‘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:
- 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 the first three.
Songs
Four of the plays in the cycle are musical. The songs from ‘Tonight at 8.30’ are:
- We Were Dancing – ‘We Were Dancing’
- Red Peppers – ‘Has Anybody Seen our Ship?’ and ‘Men About Town’
- Shadow Play – ‘Then’, ‘Play, Orchestra, Play’ and ‘You Were There’
- Family Album – ‘Drinking Song’, ‘Princes and Princesses’, ‘Music Box’ and ‘Hearts and Flowers’
1. We Were Dancing: A Comedy in Two Scenes
Set in Samolo, Coward’s fictitious country in the South Pacific, which also appears in his play ‘South Sea Bubble’ and is the setting of his 1960 novel, ‘Pomp and Circumstance’.
Hubert and Louise Charteris are at a dance. They have been married 14 years. The plot or premise of this slender 20-page ‘play’ is so bizarrely unrealistic as to be surreal but what happens is that Louise dances with a complete stranger, Karl Sandys, and just on the strength of this one dance, having never met before, they both fall deeply and hopelessly in love with each other. By the end of the dance they are kissing passionately. Several other dancers see them kissing on the club veranda and go off to gossip about it, before Louise’s husband, Hubert, appears, accompanied by his married sister, Clara Bethel.
And from that point onwards most of the play consists of Hubert telling Louise to come along and stop being so silly, and Louise insisting that she has fallen head over heels in love, has been swept away on a great wave of passion. What helps to make it so surreal is she doesn’t even know the man’s name, she has to ask him. It’s nothing to do with their names or histories or even personalities – some force has descended on both of them and transformed their lives.
If you regard this from the strictly realistic standpoint of most of Coward’s works, which is epitomised in the conventional and scandalised husband, Hubert, then the whole thing is preposterous nonsense. But I think that’s the wrong way to see it. It’s better to approach from the other end and see it as more like a symbolist play, or the descent of God’s grace in a religious novel. The advent into a pair of ordinary lives of a force much larger than them. From this perspective its very silliness made it, for me, rather wonderful.
Slowly, by their persistence, the lovers persuade Hubert that they’re really sincere, though his sister, Clara, never stops being outraged and scene 1 ends.
The second scene opens with the same four characters who’ve stayed up till dawn the next morning, are very tired and pecking at some sandwiches. The idea is that, in the cold light of day, Louise and Karl’s wonderful love evaporates. Karl announces that he has to leave for Australia for his work and Louise tells him she can’t go with him (because a couple they know are leaving on the same boat and she doesn’t want to be seen ‘living in sin’) and so, as casually and inconsequentially as they fell in love, they sober up, become sensible again, and she kisses him goodbye. And so, after some regretful chat, in the same unreal dreamlike way that they fell in love, he simply walks out of her life.
I think it was intended to be a realistic vignette and so was criticised for being thin and silly. the introduction says it’s the slightest of the set and quotes Gertrude Lawrence as agreeing. But as I’ve explained, the basic idea is so unrealistic and preposterous as to transport us to an altogether different dimension of fantasy. Which I liked.
It contains one of the set’s most popular songs, ‘We Were Dancing’. This recording of it opens with Coward himself reciting the passage describing how his character has been overcome by love. Hearing him is a reminder of how rapidly he declaimed his lines. Must have been quite hard to follow in the theatre.
‘Shut up, Clara!’
Something occurred as I read this short play. I’ve mentioned in other reviews how Coward is famous for or often credited with writing ‘witty’ and ‘sophisticated’ dialogue but how, when you actually pay attention to it, you realise that a lot of his dialogue actually consists of shrill argument, often descending to vitriolic abuse.
The supposedly dapper, sophisticated and witty ‘Private Lives’ actually consists of a couple who spend over half their time shouting poisonous insults at each other, slapping and then assaulting each other, and that’s when they’re not having furious rows with their new spouses, and those spouses aren’t themselves having a furious row with each other. Change the clothes and accents and it could be ‘Eastenders’.
Well, something similar happens here but in a slightly different way which I found thought provoking. This is the extent to which the characters tell each other to shut up:
CLARA: Please be quiet and let me speak.
LOUISE: Hubert, do make Clara shut up.
CLARA: You must be insane.
HUBER: Shut up, Clara.
Not that witty, is it? Or even entry-level polite. And they do it a lot, tell each other to shut up.
LOUISE: Oh my darling–
KARL: Don’t, don’t speak…
KARL: What’s the use of arguing.
LOUISE: Answer me.
HUBERT: Will everybody please be quiet for a moment.
HUBERT: Don’t talk like that…
What all this began to convey was a sense of these four characters clamouring for their version to be heard. It began to feel like the text is a kind of battlefield. I know they say the heart of good drama is conflict but in these Coward plays, quite regularly, this is reduced right down to who has the right to speak. The phrase ‘Shut up’ recurs in so many of these plays that the plays themselves can be seen as created in large part out of the conflict of who will get to speak; a little more widely, the conflict of whose interpretation will prevail. It is a battle of hermeneutics.
CLARA: Rubbish!
