‘Tonight at 8.30’ is a cycle of ten one-act plays by Noël Coward. It was first staged in London in 1936 with Coward himself and Gertrude Lawrence in the leading roles.

The plays are mostly comedies but three – ‘The Astonished Heart’, ‘Shadow Play’ and ‘Still Life’ – are serious. Four of the comedies include songs, with words and music by Coward.

One play, ‘Star Chamber’, was dropped after a single performance. The other nine plays were presented in three programmes of three plays each. There have been numerous revivals of many of the individual plays, but revivals of the complete cycle have been much less frequent. Several of the plays have been adapted for the cinema and television.

Background

In the late 1920s and early 1930s, Coward wrote a succession of hits, ranging from the intimate comedies ‘Private Lives’ (in which Coward also starred alongside Gertrude Lawrence) and ‘Design for Living’, to the operetta ‘Bitter Sweet’ (1929) and the historical extravaganza ‘Cavalcade’ (1931).

After performing in ‘Private Lives’, Coward felt that the public enjoyed seeing him and Lawrence together on stage, and so he wrote the play cycle ‘Tonight at 8.30’ expressly as ‘acting, singing, and dancing vehicles for Gertrude Lawrence and myself’. But he also had the conscious motive of reviving the moribund form of the one-act play. As he wrote in the Preface to the printed plays:

A short play, having a great advantage over a long one in that it can sustain a mood without technical creaking or over padding, deserves a better fate, and if, by careful writing, acting and producing I can do a little towards reinstating it in its rightful pride, I shall have achieved one of my more sentimental ambitions.

Ten plays

The cycle consists of ten plays. In order of first production they are:

1. We Were Dancing: A comedy in two scenes
2. The Astonished Heart: A play in six scenes
3. Red Peppers: An interlude with music
4. Hands Across the Sea: A light comedy in one scene
5. Fumed Oak: An unpleasant comedy in two scenes
6. Shadow Play: A play with music
7. Family Album: A Victorian comedy with music
8. Star Chamber: A light comedy in one act
9. Ways and Means: A comedy in three scenes
10. Still Life: A play in five scenes

This blog post summarises and comments on numbers 7, 8, 9 and 10.

7. Family Album: A Victorian comedy with music

It is the evening of an autumn day in 1860. The entire 20-page play takes place in the same setting, the drawing room of a house in Kent belonging to the Featherways family. The play depicts this prosperous middle-class Victorian family, all wearing mourning and gathered after the funeral of their father. The group comprises his five children (in bold) and their spouses, if they have them:

• Jasper Featherways, the facile flippant one, played by Coward
• Jane, married to Jasper
• Harriet Featherways now married to…
• Charles Winter
• Emily Featherways, now married to…
• Edward Valance
• Richard Featherways, unmarried
• Lavinia Featherways, unmarried

They reminisce and call for madeira wine to drink a toast in. This is brought in by the ancient butler, Burrow, who is very hard of hearing which leads to utterly predictable and very enjoyable misunderstandings.

Jasper takes the lead in proposing toasts and is given a stream of comic and flippant remarks throughout. Lavinia is the most stern and Victorian of them all, strongly objecting to drinking after a funeral, and to many of the jokes and flippant remarks – ‘This is so wrong, so dreadfully wrong.’ As he proposes the toasts, Jasper breaks into song, the first of four songs in the piece:

• The Toast

At which point Jasper suggests it’s time to get the big old family trunk down from the attic. Jasper asks Burrows to fetch the box, to which Burrows comically replies that, yes, he’s wound them all up, to which Jasper says significantly louder, The box not the clocks.

So Jasper and Richard go up into the attic and fetch down a bog old dusty box. But when he goes to unlock it, discovers it’s already open and then realises it’s an old box full of their toys and dressing-up costumes. The Featherways offspring get these all out and start playing an old favourite game of theirs, Princes and Princesses which, again, triggers a song, ‘Princes and Princesses’, which I can’t find on the internet.

Incidentally, they have all continued drinking the madeira very liberally and have now finished the first bottle so ring for Burrows to bring another one which they pour out with gusto. This strikes me as not very 1860s behaviour, much more the drunken behaviour of Leo and Otto in ‘Design for Living’ or Elyot and Amanda in ‘Private Lives’.

