Hands Across the Sea is a short comic play by Noël Coward, one of ten that make up Tonight at 8:30, a cycle written to be performed across three evenings. In the introduction to a published edition of the plays, Coward wrote, "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."[1]
The play was first produced in 1935 in Manchester and on tour and played in London (1936), New York (1936–1937) and Canada (1938). It has enjoyed several major revivals and a television adaptation. At its premières in Manchester and London Hands Across the Sea was played on the same evening as Fumed Oak and Shadow Play. Like all the other plays in the cycle it originally starred Gertrude Lawrence and Coward himself.[2]
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Six of the plays in Tonight at 8:30, including Hands Across the Sea, were first presented at the Opera House, Manchester, beginning on 15 October 1935,[3] but Hands Across the Sea premiered on the third night, 18 October 1935.[4] A seventh play was added on the subsequent provincial tour, and the final three were added for the London run.[2] The first London performance of Hands Across the Sea was on 18 January 1936 at the Phoenix Theatre.[5]
Coward directed all ten pieces, and each starred Coward and Gertrude Lawrence. Coward said that he wrote them as "acting, singing, and dancing vehicles for Gertrude Lawrence and myself". The plays were performed in various combinations of three at each performance during the original run. The plays chosen for each performance were announced in advance, although a myth evolved that the groupings were random.[6] Matinées were sometimes billed as Today at 2:30.
The main characters, a British couple, Commander Peter Gilpin and his wife Lady Maureen ("Piggy") Gilpin, were caricatures of Coward's friends Lord Louis ("Dickie") Mountbatten and his wife Edwina,[7] who, Coward later said, "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."[8] Mountbatten, in mock indignation, called it "a bare-faced parody of our lives, with Gertie Lawrence playing Lady Maureen Gilpin and Noël Coward playing me. Absolutely outrageous...!"[8] In the introduction to his collected plays Coward states:
The Broadway openings for the three parts took place on 24 November 1936 (including Hands Across the Sea), 27 November 1936 and 30 November 1936 at the National Theatre, again starring Coward and Lawrence. All of the plays were included except Star Chamber.[10] The London and New York runs were limited only by Coward's boredom at long engagements.[11]
Major productions of parts of the cycle were revived in 1948 and 1967 on Broadway (Hands Across the Sea was included in 1948 but omitted in 1967), 1981 at the Lyric Theatre in London (Shadow Play, Hands Across the Sea and Red Peppers), starring John Standing and Estelle Kohler and at the Chichester Festival in 2006 (Shadow Play, Hands Across the Sea, Red Peppers, Family Album, Fumed Oak and The Astonished Heart). In 1971, the Shaw Festival revived three of the works (not including Hands Across the Sea), and in 2000, the Williamstown Theatre Festival revived We Were Dancing, Family Album, Hands Across the Sea (all starring Blythe Danner), Red Peppers, Shadow Play and Star Chamber.[12] The Antaeus Company in Los Angeles revived all ten plays in October 2007, and the Shaw Festival did so in 2009.[13][14]
Hands Across the Sea was adapted for television in 1938.[15] In 1991, BBC television mounted productions of the individual plays with Joan Collins taking the Lawrence roles. Hands Across the Sea was chosen to open the series.[16] The sheer expense involved in mounting what are effectively ten different productions has usually deterred revivals of the entire Tonight at 8:30 cycle, but the constituent plays can often be seen individually or in sets of three.
Two bemused visitors from the colonies take up a casually-made invitation from an upper-class British couple to drop in on them at their Mayfair flat when in England "in the kind of smart house where the telephone never stops and there is a continuous scream representing a conversation which has never begun and will certainly never end."[17] In their enthusiasm for hospitality, the British couple, Commander Peter Gilpin and his wife Lady Maureen ("Piggy") Gilpin, have invited so many people to their cocktail party that they can't entirely remember who they invited.
The Gilpins receive a phone message that the Rawlingsons will be visiting – a couple who stayed with them while travelling the Far East, and everyone leaves to get ready for their arrival. Mrs Wadhurst had spoken to Lady Maureen earlier in the week, but when Piggie sees the Wadhursts, she mistakes them for the Rawlingsons. They are forced to listen to meaningless conversations about people they do not know. Among the arrivals, departures, telephone calls and free-flowing alcohol, confusions abound. When Mrs Rawlingson telephones, Piggie finally realizes that she doesn't know who the Wadhursts are.
The Times said of the play: "As a piece of production it is, technically, of the utmost brilliance; as an entertainment, in its own kind frothily faultless.[18] Coward's fellow-dramatist Terence Rattigan considered it "the best short comedy ever written."[19]