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Still Life (play)

This article is about the Noël Coward play. For the John Byrne play, see The Slab Boys Trilogy. For other uses, see Still Life (disambiguation).

Middle-aged white woman in smart 1930s costume addresses weary-looking man and dazed woman across a café table
Dolly (Everley Gregg), Alec (Noël Coward) and Laura (Gertrude Lawrence) in the final scene

Still Life is a short play in five scenes by Noël Coward, one of ten plays that make up Tonight at 8.30, a cycle written to be performed across three evenings.[n 1] One-act plays were unfashionable in the 1920s and 30s, but Coward was fond of the genre and conceived the idea of a set of short pieces to be played across several evenings. The actress most closely associated with him was Gertrude Lawrence, and he wrote the plays as vehicles for them both.

The play portrays the chance meeting, subsequent love affair, and eventual parting of a married woman and a physician. The sadness of their serious and secretive affair is contrasted throughout the play with the boisterous, uncomplicated relationship of a second couple. Still Life differs from most of the plays in the cycle by having an unhappy ending.

The play was first produced in London in May 1936 and was staged in New York in October of that year. It has been revived frequently and has been adapted for television and radio and, as Brief Encounter, for the cinema.

  1. ^ Morley (1999), p. xii


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