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In spite of makeup which gives her eyelids a furry look and her old tendency to read her more dramatic lines as though she were giving a schoolroom recital of Elektra, Actress Fontanne manages to be conspicuously charming in a role which is not a paragon of lucidity. Actor Lunt is at all times expertly droll, although his parts in The Guardsman and Reunion In Vienna appear to have permanently endowed him with a Central European accent. Actor Coward, particularly when he is imitating a butler on a telephone and giving an interview to the Press, is, if possible, more suavely comic than ever.
Design For Living, which some spectators may find a bit decadent in spots, is a worthy successor to, if not an entertaining equal of, the playwright's previous Private Lives. Its deficiency is in the kind of hysterical laughter which in Private Lives fairly convulsed the gravest sophisticate and exalted Noel Coward to the front rank of fun-makers.
Noel Coward is conceded to be the cleverest of living English dramatists. Some go further, advancing the premise that in the last hundred years only Disraeli, Wilde and Shaw have started from nothing and conquered England as Mr. Coward has conquered.
Few indeed are the aspiring playwrights who would not give their eye teeth to be in Noel Coward's tan buckskin shoes. Aged 33, he has written or collaborated on 23 plays and musicomedies since 1920. One out of three have been huge successes. At one time he had five of his works running in London during a single season, a record equaled only by the late Edgar Wallace. A few blocks away from the Manhattan theatre housing his Design For Living, last week a cinemansion was packing in well-bred audiences who seldom stoop to cinema, to witness Cavalcade, his episodic pageant of empire not yet legitimately staged in the U, S. Further down the street the shadow of Claudette Colbert was to be seen fluttering across a screen version (Tonight is Ours) of one of Playwright Coward's most dismal failures, The Queen Was in the Parlour. Wherever he went last year—with the possible exception of the Brazilian jungles—during an enviably carefree junket, he could hear tunes he had written for Bittersweet, and the more recent Words & Music simpering from phonographs and radios. With his own two hands, long head and (when he danced and sang for This Year of Grace in 1928-29) nimble feet and voice he has made a comfortable fortune. In London a capable and adoring staff that addresses him as "the Great White Father" handles his business for him.
It was not always so, as will testify the deep sardonic lines which frame his smiling mouth like a stern proscenium.