‘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, although I rather liked it. 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 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:
- We Were Dancing: A comedy in two scenes
- The Astonished Heart: A play in six scenes
- Red Peppers: An interlude with music
- Hands Across the Sea – A light comedy in one scene
- Fumed Oak – An unpleasant comedy in two scenes
- Shadow Play – A play with music
- Family Album – A Victorian comedy with music
- Star Chamber – A light comedy in one act
- Ways and Means: A comedy in three scenes
- Still Life – A play in five scenes
This blog post summarises and comments on numbers 4, 5 and 6.
4. Hands Across the Sea: A light comedy in one scene
Maureen ‘Piggie’ Gilpin, wife of Commander Peter Gilpin, RN, is a society hostess who is notoriously forgetful and slapdash, living in a chaotic social whirl, continually inviting people dinner, tea and parties, then forgetting about them.
When Piggie is out of the room, her and Peter’s maid, Walters, takes a phone call that the Rawlinsons are in town and, having hosted Piggie and a friend out in the Pacific, on the (fictional) island of Samolo, are taking up the invitation she made then to look them up if they’re ever in London. Moments later Piggie returns, sees the message and panics, feeling obliged to lay on a good show for the Rawlinsons. So she sets about a series of panicky phone calls to friends to try and persuade them to come round and help her entertain the Rawlingsons. She prevails on Peter to persuade a naval colleague (Major Gosling) to take the Rawlinsons on a tour of the naval dockyard at Portsmouth during their stay.
Piggie and Peter dash out to change to receive guests and Walters ushers in Mr and Mrs Wadhurst, a couple whom Piggie and Maud met in Malaya. As with the Rawlingsons, Piggie has invited them to tea and then forgotten about the appointment. Another visitor is shown in: Mr Burnham, a young employee of a company that is designing a speed boat for Peter. He and the Wadhursts make polite, slightly stiff conversation. While they wait for the Gilpins to appear, Clare Wedderburn and Bogey Gosling, close friends of the Gilpins, arrive. Clare and Bogey make themselves loudly at home and liberally hand round cocktails.
Piggie enters, greets her old friends and welcomes the Wadhursts, whom she mistakes for the Rawlingsons. Conversation is continually interrupted by the telephone on which Piggie and later Peter and Clare are called to talk to other friends, which they do uninhibitedly, to the confusion of the Wadhursts. At one point, Burnham rises and tries to give Peter a long roll of cardboard, but is thwarted when Peter is again called to the telephone. The conversation is interrupted again when Piggie takes a call from Mrs Rawlingson, who apologises that she and her husband cannot come after all. Piggie, realising her error, tries to discover tactfully who the Wadhursts actually are. Just as they are about to leave to go to the theatre, Mrs Wadhurst mentions Pendarla, where she and Wadhurst live. This finally jogs Piggie’s memory, and she bids them an effusive farewell, inviting them to dine one evening and go to the theatre. She and the Wadhursts leave the room.
Clare, like Piggie, has assumed that Burnham is the Wadhursts’ son. She is puzzled when he does not leave with them. He explains who he is, and that he has brought the designs for Peter’s new boat. Piggie, meanwhile, takes another telephone call and apologises to her caller for forgetting their engagement that afternoon. As Burnham creeps out, she, still unaware that he is not the Wadhursts’ son, bids him goodbye: “It’s been absolutely lovely, you’re the sweetest family I’ve ever met in my life.”
There’s a mild bit of biographical interest in that Peter and Piggie were widely recognised as caricatures of Coward’s friends Lord Louis Mountbatten and his wife Edwina. Coward is quoted as saying the couple ‘used to give cocktail parties and people used to arrive that nobody had ever heard of and sit about and go away again; somebody Dickie had met somewhere, or somebody Edwina had met – and nobody knew who they were. We all talked among ourselves, and it was really a very very good basis for a light comedy.’
Light is the word. This doesn’t read at all funny. The trick must be in the performance and, in particular, the brio and comic timing of the actress playing Piggie.
In a reading the most convincing character is the telephone, which doesn’t stop ringing, or which Piggie is never off.
5. Fumed Oak: An unpleasant comedy in two scenes
Another play based around bitter arguments, but in an unusual setting for Coward i.e. not the posh pukka upper middle classes in Mayfair (‘Hands Across The Sea’) but a pinched and narrow, lower middle class household in Clapham.
