From left, Gabrielle Jones, Sharry Flett and Marla McLean in the Shaw Festival&146s production of &147Star Chamber.&148 Noël Coward and Gertrude Lawrence in one
of the plays that make up &147Tonight at 8:30&148 in 1936. In a November 1936 letter from New York to his mother, Violet, Coward wrote with typical brio about appearing in “Tonight at 8:30” on Broadway: “Well, the first lot have opened and were a triumph &151 we begin the second bill tonight and the third on Monday. The excitement is terrific. The critics &151 as in London &151 are slightly grudging. I think they are all irritated by the tremendous fuss that goes on over everything I do. When Gertie and I came on on the first night the audience went on applauding for nearly three minutes and there we stood just mouthing at each other!” The plays are grouped thematically in a way meant to celebrate their potential differences, said Jackie Maxwell, the Shaw Festival’s artistic director. “You start to see what connects them as well as what makes them different,” Ms. Maxwell said. “For example, with the ‘Ways of the Heart’ trilogy you get ‘Astonished Heart,’ a dark drama of obsession, then ‘Family Album,’ a Victorian musical, and end with ‘Ways and Means,’ a frothy comedy. But they’re all about marriage and infidelity.” The festival has brought together three directors and design teams, and approximately two-thirds of the company’s 70 actors for the event, which uses dozens of Coward’s songs as incidental music. The three programs can be seen individually or over a single weekend, with “Star Chamber” presented separately throughout the week. (The two remaining one-day marathons, on Aug. 29 and Sept. 19, are sold out.) The lost treasure is “Star Chamber,” which portrays a group of self-serving actors at a charity committee meeting and pokes fun at their shallowness and inefficiency. Coward decided that it might be offensive to some since at the time he was president of the Actors Orphanage, a charitable trust. The play did not travel to Broadway with the other nine and has never been performed in New York professionally, said Alan Brodie, chairman of the Noël Coward Foundation and agent for the Coward estate, which controls distribution rights for the plays.
Coward intended the one acts, which he wrote primarily as vehicles for himself and Lawrence, to be mixed and matched as desired. Perhaps the most famous is “Still Life,” which he adapted into the 1946 film “Brief Encounter.”