[Prefaces to The Collected Plays, 3 vols., Heinemann, 1952; first published in 1931-34, 6 vols.:]

The first three plays in this volume were written to be produced. At the beginning of the century, though the managers as now were complaining of the dearth of plays, it was even more difficult than at present for an unknown dramatist to get one accepted. […] The only organisation that offered the untried author a chance was the Stage Society; and even this was more inclined to give performance to a foreign play that was supposed to be too advanced for the general public than encouragement to an English author. It was the Stage Society, however, that produced my first play. I knew no one connected with it. I was obscure. The committee took it on its merits. I shall always be grateful to it.

The play was called A Man of Honour. […] The critics judged it according to their preconceptions. The more conventional abused it heartily; the earnest students of drama praised it. Et ego in Arcadia vixi: I too have been a highbrow. I have not looked at it for more than forty years and I think it must have been somewhat ridiculous. […] I could not help noticing that a play produced by the Stage Society did not lead to very much. After the two performances they gave it and the notices in the press it was as dead as mutton. I felt a trifle flat after the production of A Man of Honour. I looked reflectively at the Thames and was conscious that I had not set it on fire. I badly wanted to write plays that would be seen not only by a handful of people. I wanted money and I wanted fame. I did not know then that success on the stage can only bring notoriety. But it was not without misgiving that I turned to comedy.

[…]

Stifling then my honourable scruples I sat down and wrote a comedy which I called Loaves and Fishes. The chief character was the fashionable vicar of a London parish. It was refused by every manager to whom it was sent on the ground that the public would not care to see the cloth held up to ridicule. I found somewhat to my dismay that the small success I had had at the Stage Society had done me harm rather than good with the managers. They read my plays with prejudice; after A Man of Honour they were pretty well convinced that I should never write anything that had a penny in it. They were not alone. Max Beerbohm, walking with me on the pleasant lawns of Merton Abbey, earnestly besought me to give up a hopeless endeavour. In his gracious, flattering way he told me that I had a mind too delicate, a sensitiveness too refined, ever to succeed in the vulgar scramble of the stage. He little knew. I was young, poor and determined. I reflected upon the qualities which the managers demanded in a play: evidently a comedy, for the public wished to laugh; with as much drama as it would carry, for the public liked a thrill; with a little sentiment, for the public liked to feel good; and a happy ending. I realised that I should have more chance to get a play accepted if I wrote a star part for an actress, for women are persuasive; and it seemed to me that if I could devise a part than an actress very much wanted to play it was probable that she would get a manager to let her. I asked myself what sort of part would be most likely to tempt a leading lady. Leading ladies are human. I asked myself what sort of woman the average woman would like to be. The answer was obvious: the adventuress with a heart of gold; titled, for the sex is peculiarly susceptible to the glamour of romance; the charming spendthrift and the wanton of impeccable virtue; the clever manager who twists all and sundry round her little finger and the kindly and applauded wit. Having made up my mind upon this the rest was easy. I wrote Lady Frederick. But it had in the third act a scene in which the heroine had to appear dishevelled, with no make-up on, and have her hair done while she arranged her face before the audience. No actress would look at it. One, when urged to play the part, stamped her pretty foot and said the suggestion was the greatest insult that she had ever had to put up with. Another said it was hardly the thing a lady would do.

[…]

While Lady Frederick was being refused by manager after manager I wrote another play, and this time, profiting by experience, I decided that I would write nothing that anyone could possibly take objection to. I made use of the same principles that had served me in Lady Frederick, but I made my heroine even more virtuous; her reputation was unblemished and she did nothing that was not perfectly nice. I did everything I could to make my play innocuous. Sometimes as I wrote I had an uneasy feeling that I was overdoing it. I asked myself whether I was not riding the banal too hard. I finished the play and started it on its journey. This was Mrs. Dot. It was refused as uniformly as Lady Frederick had been. The managers praised the dialogue, but complained that there was not enough action, and one suggested that I should put in a burglary. I did not see my way to this.

