Young British director Douglas Rintoul directs Luxembourg actors Tom Leick, Myriam Muller and Jules Werner and an international cast in Design for Living. Rintoul is no stranger to Luxembourg, having worked as associate director on Deborah Warner's star-studded production of Julius Caesar, shown at the Grand Theatre in July 2005.

On Noel Coward

Noel Pierce Coward was born on 16 December 1899, in Teddington, Middlesex, England. He died on the 26 March 1973, in St Mary, Jamaica.

Born into a comfortable middle-class family and brought up in Surbiton, Surrey, Noel Coward was brought up on a diet of Edwardian musical comedy and lighter dramatic classics at Daly's and the Gaiety. In 1911, aged 12, he made his first stage appearance as Prince Mussell in The Goldfish by Lila Field, at the London Little Theatre. Astonishingly, he made his directorial debut the next year with The Daisy Chain.

The multi-talented Coward grew up to become a kind of "Renaissance Man" of the Theatre - variously a playwright, singing-actor of stage and revue, film actor, composer, writer, critic and theatrical entrepreneur. At one point he had four plays running simultaneously in the West End and was acknowledged as the master of the English stage during the first half of the 20th century.

Coward shot to fame in 1924 as writer and star of The Vortex. He reprised his role as Nicky Lancaster on Broadway the following year.

Most critics agree that his finest achievements as a writer for theatre, many of which he also produced, directed and appeared in, are five of his comedies: Hay Fever (produced 1925), Private Lives (1930), Design for Living (1933), Blithe Spirit (1941), and Present Laughter (1942). He also produced a group of one-act plays Tonight at 8:30 (1935); the review Words and Music (1932); and the musical comedy Sail Away (1961).

Coward also had a serious, patriotic side, which was evident in his tireless war work, when he entertained the troops all over the world, and in his film In Which We Serve (1942), describing the heroic activities of a British naval destroyer. His short play, Still Life, was re-written in 1945 and became the screen classic Brief Encounter starring Trevor Howard and Celia Johnson.

After the war, theatrical tastes began to change and Coward spent an increasing amount of time in the United States where he became a popular figure on television. In England, his plays met with less success, and he was openly hostile towards the then fashionable "kitchen sink" school of drama in the West End. However in 1963 a revival of Private Lives was enormously successful and led to a renewed interest and appreciation of his work that continues until this day.

In 1931 Coward met his life-long companion, Graham Payn at an audition for Words and Music in London. Their relationship lasted until Cowards death and in 1994 Graham Payn published My Life with Noel Coward, which contained many previously unpublished writings.

During the Second World War, Coward visited Jamaica and fell in love with it. In 1947 he built a home called Blue Harbour on the North East of the Island. He soon found that he attracted a lot of celebrity visitors and built a second home, as a retreat, called Firefly. Among his visitors were John Gielgud, Vivien Leigh, Laurence Olivier and Ivor Novello.

Publicly, Coward never openly referred to his homosexuality, and would not allow his biographer Sheridan Morley to mention it. He claimed that the public was unsure about his sexuality (despite him writing and singing songs like Mad about the Boy), and that his refusal to "come out" sprang from a solicitous wish not to disillusion all those harmless ladies in Goring-by-Sea who "harboured secret desires" for him. But it should also be remembered that until 1967 homosexuality was still a criminal offence in England. Coward's homosexuality is an important factor in his work, and in many of his plays there is a conjunction between a gay sensibility and ostensibly heterosexual relationships that has a potent appeal to audiences. There is love in abundance in Coward's work, but it is scotched, scorched, frozen love, the suffocated variety that Wilde, Maugham and Rattigan also articulated and found a way of making resonant beyond their immediate tribe.

DESIGN FOR LIVING

Design for Living was written in 1933 as a star vehicle for Coward and his close friends Alfred Lunt and Lynne Fontanne.

While The Vortex and Private Lives had barely escaped the attentions of the Lord Chamberlain's office, the provocative themes of Design for Living meant it did not open in London until 1939. Its eventual run of 203 performances was ended by the outbreak of the Second World War.

It premiered in New York in 1933 to popular and critical acclaim. The New York Times described it as a play of "skill, art and clairvoyance, performed by an incomparable trio of comedians," and the New York Sun called it "as happy a spectacle of surface skating as one might see," adding that the skaters were "sometimes on very thin ice."

Noel Coward