History
Six of the plays in Tonight at 8:30 were first presented at the Manchester Opera House beginning on 15 October 1935, and a seventh play, Family Album, was added on the subsequent provincial tour. Still Life, however, was added for the London run, together with Ways and Means and Star Chamber, the last of which was performed only once. The first London performance in the cycle was on 9 January 1936 at the Phoenix Theatre but Still Life did not premiere until May 1936.
Coward directed all ten pieces, and each starred Coward and Gertrude Lawrence. Coward said that he wrote them as "acting, singing, and dancing vehicles for Gertrude Lawrence and myself". The plays were performed in various combinations of three at each performance during the original run. The plays chosen for each performance were announced in advance, although a myth evolved that the groupings were random. Matinées were sometimes billed as Today at 2:30. The Broadway openings for the three parts took place on 24 November 1936, 27 November 1936 and 30 November 1936 (including Still Life) at the National Theatre, again starring Coward and Lawrence. Star Chamber was not included. The London and New York runs were limited only by Coward's boredom at long engagements.
Major productions of parts of the cycle included Broadway revivals in 1948 (not including Still Life) and 1967 (including Still Life ) and in 1981 at the Lyric Theatre in London (not including Still Life). The Antaeus Company in Los Angeles revived all ten plays in October 2007. In 2009, the Shaw Festival revived the full cycle.
Still Life was given a television production in 1951. In 1991, BBC television mounted productions of the individual plays starring Joan Collins. In most of the plays she took the Lawrence roles, but in Still Life she played Myrtle.
Read more about this topic: Still Life (play)
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“It is remarkable how closely the history of the apple tree is connected with that of man.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Literary works cannot be taken over like factories, or literary forms of expression like industrial methods. Realist writing, of which history offers many widely varying examples, is likewise conditioned by the question of how, when and for what class it is made use of.”
—Bertolt Brecht (1898–1956)
“History has neither the venerableness of antiquity, nor the freshness of the modern. It does as if it would go to the beginning of things, which natural history might with reason assume to do; but consider the Universal History, and then tell us,—when did burdock and plantain sprout first?”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)