The Astonished Heart
The Astonished Heart, described by the author as "a tragedy in six scenes", is a short play by Noël Coward, one of ten that make up Tonight at 8.30, a cycle written to be performed across three evenings.
[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.
[5] The actress most closely associated with Coward was Gertrude Lawrence, his oldest friend, with whom he had first acted as a child in Hannele in 1913.
(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".
"[10] The Astonished Heart was first presented on 15 October 1935 at the Opera House, Manchester, the second play in a programme that began with We Were Dancing and ended with Red Peppers.
They borrow the cook's Bible and find the passage he wants: "The Lord shall smite thee with madness, and blindness, and astonishment of the heart."
Leonora confesses that she has deliberately tried to make him fall in love, in revenge for his dismissive manner at their first meeting.
She tells him that his increasingly unhinged mental state, brought on by the strain of his affair, is affecting his work and his life.
In 1937 a company headed by Estelle Winwood and Robert Henderson toured the Tonight at 8.30 cycle in the US and Canada.
[21] The Antaeus Company in Los Angeles revived all ten plays in October 2007,[22] and in 2009 the Shaw Festival did likewise.
[n 7] In The Astonished Heart, the cast included Sara Crowe as Leonore, Miranda Foster as Barbara and Nick Waring as Chris.
[25] An adaptation for radio was broadcast by the BBC in the US in 1953 with Diana Churchill as Barbara, Brenda Dunrich as Leonora and David King-Wood as Chris.
[29] During the early productions, Punch praised Coward for compressing into "six brief scenes" material that "is still commonly thought to justify three Acts".
[30] The Manchester Guardian thought "the plot interesting, the dialogue as lively as ever" but felt the play as a whole "suffers from unreality".
[32] The Times, too, thought that Coward had failed to achieve a true tragedy, "but the thing is courageous and not frivolous, not written to a popular formula".
[35] In 2006, Benedict Nightingale wrote in The Times that The Astonished Heart, "memorably demonstrates the inadequacy of English reason and tolerance when faced with passion".
[21] When the piece was revived in 2018, the reviewer in The Independent wrote, "The Astonished Heart offers a devastating post-mortem on the suicide of a celebrated psychiatrist whose patient, liberal wife cannot save him from toppling into a disastrous obsession with his mistress.
