British actor and playwright Noel Coward in the original 1936 production of Tonight at 8:30, his cycle of 10 one-act plays. (Sasha/Getty Images)Say the name "Noël Coward" and the first picture that comes to mind is of the idle English upper class, lounging about in dressing gowns, tossing back cocktails and tossing off bons mots.

'People don't immediately think of Noël Coward as subversive, but in many ways he was. Many of his plays got banned first time around.'

—Jackie Maxwell

Coward's plays and songs have come to epitomize brilliant light entertainment, decadent escapism that reached its peak in the Depression-battered 1930s. He's the man with multiple "talents to amuse," who penned such giddy romantic comedies as Hay Fever, Private Lives and Blithe Spirit, and classic novelty tunes like Mad Dogs and Englishmen, a breathless lyrical tongue-twister that even the Barenaked Ladies would find daunting.

But that elegantly frivolous image, which Coward himself cultivated in his legendary cabaret performances, is simply a glittering surface. It hides considerable breadth and depth. In his long and fecund career, the British actor-playwright-composer (1899-1973) enjoyed success with everything from operettas (Bitter Sweet) to sordid dramas (The Vortex) to historical pageants (Cavalcade). He won a special Oscar for writing, producing and starring in the patriotic war film In Which We Serve (1942). He also turned his hand to short stories, a novel and three volumes of memoirs. Artistically, his elliptical dialogue anticipated "serious" British playwrights like Harold Pinter, while his subject matter often ventured slyly into once-forbidden territory.

Jackie Maxwell, artistic director of Canada's Shaw Festival. (David Cooper/Shaw Festival) "In a lot of cases, he was pushing envelopes," says Jackie Maxwell, artistic director of Canada's Shaw Festival, which is mounting an ambitious Coward play cycle this year. "I don't think people immediately think of Noël Coward as subversive, but in fact in many ways he was – certainly in terms of his sexual mores and sexual politics. Many of his plays got banned first time around and he'd have to do rewrites."

Maxwell has become a Coward fan in recent years, dating back to the festival's 2006 revival of Design for Living. When she went back to reread that 1932 play for the first time since university, the Irish-born director realized Coward was using his trademark persiflage to write covertly about a bisexual ménage à trois. "I brought my then-16-year-old daughter with me to the opening," Maxwell recalls, "and she was blown away. She turned to me and said, 'I can't believe this play was written when it was written!'"

This year, the Shaw is giving audiences a rich – and rare – smorgasbord of Coward. The festival is producing the entire Tonight at 8:30, a collection of 10 one-act plays that Coward wrote in 1935 as vehicles for himself and co-star Gertrude Lawrence. Designed to show off the duo's versatility as actors, the plays also showcase his diversity as a dramatist.

"With the one-acts, you get to see how he played with so many different genres," Maxwell says. Presented at the festival in three bundles of three, plus one lunch-hour show, the 10 plays run the gamut from Coward's signature drawing-room comedy to slice-of-life drama, from offbeat musical fantasy to Victorian satire. There's even a tragedy, The Astonished Heart, involving obsessive love and suicide.

The Shaw is the first professional company to stage all 10 plays together in repertory. Maxwell says the inspiration came when she read in a Coward biography that he'd always regretted the complete cycle had never been presented. "I thought, 'Who the hell else could do this?' We certainly could."

Patrick Galligan and Deborah Hay star in Still Life from the Shaw Festival's Brief Encounters, part of the Tonight at 8:30 series. (David Cooper/Shaw Festival) Since Coward didn't write the plays to be performed in any set order, Maxwell has grouped them to show off his range. She's also tailored each trio to suit a different Shaw venue. The best-known of the plays, Still Life – a wistful tale of suburban adultery that was turned into the classic 1946 film Brief Encounter – runs in the main Festival Theatre. It anchors a threesome that also includes We Were Dancing, a rom-com with a musical interlude, and the chaotic society comedy Hands Across the Sea. Maxwell is directing them under the umbrella title Brief Encounters; now in previews, they open May 20 to kick off the festival season.

The second batch will debut in July at the festival's traditional musical venue, the Royal George Theatre. Titled Play, Orchestra, Play, they consist of the musical fantasy Shadow Play and the music-hall pastiche Red Peppers, along with Fumed Oak, a domestic farce. Christopher Newton, the Shaw's artistic director emeritus, is staging them. Maxwell has put the "edgiest" plays – The Astonished Heart, the black comedy Family Album and the gambling farce Ways and Means – in the festival's more experimental space, the Court House Theatre. Directed by up-and-comer Blair Williams, they open in August under the collective title Ways of the Heart. The 10th play, Star Chamber, a send-up of the acting profession, begins running in June as a lunchtime program at the Royal George, and is directed by Kate Lynch.

The cycle won't just display Coward's breadth as a playwright. Shaw music director Paul Sportelli has seen to it that the productions are steeped in Coward tunes. He and his fellow sound designers – Ryan De Souza, John Gzowski and Reza Jacobs – are drawing heavily on the composer's songbook, augmenting the numbers written for the plays with other classics like World Weary.

Noel Coward, left, and Gertrude Lawrence in Private Lives; Coward wrote Tonight at 8:30 as a showcase for their talents. (Sasha/Getty Images) Sportelli, a composer whose credits include the multi-award-winning musical Little Mercy's First Murder, says he's come to appreciate Coward's songwriting prowess. "I think his music could be taken a little more seriously than it is," Sportelli says. "There's incredible depth to what he does." Coward, who famously wrote about the potency of "cheap music," was a master at everything from comic numbers to torch songs. Some of them have held up remarkably well. (Check out Jessica Biel's version of Mad About the Boy, from a new film of Coward's play Easy Virtue, or Pet Shop Boys' classy cover of If Love Were All.)

"He really covers a wide emotional terrain in his songs," Sportelli says. "If you want a song that is deeply about heartbreak or life's complexities, you can find that in a Coward lyric. Or you can ignore that and just enjoy the witticisms and lovely turns of phrase."

The full Tonight at 8:30 canon will be up and running by late July. For theatregoers with stamina, the festival is doing three marathon showings in August and September, where all 10 can be seen in one day. "They're virtually sold out," Maxwell says of the marathons, dubbed Mad Dogs and Englishmen. "It seems there's actually enough crazy people who want to do it."

Maxwell admits that the Coward cycle is partly a marketing gimmick. Although the festival had a financially successful season last year, increased competition from the big names at the nearby Stratford Shakespeare Festival, as well as Toronto's classics-oriented Soulpepper Theatre, has her on the lookout for potential audience draws. "There's no doubt that, as I thought about [doing Tonight at 8:30], I thought this could really garner attention and maybe bring in some people who haven't come here before."

As they were in the 1930s, the plays could also be a welcome diversion in a time of economic crisis. "Funnily enough," Maxwell says, "I had a board member who said, 'Did you choose these Coward plays when the world went berserk in the fall?'" In fact, she'd chosen them a year previously. "So there was no sense of doing [the cycle] as, 'Oh my God, the world needs a good time, let's give them Noël Coward.' But certainly, now, I'm hoping it will be an inviting thing for people to see."

Tonight at 8:30: Brief Encounters runs to Oct. 24; Play, Orchestra, Play runs June 9-Oct. 31; Star Chamber runs June 25-Oct. 11; Ways of the Heart runs July 21-Oct. 11, at the Shaw Festival in Niagara-on-the-Lake, Ont.

Martin Morrow writes about the arts for CBCNews.ca.