LOUISE: It’s not rubbish!… Be quiet!
One a slightly wider level, the plays overflow with orders. The ‘shut ups’ and ‘Be quiets’ are accompanied by plenty of ‘Tell me’s’, ‘Answer me’, ‘Tell him’, do this, that or the other.
LOUISE: Don’t go on evading…
KARL: Don’t, don’t speak…
The characters are like so many automata programmed to say ‘Shut up and do what I say’ and the reason they arguments quickly become so toxic is because they refuse to shut up or listen to each other and so are in almost permanent conflict.
Servants
Most of Coward’s plays feature servants who the posh characters, appropriately enough, order around. Do this, don’t do that. Yes Furby, no Saunders.
I suppose you could see the inability of the posh characters to get along at all without endless bickering and squabbling, as a kind of category error: as characters brought up to have instant and complete control over their servants, mistakenly trying to apply the same spoilt privileged control over people of their own class.
2. The Astonished Heart: A Play in Six Scenes
Concerning a married couple Christian and Barbara Faber. The first scene opens a bit obscurely but slowly you realise that Christian is a distinguished psychiatrist (‘one of the most celebrated psychiatrists in the world’) but is lying very ill in the bedroom, attended by his secretary Susan Birch, his assistant Tim Verney, and his wife Barbara (35).
We learn that Barbara is his devoted wife of many years, but that there has been a rupture in the relationship because Christian, on what we begin to realise is his death bed, has called for another woman to be with him and during this first scene she arrives. She is Mrs Leonora Vail and we realise she has been having an affair with Christian.
Having established that the play very cleverly flashes back to exactly a year ago, when Barbara is meeting an old school friend Leonora Vail née Ames (‘Leonora Ames, terrible at games’ they used to chant at school). After a few pages of reminiscence, which includes reference to Leonora casually divorcing her (much older, rich) husband, Barbara introduces her to her husband, Christian.
Christian, as always in a tearing hurry, is not impressed by her preening personality and passes out of the room again. Leonora jokes that that foils her cunning plan for seducing him before having an ‘old friends’ reunion where everyone behaves jolly decently. But that’s what happens.
Because in scene 3 we discover Chris and Leonora in the same living room, after midnight and they’ve been out together, having a big snog, after which they talk about how quickly they’ve fallen in love etc, filling the space, as lovers in this kind of play do, with chatter about Barbara (she will be terribly hurt, won’t she) and previous lovers etc, all designed to give these mannequins the illusion of depth.
In scene 4 it is three months later, 6am and Chris is sneaking quietly into the house but is confronted by Barbara who has stayed up all night to wait for him. With stiff upper lip restraint she doesn’t scream or shout but just wants to confirm that The Other Woman is Leonora and whether he really loves her, whether he wants to marry her, which leads to an over-civilised exchange about just exactly how Chris has been overcome by passion and yet it doesn’t affect his love for Barbara. She tells him to go away with Leonora for two or three months to get her out of his system. After more chat she says he better get some sleep and he thanks her and exits – all frightfully civilised.
Scene 5 is in the same location seven months later, the night before the opening scene when Chris was lying seriously ill in bed. So we know something bad is going to happen. What it turns out to be is that Chris and Leonora have reached the bickering squabbling stage which is all Coward characters’ habitual state, and are seeking to stop and control each other’s actions and utterances:
CHRIS: For the love of God, stop crying.
LEONORA: Don’t, don’t come near me.
LEONORA: Don’t be such a fool.
CHRIS: Stay still.
Possibly the sense of thinness in Coward derives from the way he conceives of ‘drama’ as simply negation and contradiction. One character wants to do something and the other one tries to stop them. At bottom, that’s it.
Anyway Leonora tries to leave but Chris grabs her arms to stop her, then tells her how she twists and torments him etc, the exact same kind of accusations as in ‘Private Lives’ but played for tears and not for lolz.
CHRIS: Stay still.
LEONORA: You’re mad.
He accuses her of falling in love with – and spending the night with – another man and keeps on badgering her until she finally admits that she doesn’t love him any more, not in the same way as at the beginning etc.
Infuriated he kisses her one last time against her will then shoves her away and she falls to the floor as he delivers a long speech about how it’s all over and he used to have a vocation but now he’s burned out etc. She gets up and exits while Chris goes over to the big window, looks out for a bit, then steps over the ledge i.e. throw himself out the window in a suicide bid.
Ah. Now we understand how the situation in scene 1 came about. And with that we are onto the sixth and final scene, exactly as scene 1 ended, but now Leonora – who Chris has been calling for on his deathbed and Barbara, Susan and Tom have been waiting for – arrives and, after some strained pleasantries, is taken by the butler into Chris’s bedroom.
Now that I’m reading Coward’s plays in terms of characters battling to force each other to their wills, I see added significance in the way Barbara, apparently from good manners, offers Leonora a cocktail, Leonora refuses, but Barbara insists. On the surface all politeness, Coward dramas are in fact a constant battle of wills.
