the British Library for almost 90 years.
"When we came across a typewritten copy of this, a play that does not appear in any of the collected editions of Coward, we knew we had found something," said Professor Richard Hand, who was searching through the Lord Chamberlain's archive with another academic from the University of Glamorgan, Professor Mike Wilson.
The script, which crackles with sardonic one-liners and tells of a love triangle between David and the women in his life, Marion and Alice, has been clearly marked in blue pen by the official censor and demonstrates just how provocative Coward's dialogue was felt to be in the 1920s.
One of Alice's lines, in particular, seems to have given the censor pause for thought, suggesting as it does the existence of a sex drive in womankind.
Bold blue ink in the margin marks the moment when this character exclaims: 'Just because your endeavours are egged on by women of the Marion type, who camouflage their desires for your body behind a transparent effusive admiration of your brain!" Hand said: "The censor was obviously not sure about this bit, but then he let it go."
Until 1969, plays performed in Britain had to be granted a licence by the Lord Chamberlain.
"The theatrical censor, who was a G. S. Street at that time, ruled in the end that there was no need for 'interference' with this play, as they termed it at the time, but he judged it to be 'daring' ... he added that 'the daringness was confined to speech' and so deemed to be OK," said Hand.
"Because it is comedy, Coward gets away with it, rather like Oscar Wilde and George Bernard Shaw before him. In fact, it is quite incisive social satire."
The academics were working on a book, London's Grand Guignol and the Theatre of Horror, and were interested in a series of offbeat productions staged at the Little Theatre, near Charing Cross in London. The theatre, destroyed in World War II, was notorious with the Lord Chamberlain's Office and the censor referred to it as "that troublesome theatre".
The Better Half appeared in a very brief run there in 1922 and was performed by the Grand-Guignol company, an experimental group which involved Sybil Thorndike and her husband Lewis Casson.
It was part of a short-lived attempt to establish a continental tradition of combining horror and comedy plays on the same bill.
Coward, who died in 1973 and was popularly known as "The Master" because of his accomplishments as actor, playwright and songwriter, wrote the play just before he became famous.
Observer
