Jason Moore talks Red Peppers / Aged in Wood – A Backstage Double Bill at the Tabard

“There’s something rather magical about pulling back the curtain and finding out what really goes on and how things work.”

This is how director Jason Moore describes the draw of backstage storytelling — a sentiment that lies at the heart of Red Peppers / Aged in Wood, a double bill opening at Theatre at the Tabard on 28 May. Featuring Noël Coward’s 1936 one-act play Red Peppers alongside a new commission from playwright Cian Griffin, Aged in Wood, the production offers a comic window into dressing room drama nearly a century apart.

Parallel Dressing Rooms: Coward and Griffin Share a Stage

Both plays unfold in the same space — a theatre dressing room — and use the same cast of six. Coward’s piece, a spiky glimpse at a failing husband-and-wife music hall duo, provides the vintage half of the evening. Griffin’s new work inhabits the same physical room, updated to the present day, but the squabbles, vanities, and anxieties remain largely unchanged. Together, the two plays create what Moore calls “an onstage behind-the-scenes pastiche of the wonderfully stubborn persistence of artistic ego.”

On the practical side, the double bill emerged from a logistical constraint. “We loved Red Peppers but the other plays in Tonight at 8:30 are very different in tone,” Moore explains. “They all have different sets and cast sizes. It’s really not practical to do a complete set change in a small theatre, so that naturally led us to use the same set for the new play.”

Enter Aged in Wood, which Moore developed closely with Griffin. Their collaboration wasn’t a one-off. “We’ve been working with Cian for a couple of years,” Moore notes. “I’m directing his other new play LEE at Park Theatre this September. Cian is one of those writers who likes direction and works well within set parameters.”

That collaborative spirit shaped the piece early on. “He’d already been working on a comedy and was willing to change the setting from someone’s home to a theatre dressing room. He also changed the leading lady from a corporate solicitor to an actress. Most of the other characters were already there — we just needed to set some of them in the world of show business.”

““There’s something rather magical about pulling back the curtain and finding out what really goes on and how things work.”

Jason Moore

Comedy, Continuity, and the Theatre of Ego

That world — in both 1936 and 2025 — is riddled with egos, flops, and fragile relationships. In Red Peppers, Coward’s characters battle over missed cues and musical timing. In Aged in Wood, leading lady Deena Ames is reeling from a disastrous opening night. As curtain-up looms, she must navigate her agent, her ex-husband, a willful son, and a leading man with whom the chemistry may be offstage only.

The contrast between Coward’s clipped 1930s repartee and Griffin’s contemporary dialogue might seem stark. But Moore aimed to close that gap from the outset. “There is a link within the comedy that makes the two plays almost seamless,” he says. “We asked Cian to write a modern-day Noël Coward play and that’s exactly what he delivered. So while both plays were written 90 years apart, the new play was deliberately created to blend in with Coward’s work. We did not want a jarring contrast between the two works.”

The same attention to continuity extended to the design. Although both plays share the same set, Moore and designer Ian Nicholas employ subtle visual shifts to mark the change in era. “We’re swapping furniture, artwork and accessories to completely change the look and feel of the dressing room,” Moore explains. “We’ll also change the mood with music during the interval to convey the passage of time.”

OnBook Theatre’s Shift Toward New Writing

That kind of visual storytelling is central to OnBook Theatre, the company behind the production. Founded by Moore and Ian Nicholas, OnBook has staged works by Neil Simon, Joe Penhall, and Yasmina Reza, as well as original plays like The Elephant Song. But with Aged in Wood, the company is making a deliberate shift. “Aged in Wood is the first original play to be produced by OnBook Theatre,” Moore says. “It is always very exciting to direct a new play and bring it to life for the first time with the actors and creative team.”

Going forward, original writing will be the company’s focus. “New writing is incredibly important to keep theatre alive,” Moore says. “There are so many new stories to tell, which is why OnBook Theatre has made a commitment to produce all new work. In fact, Red Peppers will most likely be the last time we produce a revival. Everything we have planned for the rest of 2025 and 2026 is solely new writing.”

“There are so many new stories to tell, which is why OnBook Theatre has made a commitment to produce all new work.”

A Cast Bridging Eras and Styles

But Red Peppers was a deliberate exception — a kind of torch-passing. Coward’s play, brisk and barbed, sets the tone for Griffin’s follow-up. “Red Peppers by Noël Coward was a huge inspiration,” Moore says. “Where backstage antics can be ridiculous and funny, Aged in Wood combines comedy and pathos to give the audience a great deal of laughs and some tender heartfelt moments.”

That combination — old and new, absurd and sincere — shapes the cast’s challenge as well. Jessica Martin (whose credits include Spitting Image and the West End production of Sunset Boulevard) leads the ensemble, joined by Jon Osbaldeston, Emma Vansittart, John Craggs, Dominic McChesney, and Rhys Cannon. “We really focused on the use of modern costumes and language,” Moore says, “as this certainly helps the actors to ‘travel’ from the 1930s to present day.”

What connects these actors across the two plays isn’t just a shared dressing room, but a shared exploration of ego, failure, and hope. “Hopefully, it will highlight that modern plays and classic plays can work together seamlessly,” Moore says, “as long as the writing is good.”

Behind the Curtain: Craft, Chaos, and Collaboration

That message — about craft, continuity, and collaboration — underscores OnBook’s approach. And it finds a fitting metaphor in the theatre dressing room itself: a confined space where transformation happens daily, under pressure, with only a curtain separating chaos from performance.

As Moore puts it: “As a child, I always wanted to run backstage and watch from the wings, see the costumes up close, the smell of the greasepaint, the sets moving into place, the props table. And of course, all the backstage stories with the cast.”

Images supplied by show PR