When For Services Rendered opened at the Globe Theatre in London in 1932, audiences were not prepared for its anti-war focus. As a result, the play closed after just 78 performances. As Ted Morgan argues in his biography on Maugham, the play is “an indictment of a whole nation. . . . The patriots and promise-makers, the apostles of a better world, were shown up as rogues and hypocrites.”

For Services Rendered: British soldiers of the East Lancashire Regiment in a trench during World War I [graphic graphicname="TIF00181635" orient="landscape" size="B"]

Anthony Curtis, in his introduction to the play, writes that “the London critics damned it with qualified praise.” He cites one such critic, Charles Morgan, writing anonymously in The Times, that “Mr. Maugham has given us an enthralling theatrical entertainment, if nothing more.” Curtis notes that in The Spectator, Peter Fleming concluded that Maugham tries too hard to blame the war for all of the problems that the characters face. Fleming writes that,

Other reviewers were much more harsh. Curtis quotes enraged novelist Cecil Roberts who ranted in his article, “Should Maugham Get Away With It?” for The Daily Express, “It is worse than a bad play. . . . It is a play of malevolent propaganda against those who live with courage and hope.” Yet in response, Wimbledon tennis champion Bunny Austin wrote an eloquent defense of the play to the paper a few days later. Some reviewers, like Desmond MacCarthy in the New Statesman and John Pollock in the Saturday Review considered it to be his best play.

The play’s reputation has increased since its first production. Curtis notes that its 1979 production by the Royal National Theatre was hailed by many in the press as Maugham’s “theatrical masterpiece.” He adds, “At this distance of time, the play appears as a microcosmic image of what Auden later described as ‘a low dishonest decade.’” M. K. Naik, in his study of Maugham’s work, finds “a greater mellowness; and the awareness of the graver issues of life” than in Maugham’s previous work. Laurence Brander, in his guide to Maugham, insists that the play “was much too accurate a picture to be a success on the stage” and concludes, “It is a bitter picture of a macabre world which is realized in this very expert piece of writing.”