Coward, one of the most creative and popular figures of the British theatre, first came to Singapore in 1930. In his memoir Present Indicative, he described sitting on the veranda outside his room, enjoying a Gin Sling while watching “the most thorough-going rainstorm” that he had ever witnessed, saying “its impact on the roof of the veranda was terrific.”  
 
While his travelling companion, Jeffrey, Lord Amherst, was suffering from dysentery and recuperating in Singapore’s General Hospital, Coward began to socialise with a theatrical touring company called The Quaints. “En masse, we went to supper parties and swimming parties,” he wrote. “Some of the more refined social lights of Singapore looked obliquely at us, as though we were not quite the thing, a little too rowdy perhaps, on the common side. I’m sure they were right. Actors always laugh more loudly than other people when they’re enjoying themselves, and we laughed most of the time.”  
 
When the company’s leading man lost his voice, Coward was persuaded to play the role of Captain Stanhope in its production of R C Sherriff’s Journey’s End, set in the trenches of the First World War. It was a role made famous by Laurence Oliver, and though audiences at Singapore’s Victoria Theatre were delighted to see Coward’s three performances – he was a theatre star, after all – the critics were not impressed. “Stanhope is not a Noel Coward part,” wrote one. It was not his finest hour. During one performance, Coward dropped a heavy tin hat onto the groin of a ‘dead’ soldier – played by a young John Mills – who cried out in pain and promptly sat up. 

On that occasion, Coward stayed at Raffles Hotel for a month, though it’s unlikely he took the opportunity to explore Singapore. Despite being extremely well travelled, he was not much of a sightseer. According to his biographer, Oliver Soden, “When abroad, Noël simply recreated his plush London life… socialising with British consuls and governor-generals, and partying at embassies and clubs…”  

Coward could be scathing about the expats he encountered on his travels and his work, including in a novella called Pretty Polly Barlow set in Singapore, and often satirised the colonial lifestyle. He was equally snobbish about his fellow tourists: in a number he wrote in 1961 for his musical Sail Away, he lamented, “Why, oh why, do the wrong people travel when the right people stay back home?”

Not that he was averse to dressing in full colonial attire where appropriate: a 1935 photo shows him posing for the cameras at Singapore airport on the steps of a Qantas Empire Airways aircraft, dapper in white shorts, shirt, jacket and knee socks, a white toupee perched upon his head.