There’s an interesting cycle of plays on at Malvern Theatres this week – Tonight at 8.30 by Noel Coward. It’s a set of nine, one-act plays, grouped into three sets of three, “Cocktails”, “Dinner” and “Dancing”, and organised so that there’s a separate set on each night. On Saturday, if you want, you can have a total Noel Coward blow-out, with the full cycle shown over three performances starting at 12 noon, a mid-afternoon matinėe, and the evening.
I rather enjoy a good Coward play, though I didn’t know these ones at all – probably because the current tour is the first UK revival since Coward originally wrote and starred in them. I did toy briefly with the idea of having a marathon session and spending all day today watching all nine plays. But I decided, on reflection, that one can have too much of a good thing, and I would find a whole day of catty comments, witty repartee, and brilliant banter rather exhausting. So, since I didn’t know any of the plays, I thought it wouldn’t matter which one of the groups of three I went to, and just picked “Dinner” because it best fitted in with my plans for the day. Hence, instead of Tonight at 8.30 it should really have been called This Afternoon at 3.30!
The three playlets shared a cast, but otherwise were completely different in tone and content. The first was a fairly light piece, full of Coward’s trademark bitchiness, about an upper-class couple before the war who were stony broke and living off their wits, and sponging off their increasingly pissed-off friends, in the south of France. It was laugh-out-loud funny in places. The second was much darker, about a put-upon husband who suddenly snapped, telling his wife, daughter and mother-in-law exactly what he thought of them before he walked out on them all. The third, and final, play of the day was the best in my view. It was called Still Life, but was later filmed under the title Brief Encounter. Unlike the film, it was set entirely in a station refreshment room, and of course documented the doomed affair between two respectable married people.
Altogether, it was a pleasant and interesting way of passing the afternoon. Having enjoyed the three playlets that comprised “Dinner”, I suspect that I would also have enjoyed the other two sets as well – but not enough to make me wish I had sacrificed the whole day for them.
