The national tour of Noel Coward's collection of nine one-act plays Tonight At 8.30 is the culmination of a ten-year labour of love by director Blanche McIntyre.

 

"In retrospect it was crazy," she admits. "Everyone said Tonight At 8.30 would bankrupt them. Luckily the English Touring Theatre and Nuffield Theatre agreed to take it on.

"I'm a sucker for ambitious projects - plays that demand you stretch yourself."

As well as performing the nine plays that make up Tonight At 8.30 over three nights, McIntyre decided they should all be played back-to-back each Saturday creating a six and three-quarter hour-long play.

"If you put all the plays together they feel like one play rather than nine individual pieces," she says on a break from casting a version of The Comedy Of Errors at Shakespeare's Globe in London.

"The quality of the writing is not what you would expect from Coward - it's much more raw and heartfelt, as well as being funny and surprising.

"It poses questions such as what is life, what is love, and how do you live and deal with it. It works with variations of all those things, and finishes with a resolution of how hard it can be to make love work, but also how worthwhile it is.

"I've been joking it is like Noel Coward's Ring Cycle!"

While the original series of plays were a showcase for the acting skills of Coward and his favourite leading lady Gertrude Lawrence, McIntyre has made this tour more of an ensemble piece.

"You can tell which parts Coward and Lawrence would have played," says McIntyre.

"I've split them up because I don't think an actor could learn and play that much without exhausting themselves. The plays are such a celebration of diversity of acting, it's good to let everybody be in the spotlight."

In total the nine-strong cast play 71 characters across the complete cycle. McIntyre admits finding the right people wasn't easy.

“We needed incredibly versatile and tough actors who could go through this punishing schedule and perform six and three-quarter hours of drama in a day," she says.

“I needed brilliant character actors with a terrific sense of rhythm and the ability to sing and dance. It was tricky to get it right, but the company is really lovely.”

Rehearsals turned into something of a boot camp to fit in all the different plays.

“We had five weeks of rehearsal, which worked out at three-and-a-half days per play,” says McIntyre.

“We had an almost military rehearsal timetable - a scene had to be right within five minutes to allow an actor to move on to the assistant director to learn a song or tap dance routine.”

Probably the best known play in the cycle is Still Life - which Coward later developed into the classic movie of doomed romance Brief Encounter.

The secretive affair between doctor Alec and frustrated housewife Laura still forms a part of the piece, set wholly in the railway refreshment room of Milford Junction where the pair first met.

But Still Life also gives equal room to two other romances concerning the widowed refreshment room owner Myrtle and put-upon waitress Beryl.

“Still Life sits beautifully within the nine plays,” says McIntyre. “Because Coward had to write so many different plots very quickly a lot of the stories are very personal. One was inspired by his childhood in suburban Clapham, another by his glamorous friends, and another is about the place he used to spend his holidays.”

McIntyre has put the first three plays Coward wrote for the cycle together, and rearranged the other six to create an arc for the full nine-play production.

“If you watch all nine you go on an interesting journey,” says McIntyre.

“It feels like a curve rather than a zig-zag - audiences tell me you start to see connections between all nine. The whole thing is greater than the sum of its parts.”