Guest Blog: Director Tom Littler On Noel Coward's TONIGHT AT 8:30

In the mid 1930s, at the height of his creative powers, Noël Coward embarked on a project to revive the lost art of the one-act play. He wrote three one-act plays, and then another three, and then four more.

Teaming up with his regular partner Gertrude Lawrence, Coward - playwright, producer, director, composer, lyricist, and star - led the production on a UK tour and then into the West End.

Coward's aim, besides showing off his own and his co-star's versatility, was to explore the power of the short dramatic form: to entertain, to delight, and to move. The production was titled Tonight at 8.30.

Since then, several of the plays within the cycle have gained an independent fame: Still Life was immortalised as Brief Encounter, and Red Peppers, about a music hall duo, is regularly performed.

It's not unusual for a theatre to revive two or three of the plays. And a few years ago, Blanche McIntyre directed all nine in a touring production. But this is the first London revival of the complete cycle since Coward's production played in 1936.

I've grouped the plays into three newly titled trios. Nuclear Families begins with a Victorian operetta, Family Album, continues with one of Coward's funniest light comedies, Hands Across the Sea, and closes with the devastating The Astonished Heart.

Bedroom Farces kicks off with the brittle pastiche of We Were Dancing, moves to the glorious sitcom Ways and Means, and finishes with a masterpiece of music theatre, Shadow Play.

And Secret Hearts starts with the theatre satire Star Chamber, continues with Red Peppers, and ends in the railway station café of Still Life.

The rediscovery here is Star Chamber, a kind of W1A for the 1930s, getting its first ever full UK production: Coward gave it one matinee performance before dropping it for fear of offending friends. We're staging it in place of a play I liked less called Fumed Oak.

There's no getting around the technical and logistical challenges. It's taken a lot of money, work, time and care, and I'm blessed with a production team of regular collaborators who have thrown themselves into this project.

Our ensemble cast of nine actors play 73 roles with dazzling versatility. The set (take a bow, genius designer Louie Whitemore) spins into nine different shapes, thanks to our crack stage management team, and my longstanding costume designer Emily Stuart has come up with 81 different outfits.

I can't give you a favourite play or a favourite trio: the joy is the mix of relationships and contrasts between the pieces. There's nothing wrong with seeing just one trio. They all offer outstanding writing and music (we're lucky to have one of the great Coward interpreters, Stefan Bednarczyk, on the piano).

But if you can see two or three cycles - perhaps on a Trilogy Ticket over a Saturday or Sunday - the experience becomes more than the sum of its parts. Themes emerge: Coward is wonderful on love, marriage and divorce, particularly.

And what is revelatory about seeing the plays back-to-back is the kaleidoscopic nature of Coward's understanding: extramarital affairs seen from the perspective of the betrayed party and the lover; grief as a subject for high comedy and for heartbreak; lies and pretence as the stuff of farce and of tragedy. Those timeless themes are as funny and moving now as they were in the 1930s.

But styles have changed, and a studio space like Jermyn Street Theatre - we're 70 comfy seats, just around the corner from Piccadilly Circus - offers rich possibilities for reinterpretation. Gone are the clipped ('flet' for 'flat') vowels of the 1930s, which seem now to hold an audience at arm's length. Songs can be under-sung, just on the edge of the melody.

I've been fascinated by the potential of studio naturalism for well-made plays for years: I've tried to do the same with Coward as I've done in the past with Graham Greene, Terence Rattigan, or August Strindberg. It's about an emotional honesty and an attention to detail that allows the audience to share the experience.

That doesn't deny that Coward's writing has a 'tune' that's ignored at your peril - but there are chances to disrupt that tune, and to make the words startlingly modern. It's been one of the greatest challenges, and privileges, of my professional life to bring these nine plays back to the West End. I can't wait to share them.

Noël Coward's Tonight at 8.30 runs 10 April-20 May at Jermyn Street Theatre

Tom Littler is the Artistic Director of Jermyn Street Theatre

Photo credit: Mark Douet