They drink a toast to Burrows, who was so sweet and kind to them when they were all children. Any the next thing they find in the old trunk is a musical box which they wind up and which, of course, provides music for more songs, which they sing, amid more drinking. Here’s a medley of two of the songs, ‘Hearts and Flowers’ and ‘Music Box’.

• Hearts And Flowers/Music Box

The others are continuing uttering pious sentiments about their dead father when Lavinia amazes them and the audience by declaring she hated him.

LAVINIA: I hated Papa, so did you … He was cruel to Mama, he was unkind to us, he was profligate and pompous and worse still, he was mean.

Worst of all, he kept her at home as if imprisoned in the dark old Victorian home, counting his bills and sorting his linen and putting up with his silence or his insults. She hated him and she’s glad he’s dead.

(All this resonated with me much more since I read Virginia Woolf’s searing feminist polemic Three Guineas which, among other things, gives a horrible sense of how the Victorian home was a prison and a tomb for countless million unmarried middle class women, a plight dramatised by the case of Eleanor Pargiter in her novel, The Years.)

She then astonishes the others by telling them that the will read out to them that morning, the one which distributed family fortune equally among the five children, was not the old man’s final will. Just a week before he died he had made a new one, leaving the children nothing but dividing his fortune among his three mistresses and the rest to pay for a new church containing a grandiose memorial to himself in black marble.

This will was witnessed by Lavinia and Burrows, but now, she tells the flabbergasted family, precisely seven minutes after the old man expired, they burned it! Flabbergasted Jasper calls Burrows in to ask if all this is true but the deaf old retainer wisely and diplomatically states that his deafness is getting worse so that he will never be able to hear questions about the will.

They all realise what an excellent chap he is and invite him to join them for a (yet another) glass of madeira although it is Burrows himself who has the last toast, drinking to the whole family as, to the tune of the musical box, they dance round him hand in hand.

Comment

Immensely enjoyable because it’s one of the few Coward plays where the characters don’t spend a lot of the time shouting at each other or feeling miserable. It is wonderfully warm and happy and the plot, too, is simple but charming.

8. Star Chamber: A light comedy in one act

This is the one play in the set which was quickly dropped only being performed once. Maybe this was because it had by far the largest cast, with ten named parts.

It’s set on a West End stage around noon i.e. no question of a performance taking place. Instead one by one the ten or so characters arrive and we learn that they are all members of a ‘committee’ including its secretary. It takes a while to learn it’s the committee of the ‘Garrick Haven Fund’. The characters are:

• Jimmie Horlick, stage manager
• J. M. Farmer, secretary of the Garrick Haven Fund, amiable looking man between 30 and 40 carrying a briefcase stuffed with papers
• Hester More, a vague, absent-minded and fanciful actress, ‘vague to the point of lunacy’
• Johnny Bolton, a star comedian, middle aged, of working class origin, outlandishly dressed in ‘plus fours, a camel-hair coat, a check cap and a very bright scarf’
• Julian Breed, the leading young actor in London
• Violet Vibart, an elderly actress of considerable reputation
• Maurice Searle, an exceedingly handsome virile young actor, mortally embarrassed because he’s had to grow long hair for a film role
• Dame Rose Maitland, a grande dame of the theatre, majestic and autocratic, a vice president of the committee
• Elise Brodie, an actress, pretty and respectable, another vice president of the committee
• Xenia James, an actress, president of the Fund

I loved all these caricatures, very enjoyable. I loved Hester’s wild flights of fantasy (flights which I’ve noted running like a thread through so many of his plays), I loved the way the Johnnie character sticks out a mile because of his Cockney accent and the way he keeps trying to tell people long boring scenarios which everyone drifts off and ignores and so which are never finished.

I love the lofty way the grande dame ignores everyone and fails to hear anything she doesn’t want to. It takes a while for all these thespians to arrive and settle down and it’s funny how they’ve just agreed that, in the absence of the chair, Xenia James, Dame Rose will chair the meeting when the very same Xenia James makes a grand entrance dragged along by a vast great Dane, who she’s named after a fellow actor who passed away, Atherton.

Synopsis

Anyway, on the bare stage of a West End theatre the stage manager, Jimmie Horlick, is arranging chairs round a large table in preparation for a meeting of the committee of the Garrick Haven Fund. The committee members arrive in dribs and drabs.

