Tonight at 8:30

Noel Coward provides three tales of domestic tribulation, some gatling-gun dialogue and "sophisticated wit," and several of Britain's most capable comic artists take it from there--to make the current Brattle fare well worth indulgence any time this week.

Tonight at 8:30 is a series of technicolor comedies keyhole-peeping into the lives of a husband-and-wife vaudeville team, a non-U family on London's seamier side, and a couple of young bon vivants broke in Southern France.

Into each of these lives there comes a crisis:

In "Red Peppers" (with Kay Walsh and Martita Hunt), a red-wigged song-and-dance team have a dressing-room brawl and on-stage run-in with the orchestra maestro--and while the curtain comes down the show goes on.

Stanley Holloway, a lower middle-class and long-enduring husband, returns home one evening slightly lubricated--to celebrate the night he got his wife in a "trouble" which took three years to develop.

And Martita Hunt returns in the concluding play as a middle-aged hostess to the international set, armed with elaborate paste jewelry and a burglar-chauffeur.

The color is a ruddy red, and the language is expectedly lively: HE (with a disdainful swipe at the brow): "I will return to the past, to the scenes of my childhood." SHE (inspecting her fingernails): "Well, I'm sorry I'm not your rocking horse."