just a song at twilight
when the lights are low
Looking Back on a Double Life
A Review of ‘A Song at Twilight’
In 1965, when Noël Coward wrote “A Song at Twilight” for the London stage, the words “out” and “closeted” did not mean what they do today.
How could they?
Homosexual sex was still a criminal offense under English law, and being openly gay could — and did — land people in jail.
But the ethical and emotional ramifications of a life lived in secret, especially for a writer’s life, are at the heart of this very late work by a playwright whose homosexuality was well-known but never acknowledged.
And when often it's all in the acknowledgment that counts!
Ostensibly inspired by the "Memoirs" of W. Somerset Maugham, who omits any mention of his 30-year liaison with his secretary, Gerald Haxton, and by an event recounted in a biography of the writer and caricaturist Sir Max Beerbohm, “A Song at Twilight” seems nonetheless utterly autobiographical — and it must have seemed even more so to its original audiences, watching the aging, ailing, closeted author play an aging, ailing, closeted author.
Sir Noel called "A song at twilight" his most serious play, and it certainly cuts through the familiar, waggish Coward persona to reveal a semblance of real heartbreak underneath.
Currently at Hartford Stage in a stylish coproduction with Westport Country Playhouse, where it opens next month, it is both a period piece and a topical inquiry into just how much honesty an artist owes his public, his intimates and himself.
We come upon the artist in question, an English novelist named Hugo Latymer, amid the graceful furniture of the grand Swiss hotel suite where he lives.
Some have never seen a hotel room furnished with a classical marble statue, but maybe some frequent the wrong hotels.
Crowned with an impressive white pompadour and accoutered in the de rigueur Coward dressing gown — this one, designed by Fabio Toblini, the color of claret — Brian Murray is the very image of a self-regarding literary lion.
Latymer and his German-born wife, a brisk and sensible Mia Dillon, are somewhat nervously awaiting the arrival of an uninvited interloper, Hugo’s old flame Carlotta, a none-too-successful actress who hasn’t been in touch in decades.
They fear, quite rightly, that she’s up to no good.
And when Carlotta, in the person of Gordana Rashovich, finally appears, her garishly dyed Titian coiffure, spangly dress and attention-grabbing jewels make Hilde Latymer’s tasteful string of pearls and lavender sweater set look positively frumpy.
Even more threatening are the old love letters Carlotta wants to quote in her forthcoming "Memoirs", payback for the nasty swipes Hugo took at her when he published his own autobiography -- "a mediocre actress," he called her).
It sounds like a perfect set-up for the kind of brittle back-and-forth that Sir Noel perfects in “Private Lives” and “Design for Living.”
And Hugo and Carlotta do fling a few choice zingers at each other.
But the repartee in “A Song at Twilight” doesn’t come close to matching Sir Noel’s best, and even at 90 intermission-less minutes, the play seems somewhat long.
It’s not because the director, Mark Lamos, and his team aren’t trying.
The three stars are strong performers, well-suited to their roles.
Murray, especially, lets us see the difference between the charming face Hugo presents to the world and the truth he bottles up inside.
And Dillon, Rashovich and even Nicholas Carrière, in the small part of the hotel waiter (someone has to fetch the caviar and champagne, after all) are superb.
Alexander Dodge’s elegant hotel salon is ringed by a subtle evocation of the surrounding mountains, a visual reminder that, as expatriates, Hugo and Hilde have chosen to live a lie in more ways than one.
The suggestion that we are not to take the setting as completely literal also allows Lamos to add a couple of graphic bed-room tableaux, just visible through the backdrop, as Latymer remembers his passionate affair with the man who was the love of his life.
Matthew Richards’s muted lighting and John Gromada’s dramatic music add emotional resonance to an effect that might otherwise have seemed merely gratuitous.
But these love scenes, one of them nude, also serve to remind us of how far society and the theater have come since Sir Noel wrote the play -- and of course if we forget about all the burlesques and drag queens!
In 1967, the English Parliament decriminalized homosexual acts between consenting adults.
Yet when Sir Noel died, in 1973, “A Song at Twilight” had still not been produced on Broadway.
"A song at twilight" arrived in Broadway ('the Great White Way', as Carlotta calls it) the following year, part of a double bill called “Noël Coward in Two Keys,” with Hume Cronyn, Jessica Tandy and Anne Baxter.
To suppose that the play would someday be presented with nude men embracing on the stage, before audiences that might easily include men married to each other, would have seemed sheer folly.
And to suppose that its themes would still feel relevant — well, Sir Noel might well have imagined that.
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