First, Mr Farmer, Secretary of the Fund, briefcase packed with papers, methodical and harassed. Next Hester More, a dizzy young actress; Johnny Bolton, ‘a star comedian of middle age but perennial youthfulness’; Violet Vibart, an elderly actress of great distinction; Julian Breed, a popular juvenile lead; Maurice Searle, a character actor who has grown his hair to shoulder length for an historical role and feels self-conscious about it; the majestic Dame Rose Maitland; the preoccupied Elise Brodie; and finally, and very late, Xenia James, chairman of the committee, with her dog, Atherton.

The whole thing from start to finish is characterised by all the characters’ complete inability to concentrate, focus or obey rules. Instead the continually gossip, talk over each other, interrupt whoever else is speaking, undermine the chair and ignore Farmer’s long boring presentation.

In a nutshell, this is a meeting of the Garrick Haven fund, established in 1902 to provide a home for destitute actresses. The fund is well off, with a balance of £58,000, largely generated by the annual fun fair. Mention of this characteristically triggers all present to wander off into memories of the fair and complaints about all aspects of its management.

With difficulty, Farmer tries to quieten them down and get their attention back onto the issue the meeting’s been called for which is to give formal consent for much-needed structural alterations to the retirement house (notably an extra bathroom and inside toilet).

At this point Atherton starts farting and Xenia gets nice Mr Horlick to take him (very gingerly) off to the props room. Farmer reads a letter from the residents politely asking for the extra loo and bathroom and then proceeds to read out, at very great length, the precise and exact quote for the building works which he’s received from the builders (Messrs Joyce and Spence) and the committee has to sign off on, amounting to £3,082, 17 shillings and fourpence.

The comedy derives from the way it’s like herding cats: the actors are completely incapable of concentrating on anything without wandering off into digressions and lots of private conversations, in one instance a suggestion that the new buildings be decorated with framed posters from old play productions.

Xenia sneaks off to check on Atherton and finds her darling fast asleep and twitching as though chasing rabbits in a dream.

Farmer attempts to read out a further quote for the plumbing work but by now the actors have had it. A press photographer arrives and they are all instantly distracted by this, As Farmer drones valiantly on all the others arrange themselves with much fussing for a group photo.

The actors start to leave in ones and twos as they arrived, Julian and Maurice leaving with the photographer. Xenia makes a speech appealing for donations and promises to give £100 to set the ball rolling not having really grasped that donations are not at all needed, what was needed was attention and responsibility. Then, without formally closing the meeting, she too dashes off, forgetting her dog.

Johnny gets to his feet to second Xenia’s fine sentiments and is droning on about what a worthy cause it is, and how we may all suffer poverty one day etc but he is drowned out by the sound of the remaining thespians all saying goodbye to each other, giving air kisses, promising to meet again soon etc until he becomes utterly demoralised and gives up.

Only valiant Mr Farmer is left to Johnny, with no-one else to snare, invites him to lunch at his club and Farmer is incautious enough to accept. As they walk off he tells Jimmie to turn off the lights, thus providing a mirror of the opening of the play (lights on, enter Jimmie, then Johnny, then Farmer).

And, in a last gag, after everyone has exited the bare stage and the lights have gone off, we hear the mournful howling of the dog Atherton, locked up and abandoned in the props room.

Maybe I’m in a relaxed mood today, but I found this as entertaining and funny as Victorian Album.

9. Ways and Means: A Light Comedy in Three Scenes

We are in the South of France, on the fashionable Cote d’Azur. We are in the house of the very well-off Mrs Lloyd-Ransome. The curtain opens to reveal a bedroom and in the bed, having breakfast off a tray, are the unhappy married couple Toby and Stella Cartwright.

Briefly: he has gambled away all their money. They’re in debt to their banks and everyone they know including their hostess in this house. The dialogue mostly consists of despair at being so broke, alternately flippant / humorous and genuinely despairing.

Toby tells their Nanny (‘a capable looking, middle-aged woman’) to pawn Stella’s jewellery and the gold buttons off his waistcoat. They then go back to the casino to gamble with the cash but in the second scene we find them a few hours later, back in the bed, and utterly despairing, since they have lost everything they got from the pawnbrokers in four minutes flat. Toby had got a place at the big table and was feeling lucky when he was asked to give up his place by an American lady, Mrs Irving Brandt. Ever the gentleman, he gave up his place when a lady requested it and Mrs Irving Brandt went on to ‘run the bank’ 17 times and win 175,000 francs. When she had utterly cleaned up she graciously let Toby have the seat and he promptly lost everything.

