Bringing out the Acid: Noël Coward, Harold Pinter, Ivy Compton-Burnett and the Uses of Camp

Abstract

Noël Coward's most famous plays fit closely with Sontag's description of the primary attributes of camp: flippant, stylized, ironic and self-consciously theatrical, artificial. But where Sontag defines the camp sensibility as disengaged and depoliticized, this article argues that Coward deploys a form of linguistic camp to destabilize judgements and challenge orthodoxies. As his characters switch rapidly and seamlessly among different linguistic registers and their associated sets of values and assumptions, any sense of normative or self-evident values is dissipated. Coward singled out Harold Pinter from all the “new wave” dramatists of the fifties and sixties, admiring him as a genuine original using language brilliantly and describing him as a “sort of Cockney Ivy Compton-Burnett.” Pinter and Compton-Burnett share Coward's particular form of linguistic camp, and their characters can be seen to deploy it to similar disruptive ends, unsettling moral and sexual judgements and challenging orthodoxy's claim to normality.