Hands Across the Sea (play)

Hands Across the Sea is a short comic play by Noël Coward, one of ten that make up Tonight at 8:30, a cycle written to be performed across three evenings. In the introduction to a published edition of the plays, Coward 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."

The play was first produced in 1935 in Manchester and on tour and played in London (1936), New York (1936–1937) and Canada (1938). It has enjoyed several major revivals and a television adaptation. At its premières in Manchester and London Hands Across the Sea was played on the same evening as Fumed Oak and Shadow Play. Like all the other plays in the cycle it originally starred Gertrude Lawrence and Coward himself.

Six of the plays in Tonight at 8:30, including Hands Across the Sea, were first presented at the Opera House, Manchester, beginning on 15 October 1935, but Hands Across the Sea premiered on the third night, 18 October 1935. A seventh play was added on the subsequent provincial tour, and the final three were added for the London run. The first London performance of Hands Across the Sea was on 18 January 1936 at the Phoenix Theatre.

Coward directed all ten pieces, and each starred Coward and Gertrude Lawrence. Coward said that he wrote them as "acting, singing, and dancing vehicles for Gertrude Lawrence and myself". The plays were performed in various combinations of three at each performance during the original run. The plays chosen for each performance were announced in advance, although a myth evolved that the groupings were random. Matinées were sometimes billed as Today at 2:30.

The main characters, a British couple, Commander Peter Gilpin and his wife Lady Maureen ("Piggie") Gilpin, were caricatures of Coward's friends Lord Louis ("Dickie") Mountbatten and his wife Edwina, who, Coward later said, "used to give cocktail parties and people used to arrive that nobody had ever heard of and sit about and go away again; somebody Dickie had met somewhere, or somebody Edwina had met – and nobody knew who they were. We all talked among ourselves, and it was really a very very good basis for a light comedy." Mountbatten, in mock indignation, called it "a bare-faced parody of our lives, with Gertie Lawrence playing Lady Maureen Gilpin and Noël Coward playing me. Absolutely outrageous...!" In the introduction to his collected plays Coward states:

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