Angry, he goes into the bathroom where he manages to bang his head on the mirror and cut himself. There’s a big song and dance while Stella tells him not to be such a baby and gets some iodine to dress the wound.

After much more fuss and flippancy and lamenting, they go to bed and put the lights out. This sets the scene for the third and final scene in which they’re awakened by a burglar. When they call out and put the lights on he pulls a gun on them. However, he’s not a very good burglar and they first demoralise him by telling him they have no money and then manage to disarm him, seize the gun and turn the tables.

When they take his mask off they discover it’s the chauffeur of posh people in their circle, a man named Stevens. Now we understand why there’d been some chat in the first scene, among their posh friends, about some scandal involving this chauffeur. He had been dismissed for having a fling with his employer (Mrs Bainbridge)’s daughter, May. Now he explains that, thus thrown out of work, he decided to try his hand at crime.

So, as in these posh comedies, as for example in P.G. Wodehouse, the posh protagonists turn out to be on good terms with their would-be burglar, and have a civilised chat and a drink. Suddenly a plan occurs to Toby. Remember the 175,000 francs won by Mrs Irving Brandt? Toby suggests Stevens sneaks down the hall and into her room and steals that 175,000 francs.

Despite Stevens’ and Stella’s initial objections, this is what he ends up doing, returning five minutes later not only with all the cash but with some diamonds he pinched as well. They secrete the money in their clothes to look like it’s theirs, then get Stevens to tie them up.

The plan is to look like he broke into their room, tied them up, burgled them, then onto Mrs Brandt, before returning to their room and escaping. So this is what he does, ties them to their chairs and finally ties gags over their mouths. Up to that point they’d been conducting a comic Wodehouse-style conversation in which they promised to help him out with his choice of a new career and he answered all their requests with yes sir, yes ma’am.

He bows politely and leaves them tied to their chairs, gagged, and laughing hysterically.

The way the whole thing is a kind of conspiracy or scam which leaves the actors hooting with laughter is identical with the end of ‘Design for Living’ where the more the outraged husband preaches old-fashioned morality, the more Leo, Otto and Gilda fall about laughing.

In one sense his plays are a kind of conspiracy by imaginative tricksters against the conventional values and morality of the older generation and the poor saps among the current generation who still believe them.

Thoughts

His fans and blurb writers endlessly praise Coward for the wit and stylishness of his writing and dialogue. The plays certainly are almost entirely about posh upper-middle-class people, and they contain much 1) posing and prancing and characters drawing attention to their own poshness with their drawling flippancy and ‘wit’. But this summary or cliché ignores two other major elements of his approach or style or schtick, which are 2) arguments and abuse and 3) flights of fantasy.

1. Wit

STELLA: You seem to forget that one a certain bleak day in 1928 I gave my life into your keeping.
TOBY: Marriage is a sacrament, a mystic rite, and you persist in regarding it as a sort of plumber’s estimate.

TOBY: You play bridge too merrily, Stella.
STELLA: My merriment is entirely a social gesture. I loathe bridge.
TOBY: That is no excuse for playing it as if it were lacrosse.

TOBY: From now onwards I intend to live in the past – the present is too unbearable. I intend to go back to the happy scenes of my boyhood.
STELLA: I’m sorry I’m not a rocking horse.
TOBY: You underrate yourself, darling.

2. Abuse

It had previously been axiomatic that a gentleman never lost his temper and was chivalrous and respectful to woman. The Coward male is neither of these things. The Coward male loses his temper all the time, every few minutes flies into a frothing spitting rage, see ‘Private Lives’ or ‘Design for Living’ or Toby, here.

The furious Coward male also doesn’t mince his words, hurling the most astonishing abuse, insults and threats at his woman. The level of hatred, cursing and threats in ‘Private Lives’ staggered me.