[…]

Since these plays introduced me to the stage I think it would be ungrateful to leave them out of this edition, but I am well aware of their defects and it would be absurd to write about them at length. Their success made the managers eager to take other plays, and the three that follow in this volume were written on commission to suit certain actors, Penelope for Marie Tempest, Smith for Miss Marie Lohr and Robert Loraine and The Land of Promise for Irene Vanbrugh. I think they show some slight advance in skill and perhaps The Land of Promise might still hold an audience. They established me as the most popular dramatist of the day. But not long after I had achieved this somewhat spectacular success an unfortunate incident befell me. I knew from long experience that the way of the literary man was hard; and when I was asked for interviews saw no harm in giving others opportunity to earn a few guineas at so little inconvenience to myself. But straightaway, often in the very paper that had published the interview I found myself abused for self-advertising, (though everyone knows that no amount of writing about it can save a play that does not please, whereas one that does needs no more advertising than the entertainment it gives to succeeding audiences), or censured for venturing on the strength of three or four trivial pieces to express my view on the subject, only to be treated with reverence, of the British drama. I thought it hardly fair that these gentlemen of the press should have it both ways: you are not obliged to ask a man to dinner, but if you do it seems ungracious to call him a parasite because he accepts. I made up my mind consequently to follow the course that was least trouble to myself – it is a very good rule for getting through life comfortably – and declined thenceforward the flattering importunities of the interviewer. But since I was adopting an attitude, a process that is forced upon everyone who has relations with the public, I preferred to give it a certain completeness: I determined not again to appear before the curtain on first nights, (a vulgar practice only to be excused by its antiquity,) and never to write letters to newspapers.

[…]

I was blamed also for my fertility, which is a merit, it appears, only in the dead, but when I look back I am astounded at my moderation. I had always half a dozen plays in my head, and when a theme presented itself to me it did so divided into scenes and acts, with each ‘curtain’ staring me in the face, so that I should have had no difficulty in beginning a new play the day after I had finished the one I was engaged on. If I did not write six a year it is only because it would have bored me. I have always written with pains and care, but I am an improviser. Some writers beat out their matter little by little, they write and write again, they add something here and something there; they put their work together like the pieces of a mosaic; and I am prepared to believe that so they achieve sometimes an excellence that the improviser cannot hope for. With him it is hit or miss. I daresay the elaborator gets nearer perfection, but the improviser perhaps has a greater spontaneity and he preserves the freshness of any inspiration he may have. Anyhow he has not made himself, and he must make the best of what gifts he has. Fertility is one of his compensations. I have often tried writing scenes again, but have found that I wrote not better but merely different ones.

[…]

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The three plays following are placed in the order in which they were written. Our Betters, though it was not acted in London till 1923, and then only with a scene at the end of the second act altered to suit the exigencies of Lord Chamberlain, was written in Rome at the beginning of 1915. When at last it was produced I extracted a certain amount of discreet amusement from such of the critics as found in it a development of the characteristics that they had discovered in plays produced before but written much later. I may add in passing that in this edition I have reverted to my original version. It was more probable and I do not see that it was more shocking. In the few years that have passed audiences have become used to greater frankness, and if the play were revived I have little doubt that the word slut used by one of the characters, which made the spectators on the first night gasp with horror, would now fail entirely to express the speaker’s indignation. The Unattainable was produced under the name Caroline, and it gave Irene Vanbrugh the opportunity for one of the best performances of her distinguished career. […] I wrote it in Geneva during the autumn of 1915. I was engaged in work for the Intelligence Department which the Swiss authorities did not approve of, and my predecessor had had a nervous breakdown owing to the strain it put upon his temperament, more sensitive than mine, to break the law; my colleague at Lausanne had lately been sent to prison for two years. I did not know how political prisoners were treated and I had no notion whether, should such an unpleasant fate befall me, I should be allowed pens and paper. I hated the idea of leaving the play unfinished, and I knew it would be very difficult to take it up again after a long interval. It was a great relief to me when I wrote the last line. […] I do not know that it is an author’s business to point to his readers the defects of his work, but if I were a critic I should perhaps feel it my duty to make the observation that the play is really finished by the end of the first act. What follows might have very well been left to the imagination of the reader.

The same stern critic might make the same objection to Home and Beauty, the third play in this volume, and in each case the answer might be given, in extenuation, that a certain number of diverting scenes do what is possible to atone for the failure to adhere to the strict canons of the drama. Home and Beauty was written in a sanatorium during the last winter of the war. I had escaped a Swiss prison, but the work I was engaged in had much exposed me to the rigours of a singularly bad winter and I had contracted tuberculosis of the lungs. This had been aggravated by a sojourn in Russia, and when on the seizure of power by the Bolsheviks I was obliged to come back to England, I was feeling very sorry for myself. It was impossible then to go to Davos or St. Moritz, so I went to Scotland. It was a very pleasant life at Nordrach-on-Dee. I was sent to bed every day at six o’clock, and an early dinner gave me a long evening to myself. The cold, windless night entered the room through the wide-open windows, and with mittens on my hands so that I could comfortably hold a pen, it was an admirable opportunity to write a farce. For Home and Beauty pretends to be nothing more.