It opens with a grim portrait of breakfast time with three generations of women – Mrs Rockett, her daughter Mrs Doris Gow, and her daughter, Elsie, all arguing, dominated by narrow-minded Doris, ‘mean and cold and respectable’, bossing and nagging everyone:
DORIS: Never you mind… Get on with your breakfast… Stop sniffling… Don’t start that again… You’ll do no such thing… Do as I tell you… I wish you’d be quiet…Don’t untidy everything… Oh do shut up mother…
Doris tells her daughter, Elsie, she can’t put her hair up like a friend at school. Tells her she can’t have an extra slice of toast. When her mother gives Elsie twopence to buy a bit of cake they argue about that. Mrs Rockett complains about the gurgling of the pipes in her bedroom, complains about the baby next door who cries and wails at the slightest provocation. When the daughter finally leaves, Mrs Rockett complains about Doris’s husband, Elsie’s father, Henry, getting home late and banging about the place keeping her awake. When Doris says at least he’s not a drunk like her father, Mrs Rockett’s deceased husband, was, they flare up into a real argument.
The point is that throughout most of this, Doris’s husband, meek Henry, has been sitting silently eating his breakfast, not saying a word. How could he get a word in edgeways and what would be the point? Mrs Rockett complaining about him getting home late is done after he’s left the room to dress for work. He re-enters, interrupts another flaring row between mother and daughter, then quietly exists. End of scene 1.
The second and final scene is in the same setting but 7.30 that evening. Henry’s come home late from work again, to find cold ham for supper and Doris and Elsie dressed up to go to the cinema.
He’s had a couple of drinks (whiskey and soda) on the way home and is going to give Doris a piece of his mind. He tells her her hat looks awful. He says he’s celebrating the first time they had sex. Doris is shocked and tells Elsie to go upstairs but Henry insists she stays. Remember how I’ve noticed that Coward plays are all about control, about who controls the narrative, about clashes of interpretation.
DORIS: Go upstairs Elsie.
HENRY: Stay here, Elsie.
DORIS: Do as I tell you.
Henry angrily tells Doris to stop nagging him, and explains that he works hard all day to earn the money that keeps them all but all he gets is endless nagging and cold dinner, and to demonstrate his anger he throws the plate of food onto the carpet, and then the butter dish, to Doris’s horror.
When Doris tries to exit Henry nips to the door and locks it. he orders Elsie, who’s crying by now, to bring out the bottle of port and pour him one. More nakedly than usual, this Coward play is about giving orders. Everything is in the imperative mood i.e. a command.
HENRY: Stop working yourself up into a state…
DORIS: Look here…
HENRY: Sit down…
DORIS: Elsie, come with me..
HENRY: You’ll stay where you are…
DORIS: Keep away…
HENRY: Drink it…
When Mrs Rockett darts to the window and opens it as if to escape, Henry grabs her, she starts screaming for the police, he drags her away, lightly smacks her and locks the window as she faints against the piano. As you can imagine the womenfolk are all in tears by this time.
And then it’s simple: Henry announces that he’s had enough and is leaving. He reminds her that sixteen years ago they had sex in her parents’ house which was empty for the night, how she’d set her cap at him months before, how she was anxious to get married seeing as her two older sisters were married, how a few months later she lied and told Henry she was pregnant and so how he chucked in all his plans to become a steward and see the world and took up a crappy job at Ferguson’s Hosiery and has been a wage slave ever since.
Now he announces that he’s leaving, for good. He’s been salting away a little of his pay every year and now has £572 saved up. He’s giving her £50 and the freehold of the house, so she’ll have a roof over head and can make money by taking in lodgers (‘though God help the poor bastards if you do’). And now he’s leaving. He’s got his ship’s ticket and a passport in a new name in his pocket.
Henry has a page-long speech fantasising about what life will be like in the South Seas or New Zealand or Australia, and rhapsodically describing the warm seas with their typhoons and flying fish not the cold little waves at Worthing. After subjugating himself to this cold bitch Doris for 15 long years he’s going to break free and live a little. Think of Elsie, says Doris. Why, replies Henry, Elsie’s awful, a horrible selfish snivelling little kid. She’ll be able to earn her keep in a year.
And he throws down the envelope with the £50, delivers a final speech and leaves. Arguably the main thrust of the speech is that they’re not the only family like this, but there are millions like them, living in very English misery.
HENRY: Three generations. Grandmother, Mother and Kid. Made of the same bones and sinews and muscles and glands, millions of you, millions just like you.
After a few final barbs, he leaves them for good with a cheery: ‘Good-bye one and all! Nice to have known you’ slamming the door behind him.
Slamming
This isn’t the only pointedly slammed door in Coward.
- Hay Fever: towards the end of the play, the ignored guests of the Bliss family slam the door after they’ve sneaked out
- Design for Living: at the finale of the play, outraged Ernest slams the door shut as he leaves the three protagonists collapsing in giggles
Fumed oak
The title ‘Fumed Oak’ refers to a wood finishing process that treats the oak with ammonia fumes to darken it and emphasise its rough grain. The finish is matt and dull rather than glossy. I assume this style of wood is associated with the dark heavy ‘respectable’ furniture associated with the kind of narrow, shabby-genteel, lower middle-class household Coward is portraying.