The couple at various moments say:

STELLA: Be quiet… Oh shut up!.. Don’t be so idiotic… Don’t be so silly… Don’t be so childish… Shut up… Toby, don’t be such a fool…

TOBY: Shut up!.. Be quiet, Stella… Don’t be an idiot Stella…

A bit more elaborately:

STELLA: You have the moral values of a warthog… You have a disgusting mind, Toby…

3. Fantasy

The really characteristic thing about Coward, I think, is when his lead characters go off on wild imaginative flights of fancy. Mad frivolous fantasies were Elyot’s distinguishing feature in ‘Private Lives’ and all three protagonists in ‘Design for Living’ cook up fantastical scenarios, and it crops up again here, as Toby in particular expresses his unhappiness in terms of far-fetched similes and scenarios.

TOBY: It is possible, in my present state of splendid detachment, that I might go off into a yogi trance and stay upside down for several days.

Or ridiculous plans:

TOBY: Let’s go quietly but firmly along the passage and murder Pearl Brandt.

Stella’s suggestion that maybe she could do a little light prostitution to earn the money they need. Or her absurd exaggeration:

STELLA: We’ll deliver ourselves over to Olive bound and gagged in the morning.

Coward’s imaginative characters are always overflowing with absurd and fantastical scenarios. It’s this, I think, the vein of fantasy which pops up, a smaller or larger ingredient of each play, much more than the alleged ‘wit’, which makes his plays so entertaining. (Cf ‘Shadow Play’ which is one big fantasy.)

10. Still Life: A play in five scenes

Executive summary

The play portrays the chance meeting at a suburban railway station, the subsequent love affair and eventual parting of a married woman, Laura Jesson, and a doctor, Alec Harvey. The sadness of their secretive affair is contrasted throughout the play with the boisterous life of the tea shop and station staff. ‘Still Life’ differs from most of the plays in the ‘Tonight at 8.30’ cycle by having an unhappy ending. It was also, of course, the basis of the 1945 film, ‘Brief Encounter’, directed by David Lean and starring Trevor Howard and Celia Johnson, which is regularly cited as one of the top ten British films of all time.

Synopsis

The five scenes are set in the same location, namely the tea room at Milford Junction railway station, which is dominated by the elaborate refreshments counter / station buffet, overseen by the strict Myrtle Bagot who bosses around her downtrodden assistant Beryl Waters, and flirts in an imperious dismissive way with Albert the ticket inspector. The action takes place in five scenes across the span of a single year, from April to March.

Scene 1 5.30 on an April afternoon. Myrtle’s character is established as she bosses around her assistant Beryl and rebuffs the attempts of Albert, the ticket-inspector, to flirt with her. Laura is waiting for her train home after shopping. She goes out onto the platform as an express races by with an enormous noise and re-enters moments later complaining of having a smut of grit in her eye. Myrtle gets some water and Albert offers advice but it’s the handsome young Alec introduces himself as a doctor and uses his hankie to remove it for her. She thanks him and goes to catch her train, he goes back to his cup of tea.

Scene 2 Three months later, in July. The ‘rude mechanicals’ i.e. the working class characters provide a foil or backdrop for the main love story. (The phrase ‘rude mechanical’ comes from Shakespeare’s ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream’ where it refers to the working class artisans who have their own farcical love story which parallels the love story of the main protagonists who are lords and ladies. Three hundred and forty years later Coward is still using much the same device.)

And so the scene opens with Myrtle telling Beryl about a fortune teller who told her love life accurately before Albert breezes in wanting tea and cakes for some travellers on the platform. Against this bright and breezy background, enter Alec and Lara together. He buys two teas and two bath buns.

It becomes clear that after their first meeting they encountered each other a second time by chance and like each other’s company and have had lunch and gone to the pictures together. He took an afternoon off work. Now he’s praising her as ‘awfully nice’, but she feels guilty. When she was a girl living in Cornwall, she and her sister used to sneak out the house at night to go swim in the sea but always felt guilty. Now she feels the same. She’s ‘a respectable married woman with a husband and a home and three children.’

They ask each other to describe their spouses, as people having affairs often do, out of guilt and also to make it seem more homely, more real. She gets him to talk about his work and he explains his passionate interest in preventive medicine, and then goes into more detail about his interest in lung diseases. She sits entranced until it’s time for his train. Suddenly he wants more than to bump into each other by accident but begs that she’ll meet him the following Thursday, in a week’s time, and after initial reluctance, as he takes his hand and prepares to run for his train, she agrees.

