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Bohemian & Libertine · Penrhyndeudraeth, Gwynedd

Portmeirion (Noël Coward writes Blithe Spirit)

Clough Williams-Ellis's Italianate folly-village on a Welsh estuary — a place built purely for pleasure — where Noël Coward, taking rooms in 1941, wrote 'Blithe Spirit' in five days. The village's flamboyant unreality has drawn the theatrical, the artistic and the amorous ever since.

StatusDocumented history
Datevillage from 1925; Coward's visit 1941
The peopleClough Williams-Ellis, Noël Coward
The sitePortmeirion village
Coordinates52.91361, -4.09778 (confidence 5/5)

The story

Portmeirion, Clough Williams-Ellis's Italianate village on the Gwynedd coast, was begun in 1925. In May 1941, with his London home and office destroyed in the Blitz, Noël Coward came here and wrote Blithe Spirit in six days flat — staying, by his own account, in the Fountain suite, though local legend also claims the Watch House. He propped up a wobbling table and worked morning and afternoon; he finished on 9 May, and only two lines were later cut. It opened that July and ran for 1,997 performances, a West End record for a non-musical play that lasted until The Mousetrap passed it in 1957. Coward was homosexual at a time when that was illegal throughout his career, and never publicly acknowledged it; the discretion that shaped his life and work is the real subject beneath the froth. Portmeirion later became the set of The Prisoner and now draws over 200,000 visitors a year.

More stories at this spot

Circe and the Sirens

The painter Edmond Brock captured Edith in 1925 in a group portrait with her three youngest daughters, titled "Circe and the Sirens" — a direct nod to her Ark nickname. The mythological joke ran right through her world, from the dining club to the garden herms carved with Circe's face and the swine's snouts of Odysseus's crew.

The village that played a prison

In the 1960s Portmeirion became "the Village" in the cult television series The Prisoner, starring Patrick McGoohan. Clough Williams-Ellis's dreamlike resort, built to prove that development could enhance rather than spoil a landscape, found lasting fame as the set for a story about a man who cannot escape.

Sources

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Documented history

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