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Noël Coward claimed that he wrote the Tonight at 8:30 plays as “acting, singing and dancing vehicles for Gertrude Lawrence and myself.” John Standing and Estelle Kohler perform admirably in the current trio revived at he Lyric. But there is no denying that, without that presumed Thirties feeling of two championship ponies putting on an exhibition display, the pieces make for a rather patchy night out.

Shadow Play, which worked brilliantly in the intimacy of the King’s Head last December, now looks strangely orphaned in the wide open spaces of the Lyric. The piece shows a swelegant Mayfair couple on the brink of divorce and flashes back and forth between present rupture and past rapture. Mr Standing, in white tuxedo and red carnation hoofs conscientiously like an aspiring Buchanan and Ms Kohler exudes an excellent silky desperation. But it is really a chamber-play as well as a shadow play, a kind of pocket book Private Lives, and it is unnerving in a big theatre to see Coward’s hard, sharp lines dropping like pebbles into an empty pool.

Hands Across The Sea comes across infinitely better as a kind of half-hour Hay Fever about self-centred hosts oblivious to the discomfiture of their guests. A society hostess with a poker-backed naval husband (allegedly based on Mountbatten) find themselves entertaining a colonial couple whose identities they have mistaken. And here Saul Radomsky’s designs come into their own with panelled walls and tasselled curtains that look like the Savoy Hotel gone mad, and Jonathan Lynn’s production extracts every possible gag from the sight of discommoded visitors. Hugh Lloyd’s Malaysian plantation owner, looking like a hen-pecked sheepdog, is left juggling a bewildering combination of cocktail glasses and cigarette boxes, and Susie Blake as his wife is encoiled in serpentine telephone flex. But the play survives simply because of Coward’s shameless joy in showing rampant egoists running rings round mousy misfits.

I am less confident about the durability of Red Peppers, the one about the tacky music-hall duo bickering with each other, the theatre manager and the conductor. To me it has a faint air of charity-matinee slumming: see the great stars pretending to be down among the wines-and-spirits. John Standing has the right tatty showbiz vanity (“Put Garbo on on a Saturday night in Devonport and see what would happen to her”), Estelle Kohler a nice shabby refinement and Hugh Lloyd’s conductor jogs up and down, just like the provincial pit-men of my youth. But the piece should be an interlude rather than a climax and there is still the faint feeling that, while it may have been fun to see Noël and Gertie stoop to conquer, there is less joy in seeing two highly accomplished players going vaudeville.

The evening has its pleasures; but to me Tonight at 8:30 now seems a banquet of snacks rather than a three-course meal. 

It may have been good enough for our Mums and Dads. Indeed we know it was. But is Noël Coward’s Tonight at 8.30 at the Lyric still good enough for us? This may sound like an ungrateful question to ask about a writer whose theatrical quality still puts most of our modern dramatists in the shade. But the fact is that although this enjoyable trio of one-act plays gives pleasure in a characteristically witty and socially snobbish way, they can not be counted amongst this author’s best works. Not that they “date”. After all, they are period pieces and the period is the fashionable 1930s.

But they each go on too long, or at any rate seem to go on too long in this affectionate revival by Jonathan Lynn of the Cambridge Theatre Company. They also seem now and then beyond the social range of a company which enters delightedly into the spirit of these satires and perhaps too delightedly.

It is hard for modern players to catch the Coward style; and in each of these playlets we can see some of them missing it. But John Standing is a glowing and consistent exception with his Buchanan-like sense of debonair Englishness to light up the evening; and Estelle Kohler who is his opposite number (in the sense that Gertie Lawrence was Noël Coward’s opposite number) brings her bright eyes and fascinatingly broad grin to bear attractively whenever she can.

We begin with Shadow Play which remains after all these years a beautifully shaped musical comedy on wistful marital disharmony. Mr Standing and Miss Kohler seem absolutely at ease in its romantic and nostalgic perception, with flashbacks and melodious songs to suit them. “Grab every scrap of happiness” is the Master’s message – and these players grab every scrap of effect from his clever construction.

Hands Across The Sea is more quickly passed over today because of its Mayfair snobbery at the expense of a homely couple who were picked up abroad and turn out in London to have been forgotten. Hugh Lloyd’s long face as a lost visitor is unforgettable, unlike the rest of the playlet.

The evening ends very chirpily with  Red Peppers in which Coward brings his experienced eye to the back-stage bickerings of a couple who are touring the music halls between the wars. Naturally we miss Noël and Gertie (from the famous recording), but Mr Standing knows his stuff – and the whole evening proves generally that Noël Coward did as well.

But somehow whatever pleased my parents has either lost its power – or the style of presentation has changed. Something to do with the change of tempo as well as the change of times.



Cambridge Theatre Company’s production of Noël Coward’s triple bill of comedies, Tonight At 8:30 at the Lyric Theatre, Shaftesbury Avenue, WC1 is worth seeing for the costumes and interiors. It would have made a charming footnote to the recent Hayward Gallery survey of Thirties style. Designer Saul Radomsky has recreated a Mayfair drawing room of the period for the second item Hands Across the Sea with outstanding richness and accuracy of detail, but there is precious little else of interest, either in the playlets or this realisation of them.

As writer, Coward was no more than an opportunistic manipulator of popular sentiment. There is nothing quicksilver or brittle about his epigrams: at best they creak, at worst they descend to the fatuousness of “Have you a book to read? Yes, but it’s unreadable.” As a composer he was more successful, but his inspiration in the two items with music – the limp pretentious Shadow Play and the music hall expose Red Peppers – is mundane, while on this occasion the actors singing were evidently vying with the band playing for execrability of intonation. No, it is only as a conscious deviser of starry, wilting period poses that Coward has anything to offer.

The three principals, John Standing, Estelle Kohler and Hugh Lloyd, do not match Mr Radomsky for visual flair in this respect, but they serve up a decent enough tourist spectacle.