But it is maybe also a metaphorical reference to Henry, the idea that he is the good old English oak which has been subjected to 15 years of the ammonia of the horrible women in his life, ammonia being a sour poisonous gas, who have ‘fumed’ him i.e. made him dull and dark and ‘respectable’ and nearly killed him in the process.
6. Shadow Play: A musical fantasy
Executive summary
‘Shadow Play’ depicts a husband and wife, Simon and Victoria ‘Vicky’ Gayforth, whose marriage is on the brink of collapse. Under the influence of an unwisely large dose of sleeping pills, the wife has a dream that retells their story in hallucinatory form. Musical intervals weave in and out of the dream. The husband is so concerned for his wife’s condition that his love is rekindled, and when she comes round they are reconciled.
Synopsis
It’s about midnight in the Gayforths’ flat in Mayfair, to be precise, the setting is Vicky’s bedroom.
Enter Vicky and her friend, Martha Cunningham. They’ve been to the theatre together but Vicky refuses to accompany Martha to ‘Alice’s party’ because she knows her husband will be there making up to Sybil Heston who she thinks he’s having an affair with. She asks the maid for three sleeping pills, which Martha thinks excessive. While Vicky’s in the adjoining bathroom, the phone rings and Martha answers it. It’s Michael who is clearly an admirer of Vicky’s first in line to replace Simon if the couple split up. Vicky re-enters and takes the phone and tells Michael she can’t come out, she’s taken sleeping pills and is about ‘to go into a coma’.
As usual, there’s lots of characteristic Coward bossiness, and the usual conflict about who gets to talk, with characters telling each other to shut up.
VICKY: Don’t be idiotic… Be quiet, darling… Will you kindly shut up… Stop it, I tell you…
Which gives way to what I’ve noticed is the characters’ tendency to give in to futility, at some point wondering what the bloody point is:
VICKY: What does it matter…?
Unexpectedly Simon enters and after a little banter, Martha leaves the unhappy couple alone. from the get-go they have displayed the characteristic Coward mode of arguing and bickering.
VICKY: Are going to bicker? There’s nothing like a nice bicker to round off a jolly evening.
Simon has not gone to the party because he wants to have a serious talk, despite all Vicky’s frivolous attempts to deflect the subject. He wants her to divorce him. She asks distracting questions about the details: should she cite Sibyl as correspondent, will he go to the South of France or just Brighton (in those days, in order to get a divorce one of the party had to be found guilty of adultery, and often hired a stooge of the opposite sex and checked into a hotel in Brighton, and made sure all this was witnessed by a private detective who then gave evidence at the divorce proceedings – the partner they spent the night with was hired as a freelance and no sex was involved, it was purely a performance for the courts).
Vicky asks whether he really loves Sibyl and he refuses to answer but as their conversation continues the effects of the three sleeping pills start to kick in and they both… start to hear music! And Simon bursts into song and Vicky joins him, and they launch into ‘Then’. Here are Coward and Lawrence speaking the dialogue which leads into the song, a bit more dialogue, and then the play’s main song ‘Play, Orchestra, Play’:
So, presumably we are in her consciousness as she drifts into a drugged state, or it is just a stage fantasia beyond explaining, but the set disappears, spotlights come up, a dresser brings them evening dress and they burst into song. In some way they are going back to and reviving the initial happiness they felt at the start of their relationship and Simon delivers a variation on the carpe diem trope which we’ve seen echoing through Coward’s play:
SIMON: Don’t be such a fool – grab it while you can – grab every scrap of happiness while you can.
The scenery has disappeared, there are just spotlights on an apparently empty stage and on this appear the three figures, Simon, Sibyl and Michael. First Sibyl is egging Simon on to tell the truth about them. Then Michael enters and tells Simon to hurry up and leave Vicky so she can be his, but this is all clearly a hallucination because Sibyl starts repeating word for word a speech Vicky made earlier, when she asked Simon what made him fall out of love with her, was it a dress she wore, or did she become dull etc, and all this leads into a reprise of ‘Play, Orchestra Play’.
Cut to a scene in a moonlit garden where Vicky is sitting with a young man who’s awfully keen on her but their dialogue is dreamlike in that he repeats her phrases, out of synch and muddled up, while she claims to be waiting for someone, and then Simon enters through trees.
Now they re-enact their first meeting when they made pleasant conversation and fell in love, except that they are aware it is a re-enactment with Vicky scolding Simon for forgetting his lines or skipping important bits. Simon tells her to stick to the script but Vicky delivers a line which could be a kind of motto, applied to lots of Coward’s work.
