Dame Patricia Routledge remembers the genius of Noël Coward

Long-time Chichester resident Dame Patricia Routledge remembers The Master with huge fondness. She was able to share her love of Coward with the late Queen when Elizabeth II visited Chichester Festival Theatre on November 20 2017.

“I had lunch with her at her table,” Dame Patricia recalls. “It had been suggested that I speak some Coward and I chose a wonderful piece which I had already performed in Cowardy Custard. During the war Coward wanted to enlist and to do his bit but Churchill said to him that his function was to entertain the troops. And there is a wonderful speech Coward gave sitting on a tank out in the Middle East which began ‘I have just come out from England’ in which he recounts the messages of love from home. I gave the whole of that speech and the Queen was delighted. The Queen spoke about remembering him performing for the Queen Mother, and of course the girls, Princess Elizabeth and Princess Margaret, would have been at Windsor at the time too.”

Dame Patricia remembers: “I first had an association with Noel Coward when he had two homes; one was in Switzerland and one was in Jamaica and when he was in Switzerland he used to pop to London perhaps a couple of times a year to see what was going on, to stay au fait with what was happening with his successes and also with his failures. I was in a Julian Slade musical called Follow That Girl. He came to see Julian to encourage him in the face of critical negativism, to encourage him to ‘continue writing, dear boy.’ But Noel Coward was aware of the up and comings and in 1965 I was in a great wacky successful play which transferred to Broadway where it was a great success. While I was rehearsing in New York a telephone call came from either Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer or 20th Century Fox and a lady announced herself as the secretary to Robert Wise who was a very famous film director, most famous for his direction of The Sound Of Music. The lady said would I come to meet Mr Robert Wise to discuss a project. I got leave of absence from the rehearsals and I went along to the office and I was ushered into a room where there was a semi-circle of eight or ten important-looking gentleman. Mr Wise said ‘Do you know why I've asked to see you?’ I said I had no idea. He said ‘I've just come from Jamaica where I was visiting Noël Coward and I'm going to be making a film about Noël Coward and Gertrude Lawrence and those successful days. Noël Coward said there was only one person he could think of to play Beatrice Lillie and that was Patricia Routledge.’ Beatrice Lillie was achingly funny, wonderfully funny and the blood stopped coursing through my veins. I heard myself saying ‘I don't think anyone should play Beatrice Lillie, but if The Master thinks that I am likely to be able to do it then I'd better give it some serious thought.”

In the end it didn't happen because Beatrice Lillie herself would not allow anyone to do it, but Dame Patricia was clearly on Noel Coward’s radar.

Dame Patricia met Coward in 1969 when she took part in A Talent to Amuse: Noel Coward's 70th Birthday Concert : “The whole of the West End turned out for his 70th birthday. All his leading ladies were there with the exception of Gertrude Lawrence who was no longer alive. But there were more stars in the auditorium than there were on the stage. It was just amazing. It lasted four hours and he sat on the stage at four in the morning with us. Next day he had lunch with the Queen Mother and he was knighted.”

“My next meeting came at a very significant time in my life when I was in Cowardy Custard at the Mermaid Theatre in 1972 to 73.”

A musical revue, it was one of the last Noël Coward shows staged during his lifetime. It was devised by Gerard Frow, Alan Strachan and Wendy Toye.

“It was his work and the variety was astonishing. There were pieces that could have been written by John Osborne and I did a little scene with Derek Waring that was pure Chekhov with the power of subtext and the delicacy of the words, and then if you go through the lyrics to some of the songs, it just takes your breath away. He did come on that first night but he was very frail. He made an entrance through a side entrance and the show couldn't begin for three minutes because the whole house rose to him. He came back later in 1973 on a private visit to the show and at the end he sat on the stage with us all and approved generously what we had all achieved.

“When you were with him you didn't talk. You just listened. You couldn't match his wit but he was chatty and he was friendly. He could be quite acerbic though I never experienced that.”

Dame Patricia remembers the days when you would start your career by doing two or three Cowards in repertory companies: “I remember that I was an unpaid ASM in charge of making sure that the silver cigarette boxes and cigarette holders and everything was there and I can remember thinking I didn't come into theatre for this! But I had to eat my words.

“I had to leave Cowardy Custard after six months and go into hospital. On the day I came out of hospital, I came home and I had a light lunch and took to my bed to rest. It was a darkish February afternoon and when I woke up my stepma who was looking after me came in with the most glorious bouquet of flowers from Coward.”

• The Vortex is set in the roaring twenties. A world in flux. The magnetic Florence Lancaster draws people to her like moths to a flame. But when her son Nicky arrives home from Paris with an unexpected fiancée and a secret, it sets off a chain of events which threatens to pull them all into a maelstrom. Noël Coward’s witty and stinging portrait of the darkness beneath the glittering surface of the Jazz Age is as vivid today as when it premiered, causing a sensation and catapulting its young writer to his first great success.

Daniel Raggett, nominee for the 2022 Evening Standard Emerging Talent Award, directs this new production in which Florence and Nicky Lancaster are played by mother and son, Lia Williams and Joshua James. Lia Williams’s multi award-winning roles include Wallis Simpson in The Crown, and on stage Mary Stuart (Almeida & West End) and John Gabriel Borkman (The Bridge). Her critically-acclaimed production of Doubt was seen at Chichester last year. Joshua James returns to the Festival Theatre where he appeared in the Young Chekhov trilogy as Nikolai in Platonov and Konstantin in The Seagull (for which he was nominated for an Ian Charleson Award), both also at the National Theatre.