This Happy Breed
The family consists of Frank, a World War I vet; his wife, Ethel; son Reg; dutiful daughter Vi; and wild daughter Queenie. Bob Mitchell is a buddy of Frank’s from the trenches; his son, who’s in love with Queenie, joins the navy because there’s so little work. Aunt Sylvia lives with the family because her fiance was killed in the war, and Reg expresses his adolescent rebellion by threatening to join the Communist Party and participating in the 1926 general strike that shut down English industry for nine days. Queenie is drawn in by the parties and loosened sexual mores of the Roaring 20s. Some of Coward’s historical references seem gratuitous–it’s clunky to bring up the Sino-Japanese War only to say “That’s way over on the other side of the world!” But others magnify the family experience, as when the king’s abdication to marry “the woman I love” echoes Queenie’s disruptive affair with a married man.
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This Happy Breed shows us a different Coward, a person capable of exhaustion and despair. At the same time it exhorts the audience not to succumb to those emotions; as Frank says, “England’s gotten tired, but she’ll always fight back.” Maybe that’s why my own political exhaustion began to lift as I watched: I started to believe we’ll come back as well.
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