Tonight at 8:30
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Tonight at 8:30 (1936) is a unique cycle of short plays by Noel Coward, the first production of which was a bold experiment in the history of theatre. The plays - ten in total - were performed in no particular order, with three randomly-chosen plays per Tonight at 8:30 performance at both matinee and evening shows, meaning that audiences never knew exactly which of the plays they were likely to see.
The plays are Red Peppers, Ways and Means, Still Life (later expanded into the film Brief Encounter) Hands Across The Sea, Fumed Oak, The Astonished Heart, We Were Dancing, Shadow Play, Family Album, and Star Chamber. The last of these, concerning a charity committee meeting among various actors around a table, was only performed once, after which Coward withdrew it from the cycle and banned it from future production - a ban still in force today.
The styles and subject matter range from broad farce to intricate comedies of manners to melodrama to romance. Many of them are generally held among the finest examples of English-language short plays ever written.
Coward starred in all the plays alongside Gertrude Lawrence. Aside from Brief Encounter, a number of other plays in the cycle were also made into movies.
Since their original 1936 production, the sheer expense involved in mounting what are effectively ten different productions has generally deterred anyone from reviving the entire Tonight at 8:30 cycle, but the constituent plays can often be seen individually or in sets of three. In 1981, a production was mounted at the Lyric Theatre in London. In 1991, British TV mounted productions of the individual plays with Joan Collins taking the Lawrence roles.
Four of the plays - We Were Dancing, Shadow Play, Family Album, and Star Chamber - were not republished in print form until Coward's centenary in 1999, when they were finally made available in the 7th volume of the Methuen series of Collected Plays (this also formed "Star Chamber"s print debut). "We Were Dancing", "Shadow Play" and "Family Album" had previously been published as part of volume 4 of the earlier imprint of his collected works.