VICKY: Small talk – a lot of small talk with quite different thoughts going on behind it.
They banter about gardens (because they’re in a garden; maybe this really was the setting of their first meeting), then break into another song, ‘You Were There’:
At the end of which a spotlight reveals the servant, Lena, entering with a glass of water and the tablets and reprising the last lines from ‘Then’ which describe the pair having to face the future apart and alone.
Fade out and then lights up on a new scene, Vicky’s friend Martha with her husband George Cunningham in the back of a limousine. He’s complaining about the tense evening they just spent with the Gayforths.
GEORGE: The atmosphere reeked with conjugal infelicity…
Which could also be extracted and made into the motto of so many of his plays. Anyway George asks why the Gayforths are so unhappy so Martha explains that Simon is falling in love with Sibyl Heston – to which George bluntly says that such women should be shot – while Vicky is mildly encouraging Michael Doyle to woo her, though she isn’t serious.
This appears ‘realistic’ until Vicky runs onstage and tells them they’re ruining everything. So is this in her drug-fuelled dream or not? Simon appears and behaves as if they’re in a railway carriage and tells them they’ve reserved this compartment and mimes helping them get their luggage down from the overhead rack. The train is heading to Venice. Vicky explains that they’re on their honeymoon and Martha repeats the carpe diem theme:
MARTHA: Grab every scrap of happiness while you can.
The train compartment turns into a tax and Simon and Vicky are in it after their wedding, excited and recalling the events such as her mother’s terrible hat and his uncle slapping him on the back but their conversation keeps referencing rhymes from the play they saw that evening, or words from earlier scenes such as someone dressed in pink, and Simon keeps warning her she’s about to wake up again, for some reason she must go, and steps out of the car/compartment, leaving Simon alone and he reprises singing ‘You Were There’.
Cut to the pair sitting at a little table, on their honeymoon in Venice. The conversation is even more mixed up with Simon saying he wants to tell her something (as he did at the start, when he told her he wanted a divorce) but as she trembles with dear, he instead declares that he loves her. Fantastical mixed references:
VICKY: You mustn’t make people cry on their honeymoon, it’s not cricket.
SIMON: Dearest, everything’s cricket if you only have faith.
They spin into repeating the words of ‘You Were There’ before Vicky shakes herself free and asks him to repeat his big love speech, which is really a warning that they can’t stay in their love bubble forever, other people will come along and spoil things because people are like that, everyone following their own agenda, but he tells her to hang on to memories of this moment of complete togetherness, like the White Cliffs of Dover.
The lights fade, music plays and Sibyl and Michael dance onto the stage, representing those ‘other people’ who come between couples. Vicky and Simon rise and dance together then they all swap partners as the music gets faster and they call out the names of fashionable nightclubs, representing the fashionable world, London high society, which comes between the pair.
Onto the stage at opposite sides come Lena and Martha each holding phones. Lena is phoning Martha and asking if she can leave the party and come at once back to Vicky’s house, she’s ill, something’s wrong, it was that extra sleeping pill.
In the darkness Vicky’s voice, confused, as she tells Simon she’s trying to hold onto the White Cliffs of Dover, while Simon’s voice reprises his speech from the start, where he says he has something important to tell her…
The lights come up to reveal Vicky sitting on the edge of her bed, Simon by her side, and Martha who’s arrived from Alice’s party, all encouraging Vicky to drink more coffee and be sick if she has to. Everything is back to normality and reality. Vicky asks for a cigarette which Lena provides and Simon lights.
Vicky wonders what happened and Simon explains that she was raving, the sleeping pills, hallucinations. Seeing she’s now restored Martha says she’ll leave and exists, leaving the couple alone together. When Vicky says can’t we talk about the divorce in the morning Simon claims not to know what she’s talking about. When she asks Simon if he really loves her (Sibyl Heston) he also claims not to know what she’s talking about.
Is he lying to be sweet to her? Or was that entire scene where he said he wanted to divorce her part of the hallucination?
The music starts again, softly, but as he leans Vicky gently back into the bed, takes the cigarette from her fingers, tiptoes across the room and turns out the light, it rises to a sentimental climax.
Thoughts
Some critics and online commenters claim the ‘Tonight at 8.30’ plays are slight and second rate, but I’m thoroughly enjoying them, in many ways more than the full-length plays which often feel strained and contrived. Here everything is quick and to the point and also, he can try out a greater variety of ideas and scenarios.
Related links
- Hands Across The Sea Wikipedia article
- Fumed Oak Wikipedia article
- Shadow Play Wikipedia article
- Noel Coward works
Books & Boots 