Shadow Play

Shadow Play, described by the author as "a musical fantasy", is a one-act play by Noël Coward, one of ten that make up Tonight at 8.30, a cycle written to be performed across three evenings. Short plays were unfashionable in the 1920s and 30s, but Coward was fond of the genre and conceived the idea of a set of brief pieces to be played across several evenings. The actress most closely associated with him was Gertrude Lawrence, and he wrote the ten plays as vehicles for them both. Shadow Play depicts a husband and wife in a marriage on the brink of collapse. Under the influence of an unwisely large dose of sleeping pills, the wife has a dream that retells their story in hallucinatory form. Musical intervals weave in and out of the dream. The husband is so concerned for his wife's condition that his love is rekindled, and when she comes round they are reconciled. The play was first produced in 1935 in Manchester and then toured for nine weeks before opening in London (1936) and New York (1936–37), where the cycle played to full houses. Shadow Play has enjoyed several major revivals and has been adapted for television and radio. Background and first productions 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".