Family Album (play)

The original production, starring Coward and Gertrude Lawrence played in a pre-London tour, and then the West End, and finally New York, in 1935–1937.

In fact, if one looks back over the years, one finds that the "triple bill" formula has been used, with varying degrees of success, since the earliest days of the theatre.

Occasionally still a curtain-raiser appears in the provinces but wearing a sadly hang-dog expression, because it knows only too well, poor thing, that it would not be there at all were the main attraction of the evening long enough.

[…] A short play, having a great advantage over a long one in that it can sustain a mood without technical creaking or overpadding, 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.

[7] Tonight at 8.30 opened in London on 9 January 1936 at the Phoenix Theatre,[8] In the first programme of three plays, Family Album was the first item, followed by The Astonished Heart and Red Peppers.

[9] When King George V died eleven days after the opening of the run, a comedy about a funeral was thought inappropriate and Family Album was replaced in the triple bill by We Were Dancing during the following four weeks.

Suddenly Lavinia, her reticence overcome by wine, denounces the old man: "I hated Papa, so did you … He was cruel to Mama, he was unkind to us, he was profligate and pompous and worse still, he was mean".

[15][16][17] In May 1991 Family Album was televised by the BBC in a cycle of eight of the Tonight at 8.30 plays, with Joan Collins as Lavinia and Denis Quilley as Jasper.

[18] In January 1936, Coward and Lawrence, together with Everly Gregg, Alison Leggatt, Edward Underdown and Alan Webb from the original cast, recorded "Drinking Song" and "Hearts and Flowers" and excerpts from the dialogue from the play for His Master's Voice, with the Phoenix Theatre Orchestra conducted by Clifford Greenwood.