Scene 3 Another three months have passed so it’s October. As usual the scene opens with the proles, Albert and Myrtle, flirting. They seem to have reached a new level of intimacy, as he asks her for a kiss over the counter and, on entering, slaps her behind as she’s bent over. She scolds him but permits it. In his tussle to get a kiss they know some cakes on the floor and are picking them up when Alec and Laura come in.

As usual, Alec buys two teas and takes them to their usual table. From their conversation it becomes clear that they have seen a good deal more of each other and have fallen in love. He accepts it and wants her to but Laura is fighting against it, says it’s wrong, ‘dreadfully wrong’. He wants to arrange an afternoon at a friend, Stephen’s, house, presumably to have sex. She, of course, thinks it’s horrible and squalid and will be spoiled by the fear hanging over them. He tells her they’ve both been in love before but neither of them have known this ‘something lovely and strange and desperately difficult’ and, as usual, when she listens to him she is entranced.

As with so many of these Coward plays it’s a question of hermeneutics, of clashing and competing interpretations. They both feel a tremendous attraction to each other but whereas Alec argues strongly for giving into it, Laura bridles and argues against it. She vividly describes going home after their Thursday meetings, and feeling adrift and alien in her house, weirdly detached from all the humdrum objects of her normal domestic life. He becomes more ardent and passionate, holding her hand, saying how he counts the hours till Thursday comes round again.

This intense conversation is completely overshadowed by two loud soldiers entering the room and asking Myrtle for some alcohol. She can’t serve it because it’s out of hours and this develops into an extended argument with them making all kinds of reasons why they need a nice drop, why can’t she put it in the tea etc, while she absolutely refuses to break the law. Eventually she tells Beryl to fetch Norman who takes charge of the situation and tells the two squaddies to ‘op it, before saying he has to return to his gate. Myrtle asks Beryl to get her a glass of brandy for her nerves and tells Beryl that Norman Godby may be on the short side ‘but ‘e’s a gentleman.’

After this extended interruption we return to Alec and Laura at their table. He delivers a speech about how they have to be strong enough to live up to their love, ‘clean and untouched’ by other people’s knowledge, ‘something of our own forever’.

He scribbles the address of his colleague’s flat on a piece of paper for her, says he’s going to miss his train and go to the flat and he’ll be waiting for her and leaves. Laura stares at the paper, then we hear a train steaming in and Myrtle comments on the time, making it quite clear that it’s Laura’s train. Laura gets up, goes to the platform door, pauses, the whistle blows and the train starts to puff out, while she slowly exits the tea room.

I.e. she is going to keep her rendezvous with Alec at his friend’s flat. Presumably to have sex and thereby break her fidelity to her husband, and also the law.

Scene 4 It’s December. As usual the scene opens with comic business among the working classes. If tea room boss Myrtle is carrying on with Norman the ticket collector, Beryl is continuing to be wooed by the man who carries a tray of refreshments round the platforms, Stanley. He asks if he can walk Beryl home, asks her to lock up early, so they can have an extra five minutes, presumably for snogging. Thus the mating game, played at every level of society. In all three relationships, it’s the men who are constantly pushing for more, and the women who, in their various ways, are reluctant or refuse. Is that true of ‘real life’? Or just the convention of the time, and of many times, but not of our modern liberated age?

Laura comes in looking pale and anxious, asks for a brandy, and a pen and paper, which Beryl reluctantly gives her, then sits down to write – presumably an important message to Alec – but breaks down in tears and then Alec comes in anyway. We quickly learn that they were together (presumably for the umpteenth time) at this friend of Alec’s flat, when he came home unexpectedly early and caught them. At least, Alec darted out to chat to the fellow while Laura had to get dressed in a hurry and nip out the back, feeling like a prostitute. She bets they chatted and had a good laugh about her, like men of the world.

He apologises then we get to the heart of the matter, the clash of worldviews or values. Because Alec claims that nothing else matters except their love, except their knowledge that they love each other. But Laura says that other things matter too, such as self respect and decency. So he is the voice of unbridled passion, she, as so often, embodies the weight of social convention, conventional morality etc.

Alec walks over and faces a picture on the wall because he can’t face her as he agrees that this thing will have to end: not their love, he will go on loving her to the end of his life; but their being together. He returns to the table and tells her he is going away. He’s been offered a post at a hospital in Johannesburg, South Africa. It’s a golden opportunity. He’s been agonising for weeks but now he can see this thing is ending and so… Should he go or should he turn it down? This, of course, is cruel of him, handing the whole responsibility of ending the affair to her, specially as she’s shown how vulnerable and conflicted she is. Of course she tells him to go.

