Still Life (play)

Still Life is a short play in five scenes by Noël Coward, one of ten plays that make up Tonight at 8.30, a cycle written to be performed across three evenings. One-act plays were unfashionable in the 1920s and 30s, but Coward was fond of the genre and conceived the idea of a set of short pieces to be played across several evenings. The actress most closely associated with him was Gertrude Lawrence, and he wrote the plays as vehicles for them both.

The play portrays the chance meeting, subsequent love affair, and eventual parting of a married woman and a physician. The sadness of their serious and secretive affair is contrasted throughout the play with the boisterous, uncomplicated relationship of a second couple. Still Life differs from most of the plays in the cycle by having an unhappy ending.

The play was first produced in London in May 1936 and was staged in New York in October of that year. It has been revived frequently and has been adapted for television and radio and, as Brief Encounter, for the cinema.

Short plays had been popular in the previous century, often as curtain-raisers and afterpieces to longer plays. By the 1920s they had gone out of fashion, but Coward was fond of the genre and wrote several early in his career. He 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." In 1935 he conceived the idea of a set of short plays, to run in varying permutations on three consecutive nights at the theatre. His biographer Philip Hoare describes it as "a bold idea, risky and innovative". Coward finished writing all ten of the plays by the end of August 1935.

The actress most closely associated with Coward was Gertrude Lawrence, his oldest friend, with whom he had first acted as a child in Hannele in 1913. They starred together in his revue London Calling! (1923) and his comedy Private Lives (1930–31), and he wrote the Tonight at 8.30 plays "as acting, singing and dancing vehicles for Gertrude Lawrence and myself". Coward directed the plays as well as acting in them. They were performed in various combinations of three.

Most of the plays in Tonight at 8.30 were tried out in a pre-London tour, but three, including Still Life, were first given after the cycle opened in London. Still Life was first presented on 18 May 1936 at the Phoenix Theatre, the second play in a programme that also contained Ways and Means and Family Album. Coward had thought of using the title Still Life before – for the American production of his 1925 comedy Hay Fever, although in the event it was given under its original title.

The cycle played to full houses, and the limited season closed on 20 June, after 157 performances. The Broadway premiere was at the National Theatre on 24 November 1936, with mostly the same cast as in London. As in the London premiere, the programme also included Ways and Means and Family Album. The New York run of the cycle, a limited season, as in London, ended prematurely because Coward was taken ill.

Still Life is one of the two plays in the cycle that end unhappily; the other is The Astonished Heart. For their premieres Coward placed each in the middle of its triple-bill, with a comedy before and after.