John Mortimer is not alone among contemporary playwrights in being at his best in his one-act plays. The same is true of writers as diverse as Ionesco and Peter Shaffer but for very different reasons. With Mr. Mortimer it is not an inability to sustain the development of a character over three acts—he does that quite well with Sam Turner in Two Stars for Comfort—but his plot nearly always depends on a narrative structure very much like that of an anecdote. The pattern is a simple one and could easily be spoiled by over-elaboration. The murderer is reprieved because the barrister, so talkative in the cell, becomes too tongue-tied to defend him. The private detective who can find no evidence against the woman he is shadowing starts by dating her and ends by proposing to her. The lunch-hour lovers get so involved in arguing about the fiction the man invents for the hotel manageress that they have no time to go to bed. In his dramatization of stories like these, Mr. Mortimer does succeed, to some extent, in capturing the flavour of some of the anachronisms of the Macmillan era the half-hearted rearguard action fought by middle-aged middle-class failures trying to pretend that everything was still going to be all right. Mr. Mortimer himself has enormous affection for these incompetent barristers, helpless private detectives, shabby schoolteachers, unloved waitresses and unsuccessful seducers—so much affection, in fact that he loads his own charm on all of them. This has the advantage of making them all lovable and entertaining and the disadvantage of making them all rather too much like each other and rather mannered in their use of words. The dialogue in his four new one-act plays, Come As You Are, is less self-conscious than it is in the [one-act plays collected in Five Plays], and the language in the latest of these, Collect Your Hand Baggage, is already less artificial than in the earliest, The Dock Brief and What Shall We Tell Caroline? But it is hard to see how Mr. Mortimer got his reputation for writing realistic dialogue.