He asks her to meet him one last time. Not at the flat, that’s now out of bounds, but at a café in town and they’ll go for a drive in the country. His train chuffs in and he has to go. He apologises for ever meeting her, falling in love with her, for causing her so much misery and she apologises back.

Even this scene, obviously designed to be heart-wringing, is interwoven with comedy from the proles because, before the moments, Alec has to bribe stroppy surly Beryl not to close the café at 10pm as she ought to do, but leave it open for just a few minutes more, so that he can have these final words with Laura.

In other words, this device, of paralleling the main love affair with the shenanigans of the rude mechanicals does a number of things: it provides comic relief for the high emotion of the central couple; but it also sets off and heightens their emotional moments; and it creates a vivid sense of the pressure and constraints under which an affair is carried out. The mechanicals are emblematic not only of society’s moral constraints but of the busyness of life, all the timetables of work and spouses and children and responsibilities and duties which any affair has to find time amid, stolen moments, always limited, which eventually come to seem sordid and sneaky, and make the protagonists, like Laura, feel cheap and miserable.

Scene 5 The fifth and final scene is set in March. Albert is more cocky and confident with Myrtle and sends Beryl into the back room ready to steal a kiss, when Alec and Laura enter. It’s a lovely touch that the station staff have, of course, noticed their romantic trysts, and have taken to calling them Romeo and Juliet. To ourselves, in our own minds, we live intense and tragic lives. To other people, we barely register or only as comic figures of fun.

Obviously this is the last scene between Alec and Laura and meant to be intensely moving but it is typical of the play that almost half of it is taken up with a great palaver among the proles. Mildred, who keeps the newspaper and bookstall comes running in to bring the message that Beryl’s mum’s been taken ill again and they’ve rushed her off to hospital. This leads to a cascade of consequences as Beryl is told, gets in a fret, Myrtle says she’d better go to the hospital straightaway, Mildred better go with her for moral support, she (Myrtle) will stay till locking up time (10pm). Which irritates Albert because he’d bought them tickets to see a show, Broadway Melody of 1936, and he slams his teacup down in exasperation.

Only after this extended palaver do we get to Alec and Laura. This is the last time they’ll meet before he leaves for South Africa and she has come to see him off. He asks if he may write but she says no, better not.

He tells her he loves her with all his heart and she quietly whispers that she wants to die. God. Tortured illicit love.

It is their last few minutes together and they are utterly ruined by the entrance of a friend of Laura’s, the fussy and talkative Dolly, who is overjoyed to bump into her old friend, joins them at their table, and sets about telling her all about her day’s doings, while Laura and Alec can only stare into each other’s eyes.

With the result that their last few minutes together before his train arrives are completely swamped and their goodbye is cruelly limited to a formal handshake. And so Alec goes out while Laura remains, trapped listening to prattling Dolly, who now whitters on about a couple they know who are getting divorced because he had a mistress up in town, the wife spotted it then it all came out etc.

You can imagine how this is daggers to the heart of Laura who has always been more conscious of how society sees these things i.e. crudely, dismissively, heartlessly.

They all hear the express through train approaching and Dolly goes to the counter to buy some chocolate for her son, when Laura suddenly snaps and rushes out onto the platform. Dolly turns and notices her missing and Myrtle says she didn’t see her go.

For a moment there is the strong implication that Laura has run out onto the platform to kill herself by throwing herself in front of the train. For a minute. But then the café door opens and she comes back in, looking ‘very white and shaky’.

Solid practical Dolly asks if she’s alright and when Laura says she feels a bit sick, persuades Myrtle to pour some brandy for Laura (tenpence). They hear the sound of their train, the stopping suburban train coming, Dolly gathers up her parcels and accompanies Laura out as the curtain falls. Masterpiece.

Brief Encounter

Various of the plays were adapted for TV or cinema. Coward himself adapted ‘Still Life’ for the screen as ‘Brief Encounter’, one of the most famous British films of all time.

Related links

• Family Album Wikipedia article
• Star Chamber Wikipedia article
• Ways and Means Wikipedia article
• Still Life Wikipedia article
• Noel Coward works

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