NOEL Coward stoically endured most of his enforced tax exile in Bermuda serving as a reluctant tourist attraction rather than writing. The razor-witted Recording Angel who chronicled the long, slow death of Britain's class system with vivacity and piquant charm, was routinely pointed out to camera-toting vacationers on the tannoy systems of passing ferries and tour boats whenever he took the sun on the verandah of his harbourfront home ("I don't really mind this daily publicity," he recorded in his diary, "but unfortunately it does encourage the boats' passengers to spring into taxis the moment they land and come belting out to stare at me over the wall and take photographs. The other morning I was caught practically naked, covered in dust and sweat and carrying a frying pan in one hand, a slop-pail in the other. I paused graciously while they took their bloody snapshots . . . Noel Coward is sophisticated!")

His unwanted local celebrity along, no doubt, with the stagnant, ennui-inducing atmosphere of 1950s Bermuda, prompted him to hastily decamp to Jamaica after spending just a few years here.

But imagine if during his brief residency in Bermuda Coward had collaborated in a round-robin writing project with, say, his contemporaries Bertolt Brecht and Raymond Chandler.

Assume the subject these exceptionally diverse hands devoted their pooled energies to was a playscript about the competing interests attempting to fill the leadership vacuum in an enamelled resort island suffering from one of its periodic bouts of collective political hysteria. Such a work might have been titled . And the resulting scenario would probably be not dissimilar to what is taking place in Bermuda today. The signature elements of this admittedly unlikely literary troika are all in place. There's Coward's cracked and blistered veneer of sophistication along with an increasingly pauperised local gentry that has lost its political influence, economic power and moral bearings ? everything, in fact, except for its epic pretensions and unyielding delusions; an array of Brechtian string-pullers, power brokers and paymasters in the forms of newly-minted off-shore business magnates who believe themselves to be manipulating the increasingly rococo activities of their Bermudian political and civic marionettes but who have far less control over their wilful puppets than they would ever care to admit. And finally, of course, there is Chandler's of entrenched corruption with Bermuda's political and civic luminaries concealing private agendas ? and vices ? behind the blindingly whited sepulchres of public institutions.

Rank-and-file Bermudians, of course, are spectators rather than participants in this absurdist spectacular, one that has transformed Bermuda into a 20-square-mile theatre-in-the-round in recent months.

While this island's public life often combines elements of tragedy and the farcically comic, the bizarre phantasmagoria that has been ongoing since the General Election is an unprecedentedly epic addition to the usual programme.

It would be entertaining in a perverse way if it did not impact directly on Bermudians' lives.

A palace coup topples a Premier who, despite her manifest shortcomings in the warmth, fuzziness and credibility departments, led the Progressive Labour Party to unprecedented back-to-back election victories; this is followed in very short order by a perhaps not unrelated Cabinet decision to reverse an earlier decision blocking the sale of the Bank of Bermuda; there is to be a concomitant loss of hundreds of white-collar Bermudian jobs at the bank, a development that goes entirely unremarked on by a Cabinet that is simultaneously setting the stage for Independence on the manufactured pretext that a non-Bermudian was appointed Chief Justice; the decision to pursue "cultural relations" with Cuba, a Stalinist enclave where such indispensable prerequisites of culture as freedom of thought and expression are punishable by 30-year terms of imprisonment; an increasingly belligerent Tourism Minister whose razor-wired persona continues to shred arrival figures, the morale of her own civil servants and common sense given the inexplicably generous terms of the Stonington Beach Hotel management contract, the loss of the Carnival fleet at the West End and the Hardell airport fiasco, an example of private vendettas being pursued under the guise of public policy ? a petulant exercise in score-settling that could cost the taxpayer as much as $4 million.

there's an Opposition seemingly stricken with hysterical blindness and muteness following the shock of losing a General Election it convinced itself was already won long before July 24, a relative handful of its MPs choosing to exercise their mandate to represent the interests of that half of the electorate who did cast ballots for the UBP in what was in fact a photo-finish election in terms of the popular vote; then Sir John Swan, following on from an intelligent critique of the United Bermuda Party's bloodless and passionless election campaign, abruptly exercised a type of political Sampson Option entombing not only the party he led for 13 years but much of his own legacy at the same time (still one of the canniest of Bermuda's political operators, Sir John may well be positioning himself to be a leader in waiting after damning the collective efforts of his successors at the UBP helm and further demoralising the party's already exhausted Other Ranks).

Entering into what will likely prove to be a brief alliance of convenience with the current Premier, Sir John made clear his belief that Independence will be the centrepiece of a second PLP Government term ? and effectively challenged the UBP to adapt to this perceived reality or face becoming obsolete.

Effectively, the former Premier has attempted to transform what until now has been a straight-armed Government initiative into a political pincer movement that will encircle the electorate on both sides. The possibility of Independence, Sir John anticipates, will become an inevitability. Voters will be left to choose at the next General Election between either the PLP or the UBP ushering in Bermudian sovereignty ? not whether or not they actually want Independence on its own merits.

Sir John, whose genuine commitment to Independence cannot be gainsaid, clearly has the pursuit of his own political agenda and ambitions in mind. Either consciously or unconsciously he is thinking in terms of orchestrating a Swan restoration at the UBP (or the installation of a hand-picked successor) and the belated completion of what he believes to be the most important unfinished business of his 13-year term.

Sir John clearly shares the current Premier's decision to make Independence the overriding strategic objective on the Bermudian public agenda but not his reasons doing so. Alex Scott's motives in ringing up the curtain on a rancorous and contrived Independence campaign are very different.

The reality is that Britain has had a clear and unambiguous exit strategy for Bermuda in place for more than 30 years now, one that will allow the island to abandon its Overseas Territory status for what could very loosely be termed nationhood given this is the demonstrable will of a clear majority of the public. The British have not actively pursued empire-building for more than a century; the handful of remaining colonies are embarrassing distractions to London. Britain would be delighted to grant Bermuda its Independence ? if that is what Bermuda wants ? and fly out a minor member of royalty to take the salute as the Union Jack is run down a Bermudian flagpole for the last time. The mechanism for a referendum on the issue has long been in place and was first used nine years ago.

The problem is that now ? as in 1995 ? there is no clear groundswell of support among Bermudians for Independence. Therefore a rationale has to be manufactured, invented if you will, to encourage Bermudians to believe there is a clear need to stampede towards sovereignty.

The current Premier's reasoning is probably threefold.

, he believes such an initiative will reinvigorate a PLP voting bloc that came perilously close to abandoning the party after a single term on the Government benches, the contrived hysteria over the Chief Justice a classic bait-and-switch ploy designed to demonise the British and create what he hopes will be unstoppable momentum for Independence. Secondly, such a campaign could well solidify the position of this Premier without a mandate, forcing his rivals in the party to temporarily suspend their factional in-fighting as the PLP pursues what has long been heralded as its ultimate objective. Third, and probably most importantly of all, the whiz-bang emotional fireworks attached to a full-throttled Independence initiative could well distract from scandals involving Cabinet-level graft and fiscal malfeasance, further camouflaging the fact that accountability in Bermuda's Government has long since been replaced by deniability ? plausible and otherwise ? in any number of key areas Karl Marx, a far better phrase-maker than he was economist, once said history plays itself out twice ? the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce.

Since the failed 1995 Independence campaign was itself a more comic than dramatic enterprise, this second push will likely result in a comedy of errors that might well have taxed even Noel Coward's prodigious powers of invention.