best play beforeOur Betters, was one of the famous “four at one time” plays of his early triumph. Maugham had decided that the way to a playhouse manager’s heart was through interesting an actress in her part, and he wrote Lady Frederick with this scheme in mind. His formula was to present the average woman’s ideal, a heroine who is a good-hearted, titled adventuress, a “wanton of impeccable virtue” who gets her way in everything. The managers saw his point, but neither an American nor a British actress would touch a part that called for her to appear onstage neither dressed for the day nor with her hair arranged nor with her makeup on. Not until 1907, when Otho Stuart, manager of the Royal Court Theatre, unexpectedly needed a stopgap play, did Lady Frederick get produced. It was a smash hit; just how Stuart persuaded an actress to take the part is not clear. The previously rejected Jack Straw (written in 1905), Mrs. Dot (written in 1904), and The Explorer (written in 1899) joined Lady Frederick on the stage in 1908; all but The Explorer enjoyed good runs.

Lady Frederick, potboiler or no, is good theater, a combination of bedroom and drawing-room comedy shot through with the witty repartee that makes comparison with Wilde as inevitable as it is misleading. The essentially trifling game of sorting out partners is played against a background of the romantic and decadent habits of the upper classes. Two scenes in particular fit Maugham’s theory of “big scenes” comedy. In one, Lady Frederick, whose great talent is to charm whomever she pleases, turns away the wrath of an unpaid dressmaker by treating her as a social equal. In the second, Lady Frederick invites her stripling suitor, “Charlie,” the marquess of Mereston, to her dressing room, where she treats him to the dubious spectacle of a middle-aged woman transforming herself from a morning fright into the artificially youthful charmer who had infatuated him. The scene was an impressive, if shocking, success.

Our Betters

Our Betters, produced nearly a decade later, is much superior to Lady Frederick in technique and impact. Although it deals with an infinitely small segment of humanity—wealthy, title-hunting American women and their foreign husbands and gigolos—it offers universal insights concerning sexuality, idleness, ignorance, and egocentric indifference.

Pearl, Lady Grayston, heads a set of self-exiled American women. Her lover, who financially backs her social climbing, is a gross, not quite brutal, extremely wealthy American businessman. Into this environment of false values and sensual abandon wanders Bessie Saunders, Pearl’s younger sister. She and her rejected suitor, Fleming Harvey, act as commentators on the action, as she gradually comes to see the corruption of this imitation European society that at first attracts her. Pearl, who is caught flagrante delicto with an English adventurer, brazenly brings her set to heel again through a series of shabby tricks. Only Bessie and Fleming escape, after Bessie makes a scathing denunciation of the uselessness of the women who are now neither Americans nor the aristocrats they pathetically ape. Interspersed with this intrigue are scenes in which the misery of people who marry for false reasons and the hopelessness of women who have been brought up to no purpose is examined. On the whole, the play denounces the human waste produced by a frivolous, even a vicious, civilization that puts wealth and leisure into the hands of people who have neither the responsibility, the education, nor the instincts to employ it creatively.

Home and Beauty

Home and Beauty, which was produced in the United States as Too Many Husbands, is an example of Maugham’s romping farce. The play revolves around a selfish young woman whose first husband was reported killed in World War I and who married his best friend shortly thereafter; she has had a child by each. When the first husband shows up from the dead, there is surprisingly little conflict. Stage irony develops as it becomes clear that neither man is keen to become the official husband, and a ménage à trois creaks along until the wife, to their untold relief, decides to divorce them both. If there is social commentary at all, it is aimed at the antiquated English divorce laws, which are ruthlessly parodied in the last act.

The Constant Wife

The Constant Wife is a nearly perfect example of drawing-room comedy, but it is also clearly a play of ideas. It reverses the plot of William Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew (pr. c. 1593) in that the wife tames the philandering husband and makes him agree to her “sauce for the gander” fling with her lover before settling down to a marriage of equals. It also works with the theme of the “new woman,” a staple from Henrik Ibsen and George Bernard Shaw. The point is that a wife is in honor bound to be faithful to her husband so long as she is financially dependent on him, the more so because wealth, servants, and modern conveniences have robbed her of all meaningful domestic functions. Financially independent, however, she is free to love where she chooses. Although the play inevitably suggests Ibsen’s Et dukkehjem (pr., pb. 1879; A Doll’s House, 1880), it is notably different in that Constance achieves her independence before making her gesture of defiance. The gesture may seem somewhat tawdry, but it is more satisfying than kissing and making up would be.

