|
|
In the twenty-first century, men such as Coward and Mac Liammóir seem surreal. Their careers are in illuminating contrast to the grim reality of the last stage of Alexander Moissi’s career and indeed with his posthumous career as “Aleksandër Moisiu.” The Albanian-born Moissi had been a leading performer of the German-speaking theatre, yet his career vanished with the rise of Hitler. Moissi is a representative “man without a country”; his talent was stilled because the only thing “German” about him was language. The New Order rejected him. Moissi was unable to locate his culture adequately. Conversely, Coward, who followed Churchill’s orders to sing “Mad Dogs and Englishmen” wherever the guns were blazing, was emblematically English––even after he became a tax exile. And there is Mac Liammóir’s exhaustive, if ultimately desperate, attempt to make Irish the language of Ireland’s expression of its own culture. Coward and Mac Liammóir, though, clearly situate themselves “safely” within their chosen realms. Despite Coward’s concluding decades in Switzerland and Jamaica––where he was buried––his knighthood and memorial tablet in Westminster Abbey, upon which the Queen Mother herself placed a floral tribute, would no doubt be regarded by The Master as his greatest rewards. Mac Liammóir was honored in death with a state funeral. Moissi died in flight, having turned down an offer of assistance from his putative “native land,” Albania.
Nevertheless, Moissi, Coward, and Mac Liammóir had something that could be used by a national culture. They reveal something about how the theatrical persona can be part of the culture of a nation, how the things that the performer does can be taken as manifestations of that culture. Considering performers as disparate in their queerness as Michaél Mac Liammóir and Noël Coward is instructive for texturing identity. So, too, are the variety of guises used by the drama critic John Mason Brown.