Still Life (play)
The play portrays the chance meeting, subsequent love affair, and eventual parting of a married woman and a physician.
[2] 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.
"[3] In 1935 he conceived the idea of a set of short plays, to run in varying permutations on three consecutive nights at the theatre.
(1923) and his comedy Private Lives (1930–31),[7] and he wrote the Tonight at 8.30 plays "as acting, singing and dancing vehicles for Gertrude Lawrence and myself".
[n 3] 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.
It becomes clear that after their first meeting they encountered each other a second time by chance and have enjoyed each other's company to the extent of arranging to lunch together and go to the cinema.
Alec tells Laura that he has been offered an attractive medical post in South Africa and will accept it unless she asks him not to.
They are prevented from having the passionate farewell they both yearn for when Dolly, a talkative friend of hers intrudes into their last moments together, and their final goodbye is cruelly limited to a formal handshake.
"[21] John Lahr, in his 1982 book on Coward's plays, disagreed: "when he wrote himself into the role of an ardent heterosexual lover ... the characterisation is wooden.
The Times called it "a serious and sympathetic study of humdrum people suddenly trapped by love" and strongly praised Coward both for the play and his performance.
[28] The Antaeus Company in Los Angeles revived all ten plays of the cycle in October 2007,[29] and the Shaw Festival did so in 2009.
[33] An American television version of Still Life was broadcast in 1951 with Margaret Sullavan and Wendell Corey as Laura and Alec.
[34] In 1991 BBC television mounted productions of the individual plays of the Tonight at 8.30 cycle, starring Joan Collins.
[36] A 1947 ABC radio adaptation of Still Life (with elements added from the 1945 film script – see below) starred Ingrid Bergman and Sam Wanamaker.
[37] The BBC broadcast a radio adaptation of the play in 1998, with Amanda Root and John Duttine as Laura and Alec.
A French translation was given in Paris in 1968 under the title Brève Rencontre (presented in tandem with Nous Dansons), and in the same year, along with Fumed Oak, it formed the basis for a musical, not by Coward, called Mr and Mrs.[21][n 8] The film was remade in 1974 starring Richard Burton and Sophia Loren.