The Breadwinner

The Breadwinner is another study of marriage conventions. A husband-father revolts from his conventional role of the taken-for-granted provider and from the meaningless life thrust on him as a stockbroker. His children grown and his wife provided for, he simply leaves to lead his own life in America without a twinge of conscience. The picture of the parasitic wife and the egocentric, unloving children is a devastating commentary on the “lives of quiet desperation” led by most men. The husband points up his plight as a taken-for-granted provider when he observes that people are quite able to accept other people’s sacrifices without feeling much pain, in spite of their protestations to the contrary.

For Services Rendered

For Services Rendered, one of Maugham’s last four plays—plays written, he said, to “suit himself”—is perhaps his bitterest. In it, he examines the plight of one war veteran who is blind and another who will be financially ruined by the indifference of people who profited from his sacrifices and who could help him if they would. The play closes on a mad scene in which a daughter dances and sings patriotic songs while her father mouths the most blithering platitudes about home and family.

St. John Ervine disliked the play, arguing that the Ardsleys were made unnecessarily spineless simply to serve the needs of the satire. Even so, he declared it to be “a moving and sincere tragedy, with moments of great beauty.” John Fielden was yet more perceptive: He saw that, through the focus of a nation’s self-serving disregard for the welfare of its returned soldiers, Maugham was making a point against a larger attitude that allows people to “bravely make light of the suffering of others.”

Sheppey

Sheppey, Maugham’s last play, is a sort of morality play, fantasy, and allegory combined; it turns on the question of what would happen to an ordinary person who accidentally became enormously wealthy and decided to dispose of that wealth on strictly Christian principles. The answer is that the world would follow his family in declaring him mad. John Fielden rejected the play as weak, while Desmond MacCarthy found Sheppey a highly sympathetic character in whom theatergoers could take refuge from the otherwise too bitter satire. He saw it as a mark of Maugham’s skill that he could make Sheppey sympathetic without sentimentalizing him. Richard Ward paid a high compliment indeed in declaring that, while Sheppey was far from Maugham’s best play, none better achieved the purpose of art, the expression of spiritual reality in material terms.

The Circle

The Circle is generally considered to be Maugham’s masterpiece. It combines the often brutal wit of drawing-room comedy with drama of ideas. Once more, the upper classes and their marriage habits are the target of satire. The aftermath of the elopement of a married woman, who is willing to give up child, reputation, position, and security for the companionship of the man she loves, is placed under microscopic observation. Some thirty years after the elopement, she returns to her son’s country house with her lover and encounters, unexpectedly, the man who is still legally her husband. Age has not been kind to the wife, a former beauty, or to her lover, a politician of great promise gone to seed, and worse, in self-imposed exile. In contrast, the husband has aged well, though beneath his facade of cleverness and self-satisfaction lurks a selfish bitterness. The abandoned son is himself a rising politician; his wife is bored with him and is planning an elopement in her turn. Attempts are made to dissuade her. First her father-in-law and then the mother-in-law and her lover cut to ribbons the notion of romantic love, painting a picture of the slow horror of a life in adulterous exile. The knowledge that their class code ties them together more inescapably than marriage laws rankles both of the aging lovers. Yet, even after seeing what silly, shallow, unhappy people their lives have made them—the mother-in-law, a painted harridan, and her lover, a testy, bridge-playing drunk—the daughter-in-law decides to elope and does so with the aid of the older couple. The play closes with their knowing laughter coupled with the blind laughter of the now twice-duped father-in-law.

The Circle, then, examines English marriage laws, the codes of love in upper-level social circles, and, very quietly, the notion that women will achieve equality with men only when they can earn their living exactly as men do. Meanwhile, they are condemned to a degrading marriage or to a romantic flight to a situation that is at least equally degrading. The circle is fortune’s wheel—there is no getting off it, and eventually it smashes its riders.