SUITE IN THREE KEYS is the collective title for three plays by Noël Coward which premiered in 1966 with great success. They were the full-length A Song at Twilight, and a double bill, Shadows of the Evening and Come into the Garden, Maud.
The trilogy is Coward’s swan song as a playwright and as a stage actor. He was 66, ill and frail and having difficulty remembering his lines.
The three plays are all set in the same private suite in a luxurious hotel in Switzerland. Stephen Boxer, Emma Fielding and Tara Fitzgerald play three very different couples. Steffan Rizzi plays the suite waiter. Tom Littler directs this engagingly performed revival.
A SONG AT TWILIGHT is the most autobiographical and far and away the best of the three plays. An eminent English writer is visited by an actress with whom he had an affair when she was 19. She wants to publish his letters to her. When he refuses, she threatens to hand over the letters he wrote to his boyfriend to an American professor who is writing his unauthorised biography. She is motivated by the fact that he used her as a social camouflage to hide his homosexuality and then ditched her when he no longer needed her.
The high spot is the mutual acrimony whilst seated at table eating dinner. The venomous skirmishes show Coward at his witty high comedy best and Stephen Boxer and Tara Fitzgerald are excellent.
When Coward played the obnoxious bad-tempered writer, he made himself up to look like Somerset Maugham, hoping, possibly, to deflect any suggestion that the play was autobiographical and that he was homosexual.
SHADOWS OF THE EVENING. A publisher has just learned that he is going to die. His mistress and his wife decide to have a truce. The husband finds the strain of pretending he is not going to die too much and argues that it would be better for all three of them to face up to the truth. For a playwright, who used to be so staccato, it’s a big surprise how verbose and sober-minded Coward is. If you didn’t know in advance that he had written the play, you would never have guessed he had.
COME INTO THE GARDEN MAUD is the flimsiest of the trilogy. An American business-man ditches his ghastly, vulgar, social-climbing, domineering wife, and goes off with a Sicilian princess. It feels like an extended sketch rather than a play. Emma Fielding plays the wife, a way over-the-top caricature.
A Song at Twilight can be seen on its own. Shadows of the Evening and Come into the Garden, Maud, can be seen together on their own. If you want to see all three plays on the same day you can do so on Wednesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays.
To learn more about Robert Tanitch and his reviews, click here to go to his website. 
