More Coward: Stefan Bednarczyk – The Pheasantry

More Coward: Stefan Bednarczyk at The Pheasantry, London.

Star rating: five stars ★ ★ ★ ★ ★

It is 66 years since Noel Coward wrote the wickedly prophetic ‘There are Bad Times Just Around the Corner’ but in these dark Brexit days the bitingly witty words could not be more timely.

The redoubtable Stefan Bednarczyk brought his second compilation of The Master’s catalogue of songs, verse and monologues to the famed Chelsea cabaret room and again showed himself to be every bit a match for the American greats in this genre.

Despite his name – he had a Polish father – Bednarczyk is every inch an Englishman and while he doesn’t impersonate Coward so much as channel him, he had the posh accent and Cowardy inflections off to a T.

While some of us find many of Coward’s plays dated – his final one, the limp Star Quality, was the last time I walked out of a theatre at the interval and Hay Fever totally failed to amuse – his lyrics and music have stood the test of time far better.

‘Sail Away’ is as beautiful as ever, while ‘Most of Ev’ry Day (I’m Thinking of You)’ and ‘I Wanted to Show You Paris’, an older man’s declaration to a younger woman, were Coward at his most romantic.

But it was the funny songs the packed audience loved best – ‘A Bar On the Piccola Marina’ where wealthy widow Mrs Wentworth-Brewster spent a riotous time after her husband’s demise, and ‘Bronxville Darby and Joan’, about a 50-year-married couple who discovered as early as their honeymoon they were “mutually repulsive” yet somehow stuck together for the long haul, were just two of the gems that Bednarczyk acted out so brilliantly behind the Steinway.

Coward’s way with words has never been improved upon. Who else would rhyme “goosed her” with “Wentworth-Brewster” or “allure” with “Cote d’Azur” and “behaviour” with “Belgravia”?

Bednarczyk rounded off the first half of a busy two-hour show with Coward’s heavy-handed wartime satire ‘Don’t Let’s Be Beastly to the Germans’ which Churchill loved but was banned by the BBC. “Their Beethoven and Bach are really far worse than their bite” is a genius of a line but would “And treat the rats with charity” even survive the BBC censor in today’s PC times?

He was a writer of verse from the age of nine until the end of his life but kept much of it for himself. Bednarczyk gave us several examples including an outrageous paeon of praise for the Daily Mail called ‘Morning Glory – An Epic’ but the punchline was that it was written “at the firm and clear request of Lady Rothermere”!

“I’d like to think I’ll be missed a bit,” the final line of the short poem ‘I’m Here For a Short Visit Only’ emphasised the point Bednarczyk made that behind the cocktail-sipping, elegant, playboy-about-town image, carefully cultivated for the world’s media, was an inferiority complex. Coward was constantly worrying about whether his work would be forgotten. Rest easy, Sir Noel. With Bednarczyk here and Steve Ross in New York perpetuating your genius, there’s no danger of that.

We shall never know why the versatile Bednarczyk is not an international star. He acted with Gene Wilder in Laughter on the 23rd Floor for a year on the West End stage and in Coward’s Semi-Monde at the Lyric, made movies like Topsy-Turvy and Florence Foster Jenkins, conducted the choir at St Patrick’s Church in Soho and performed these beautifully and respectfully compiled Coward and Flanders and Swann evenings all over the world.

Jeremy Chapman