“It's never too early for a cocktail,” remarks the aging but youth-obsessed Florence Lancaster in Noël Coward's 1924 hit play The Vortex.1 This suave utterance, with its characteristic inflection of camp exaggeration and domesticated decadence, signals the highly stylized territory that equally defined Coward's plays and his public persona in the 1920s and 1930s. Commenting on the immediate celebrity (and notoriety) that play afforded him, Noël Coward (1899–1973) observed that he “was seldom mentioned in the press without allusions to ‘cocktails,’ ‘post-war hysteria,’ and ‘decadence.’” Over a long career as an actor, director, playwright, and songwriter, Coward certainly received ample media attention, which, as far as The Vortex was concerned, was “very good for business.” Indeed, his status as a representative of the interwar generation has proven durable and influential, with the cocktail figuring as one of that image’s defining attributes. According to his contemporary, the fashion photographer Cecil Beaton, “all sorts of men suddenly wanted to look like Noël Coward— sleek and satiny, clipped and well-groomed, with a cigarette, a telephone, or a cocktail at hand.” In the aggregate, this catalogue of masculine attributes (we might liken it to a list of cocktail ingredients) inventories more than the mere stage props reinforcing Coward's well-polished persona. Its emphasis on the up-to-date also captures his approach to dramatic modernism in both its execution and its popular reception.

In the world of Coward's plays, modernity consists in being fully (and stylishly) present in the contemporary moment. Peter Raby, for example, identifies Coward as the definitive British comic playwright of the 1920s and 1930s in a lineage stretching back to modern drama's origins in the late nineteenth century. Similar to his predecessor Oscar Wilde, according to Raby, “he defined a decade; and, again like Wilde, he enjoyed a huge popularity— although it was a fragile one, balanced precariously on a razor edge of taste and fashion.” His era's fashion for the cocktail, it turns out, is reflected in the plays that secured Coward's reputation: Coward even memorably described the critical reception of Private Lives (1930) as a list of ingredients that “connoted, to the public mind, ‘cocktails,’ ‘evening dress,’ ‘repartee,’ and irreverent allusions to copulation, thereby causing a gratifying number of respectable people to queue up at the box office.” Glamorous, sophisticated, even vaguely louche in its celebration of self-indulgence, the cocktail is modernity's quaffable talisman.