The last twist of the knife comes in the last few seconds, as Leonora emerges to say Chris has died but tells the others that he didn’t recognise her, thought she was Barbara and her last word was ‘Baba’ (Barbara’s nickname). You can see how this is intended to wring the last drop of melodrama from the situation. But well before then, I have been reading it in a different way, non-naturalistically.
‘Shut up, Clara’
As usual, the play resounds with the kinds of orders and attempts to shut down the other characters, which I’ve highlighted above:
TIM: Shut up, Susan.
BARBARA: Don’t be unkind.
CHRIS: Stop being quarrelsome, Leonora.
LEONORA: Don’t – please, Chris – don’t.
BARBARA: Don’t be silly… Don’t worry about me…
BARBARA: That’s idiotic, unreasonable and idiotic.
It’s striking how regularly Coward characters tell each other to stop:
BARBARA: Stop trying to balance yourself… Do stop whirling about among fictions…
BARBARA: Stop struggling.
And yet they can’t because they can’t because they are trapped in play where they are doomed to play the same roles and act out the same scenes again and again. Beneath the posh accents and civilised dialogue are creatures tormented in hell. Coward and Jean-Paul Sartre have a surprising amount in common. And this, maybe, explains why so many of the characters express an explicit sense of futility:
KARL: What’s the use of arguing?
LEONORA: Oh what’s the use, what’s the use?
LEONORA: It isn’t any use, you know it isn’t.
3. Red Peppers: An interlude with music
Just 20 pages long in two scenes: in parts one and two we see a second-rate music hall double act, a husband and wife team, George and Lily Pepper, going through their act, combining ‘I say I say I say’ type jokes with musical numbers. In the first scene they are dressed as naval ratings and sing ‘Has Anybody Seen our Ship?’
In the third scene they go back on dressed in white ties and tails. But in between, when we see them in their dressing room, there is – as I’m now expecting of all Coward characters – a great deal of bickering and arguing, both between themselves and with the manager of the theatre.
LILY: I don’t know what you’re talking about.
GEORGE: Oh you don’t, don’t you?
LILY: No I don’t, so shut up.
What triggers it is that as they were trooping neatly offstage at the end of the sailor number Lily dropped the telescope they both had tucked under their arms and had to go back to fetch it, ruining the effect. In their dressing room George is furious and this little mistake triggers all kinds of simmering resentments, the kind Coward is expert at depicting. Lily says the orchestra conductor, Bert Bentley, took it too fast and that made her stumble. George leaps to Bert’s defence but Lily says that’s just because they’re drinking buddies.
LILY: Oh shut up, you make me tired.
Their break is provided by another act, a faded West End actress, Mabel Grace, doing a piece. When Alf the call-boy comes in to provide the costumes for their next number, Lily is tactless enough to criticise Mabel as way over the hill in front of him, while George immediately defends her.
LILY: You make me sick, sucking up to the topliners.
GEORGE: Oh shut up nagging.
And when Lily is caustic about the age of the material and criticises George’s dear old granny:
GEORGE: You shut your mouth…
A knock on the door and enters the theatre’s musical director, Bert Bentley, ‘a flashy little man wearing a tail suit’. He also is pretty dismissive of the serious actress, Mabel Grace – ‘the old cow’s tearing herself to shreds’. When Lily demurs:
GEORGE: Oh dry up, Lil, for heaven’s sake.
When they start arguing about the speed of the music, Lily comes over all sarcastic and George, predictably:
GEORGE: Oh dry up.
But when Bentley is rude to Lily, George comes to his defence and Bentley ends up calling them ‘a cheap little comedy act’ which ends up incensing both of them, and George calls him ‘a twopenny halfpenny little squirt’ while Lily accuses him of drinking i.e. being drunk when her conducts.
They might have come to blows except Alf comes in with the Peppers’ steak and chips and tells Bentley he’s needed back in the orchestra pit. The argument with Bentley has drawn the couple together. They tuck into their steak and pour the Guinness that came with it in a friendly way. Lights down, end of scene 2.
The third scene opens in the dressing room as they’ve finished their dinners and are now getting dressed for their item in the second half of the show. Enter Mr Edwards the theatre manager. He runs everything and is well-dressed and smoking a big cigar. He says he saw their first half performance and was not impressed. They blame Bentley and the conversation takes the same kind of turn as virtually all Coward conversations i.e. turns into a row. Lily is needlessly sarcastic to Edwards so George tells her to cool it.
GEORGE: Shut up, Lil, leave this to me.
Edwards threatens to kick them off the bill but they retort that the theatre’s getting a bad reputation anyway. They’re now shouting at each other so loudly that the faded West End actress Mabel Grace comes in from the dressing room next door to tell them to be quiet.
At the height of the argument Alf pops his head in to say they’re on in three minutes. Sudden panic! and they push Edwards and Miss Grace out and hurriedly finish dressing.
Cut to them onstage performing the second number, Men About Town. Taking his revenge, Bentley the conductor plays faster and faster, until George slips over and Lily furiously throws her hat at Bentley in the orchestra stall, screaming ‘You drunken fool’.
I enjoyed this very much. It has unusual depth and saltiness to the characters and dialogue, unlike most of the Coward plays I’ve read.
Books & Boots 