Noel Coward’s “A Song at Twilight” (1982)

Deborah Kerr and Paul Scofield in the 1982 BBC2 Playhouse adaptation of Noël Coward’s A SONG AT TWILIGHT, which originally opened at the Queen’s Theatre in London in 1966 with Coward playing the lead.

A SONG AT TWILIGHT

1982. UK.

 Director: Cedric Messina

Writer: Noël Coward

Based on: “A Song at Twilight” (1966) by Noël Coward

 Starring: Paul Scofield, Deborah Kerr, June Tobin & Bruce Lidington

The play follows Sir Hugo Latymer (Scofield), a closeted waspish writer who sits through an evening with Carlotta Gray (Kerr), an actress and former lover, who has decided to pay him a visit. Hugo senses an ulterior motive because they haven’t seen one another in years and their relationship ended terribly. Sure enough, he’s right. After Hugo refuses to allow Carlotta the use of their old love letters in her biography, she reveals she has some of his other love letters – to a former male lover.

Alan Sinfield notes in his article, "Noël Coward and the Politics of Homosexual Representation" that A SONG AT TWILIGHT was the first time Coward centered a play around an overtly gay protagonist.

Parliament hadn’t yet decriminalized homosexuality between consenting adults (that would happen in 1967), so it’s even more surprising that Coward would play a character on stage that mirrored some of his own life experiences as a semi-closeted gay man. Interestingly, he modeled the character off of another closeted writer (W. Somerset Maugham) who had passed away a year earlier as a sort of gay camouflage. And apparently it worked.

A SONG AT TWILIGHT isn’t widely streaming at the moment, though it is available on DVD – and streaming on BBC’s iPlayer in the UK.