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.