Noël Coward in Brief Encounter - American Conservatory Theater

20
Carnforth Station, by Roderick Charles Smith (2008)
The year 1939 brought a different kind of theater—World War ii. Coward was sent
to Paris to open a bureau of propaganda, and then to neutral America to assess opinion.
Before the outbreak of war he had been recruited by the British Foreign Office, and in
performing this intelligence work, he became technically a spy. While his own countrymen
were unaware of his activities—in fact he was constantly criticized for seeming to avoid
the deprivations on the home front—the Germans certainly were not. At the end of the
war the German “Black List” had Coward’s name near the top. Had they won the war, he
would have been shot.
Perhaps his greatest wartime achievement was the 1942 film In Which We Serve, the story
of a British destroyer and her crew based on the real life story of Admiral of the Fleet Lord
Louis Mountbatten’s own experience. Coward starred as the captain and codirected with
David Lean. The film was immensely popular on both sides of the Atlantic and honored
with a special Academy Award in 1943.
London theaters were briefly closed at the outbreak of war, and some of Coward’s plays
had to wait for production. This Happy Breed and the autobiographical comedy Present
Laughter were both written in 1939, but neither was seen until 1942—by which time he had