Fumed Oak

Fumed Oak is a short play in two scenes by Noël Coward, one of ten that make up Tonight at 8.30, a cycle written to be performed across three evenings. Coward billed the work as an "unpleasant comedy in two scenes". The play concerns a downtrodden, middle-aged salesman who, having saved up enough money to cut all ties, walks out on his wife, mother-in-law and "horrible adenoidal daughter", having first told all three what he thinks of them.

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."^[1]

The play was first produced in 1935 in Manchester and on tour and played in London (1936) and New York (1936–1937). It has enjoyed several major revivals and has been adapted for film. At its premières in Manchester and London Fumed Oak was played on the same evening as Hands Across the Sea and Shadow Play. Like all the other plays in the cycle it originally starred Gertrude Lawrence and Coward himself.^[2]

Coward later said, "I have always had a reputation for high-life, earned no doubt in the twenties with such plays as The Vortex. But, as you see, I was a suburban boy, born and bred in the suburbs of London, which I've always loved and always will." Fumed Oak, like his later play This Happy Breed, is one of his rare stage depictions of suburban life.^[3]