Fumed Oak is

the last Noel Coward play I was able to find on YouTube. It was part of a series of one act plays (Tonight at 8:30) that Coward wrote for himself and Gertrude Lawrence. (One of those plays Still Life went on to become the film Brief Encounter). It’s part of a YouTube series called ‘Collins meets Coward’ in which Joan Collins stars. This is irritating, if only because of the inevitable exculpatory comments on Collins expertise (‘she can act!’ ) bestowed upon her only because she deigned to appear without makeup as a working class mom (she’s still wears eyeliner though). I’m especially irritated because I worked with -- and loved -- a marvelous actress named Jennifer Phipps -- who went to school with Joan Collins -- and was a much better actress, and would have been much better in this part. The play is pretty fascinating; it's strangely didactic and quite serious, although — because it’s Coward — it’s also quite funny. It’s also significantly un-feminist, and would definitely be fuel for those who imagine Coward a misogynist. Henry Gow is a white collar nothing who lives with his wife Doris, his young daughter Elsie, and his mother-in-law Mrs. Rocket. At first the three female characters bicker:  it’s somewhat amusing but mostly just annoyingly petty. Finally Gow locks himself into the dining room with them, slaps his mother-in-law, and informs the lot that he is taking off on a boat to the South Seas. It’s a masculinist reversal of A Doll’s House —this time the husband is oppressed instead of the wife. Any tale of breaking free and telling-off-oppressors is fun to watch, and would not be out of place in Boal’s Forum Theatre —except  that these days we find the notion of a man being oppressed by women both fictional and fantastical. Well I would posit that it is not -- especially in Coward’s hands. Coward’s work features two kinds of women:  a) 'victims' —  boring, judgemental, quite often unattractive, and certainly not sexual (Sybil in Private Lives ) and b)  ‘sirens’  -- independent, intelligent, fascinating, and openly desiring (Amanda in the same play). Coward’s contention is that often women who claim to be victims are not victims at all. If he was talking about rape this might be objectionable, but In Fumed Oak Coward floats the situation of a man who has was tricked into marriage by a woman who lied about being pregnant. Men abuse and kill women -- because they can. That's evil, of course. But women can be just as evil; they are simply not capable of inflicting the same amount of physical damage as men, so they find subtler ways to hurt. Mothers (God love them) know this, and as wonderful as most mothers are there is also a singular minority capable of using their powers of manipulation and persuasion for evil — and who pull a sad, persecuted face when found out. Coward makes it clear that the women Henry Gow yells at are not victims;  he gives them cash and claims old Mrs. Rocket has a fortune stashed away anyway. He tells his wife and his daughter that they should simply start a new life without him -- and he leaves the three of them in a moist, wailing heap. I am not afraid to say that our culture is a ‘fumed oak’ culture. Fumed oak is oak stained by the ammonia used to darken it; our world is now darkened by the stain of victim politics. I’m particularly sensitive to this — always have been. I’m guilty and always will be. No matter how ‘good’ I am, I imagine I'm always to blame. My dear mother taught me this -- or perhaps rather than demonizing her I should admit the possibility that I just might be so alarmingly and neurotically sensitive that I  soaked up this mental disorder from the culture around me. If something goes wrong I figure it’s my fault, and if I do make a mistake, instead of admitting it, I get highly defensive and lie. Sometimes I even cry. I’m an actor and quite capable of crying quite convincingly if accused of doing anything wrong. In the past, I’ve also been known to fly into a tearful rage — which I am also quite good at — and which I can produce at will at the drop of a hat. I am all too feminine, having been schooled in feminine wiles -- I absorbed them from my mother who used them on me for years, and I'm more than eager to use them -- at the slightest provocation -- as posthumous revenge against her memory. So I am not an unbiased observer of Fumed Oak — the play triggers me. But also, it is particularly relevant to present day 'woke' culture. 'Wokeness' would try Coward's patience. It’s fascinating to me that the old used to — at one point — be treated as victims; people once had sympathy for us because -- after all -- we do have loads of aches and pains, and will probably die at any moment. Often we didn’t deserve this respect. But now the pendulum has swung in the opposite direction and we are scorned, laughed at and kicked to the curb. When an old guy like me expresses disatisfaction with toxic victim culture, I am assessed as a neo-fascist; but I am not, and neither was Coward. Pulling up your bootstraps and wiping the mud off your face was something you once automatically did when you had been kicked in the shins; nowadays even the mildest rejection is used as an excuse for a mental collapse, for not completing your homework, or for staying home and hiding underneath your laundry and watching Netflix. When I was railing against Vivek Shraya three years ago I told her to stop being afraid of cisgendered society; after all I used to venture out of my comfort zone in drag all the time, and still do. In drag -- or in a blog like this -- I can live in ways I can't in real life. Living means meeting the slings and arrows hurled at you, and if you can’t take it you are not only a wimp but in danger of living your life as a dead person. Perhaps our cultural obsession with zombies is related to the dead people that we have become, drenched not so much in blood as in fear of a harsh word;  all we are actually 'woke' to is our own victim-hood, which is merely an excuse for a paralysing a stasis. Act out, act up, get laid, fight back -- and be the only one on your block to do something -- whatever it is -- and be the only person of your particular kind in the social group you frequent. I highly recommend this, as when I'm not caught in the trap of performing my own victim-hood in a feminine way, I am performing my own bravery -- have been for years --- and if there's one thing I can say about myself it's this: I've escaped the fate that has befallen so many, i.e. ending up an actual sodden pile of moaning inconsequence.