[…]

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I have little to say of the three last plays in this volume. The Circle is generally thought the best play I have written. I have always thought that the device suggested by Clive Champion-Cheney to his son to prevent Elizabeth from running away not very happy. I should have liked at that point a more substantial dramatic invention. The Constant Wife was a failure in London. It was a great success in America, in the foreign countries where it has been produced and even in the provincial towns in England in which it has been from time to time acted. Where it has been successful it has been much praised by the critics. Not of course because they were influenced by its success, but because a play consists of the words, the production and the audience; and the failure of one of the parties concerned may make the difference between a good play and a bad one.

Caesar’s Wife was suggested by Madame Lafayette’s La Princesse de Clèves. It is one of the most exquisite novels that has ever been written. Short though it is and written in the restrained manner of the time, for it is contemporary with the tragedies of Racine, it is in the grand style. The theme is tragic, the triumph of will over passion, and it is unfolded with a delicate subtlety that was new to fiction. Indeed, it is according to the critics with this little book that the psychological novel was born. The story is not very well known, I think, to English readers of the present day, so that I may be forgiven, perhaps, if I briefly narrate it. Monsieur de Clèves had fallen in love with his wife at first sight, but was well aware that she had for him no more than affection; but his respect and admiration for her were so great that when, inviting his aid in her distress, she told him that she loved another, he accepted her confession with sympathy. The drama lies in the effort of Monsieur de Clèves to overcome his jealousy and in his wife’s to master her passion. It is beautiful to see the skill with which Madame de Lafayette depicts the gradual disintegration of this great gentleman’s character. He has the decorum of the grand siècle, that lively sense of what he owes his own dignity, and something of that stoical heroism which his contemporaries learnt from Corneille or which he discovered in the world around him; he is exasperated at his inability to crush a vice that he despises, but human nature is too strong for him, and by degrees he becomes mean, petty, suspicious and irritable. The situation is unfolded with sobriety, the tone is never raised above that seemly to persons of good breeding; there is no vehemence, and the expression of the most violent emotion is kept within the bounds of propriety. But the emotion is deep and true.

I thought that it would be interesting to treat this theme in a modern way. I had been often reproached for writing only about unpleasant people, and though I did not think the reproach justified, I was not averse from trying to write a play in which all the characters were estimable. I thought it possible to devise a piece in which the persons were virtuous without being insipid and in which duty and honour triumphed over temperament. But it was not in my plan to make my hero succumb feebly to a passion he disdained. Monsieur de Clèves, making too great a demand on human nature, fails in a dozen small ways; it is true to life, but, such is our own weakness, it makes him in the end somewhat antipathetic. […] He had not indeed the strength of character to play the heroic part for which he had cast himself. I did not see why a man should not play it to the end if he had courage, tolerance and self-control; but tolerance and self-control are virtues that the old learn, they seldom come naturally to the young; so I made my hero an elderly man. This further explained and excused the wife’s infatuation for the pleasant young secretary. […] And since honour, which was a reasonable motive for action in the seventeenth century and which, I suppose, is nothing more than self-respect, would in these days fail to convince, I brought in patriotism to help me to make Violet’s abnegation reasonable. By doing this, of course, I limited the success of the play to this country, since patriotism is a motive that does not travel; it is faintly ridiculous to a German or an American than an Englishman should make sacrifices to England. Caesar’s Wife will to me remain a pleasing memory for the beautiful performance that Miss Fay Compton gave in the part of Violet. The gesture with which she held out her arms to her lover after she had sent him away for good and all and he had miserably gone, had a grace tenderness and beauty the like of which I have before or since seen on the stage.

East of Suez purports to be a play of spectacle. I had long wanted to try my hand at something of the sort and a visit to China presented me with an appropriate setting. The bare bones of a story that I had for twenty years from time to time turned over in my mind, recurred to me. It seemed very well suited to my purpose. I kept my ears open and from this person and that heard little incidents that fitted in with my scheme and gave it the fullness, colour and variety that it needed. […] In a play of this sort, in which exotic and beautiful scenery is used to divert the eye and crowds to give movement and colour, it is evident that the spectacle should be an integral part of the theme. Looking back, I realise that in my inexperience I did not always adhere to the canon and in this edition I have omitted a marriage procession which I inserted because I thought this common sight in a Chinese city picturesque and amusing, but which had nothing to do with my story. On the other hand, I cannot think that anyone who saw the play will have forgotten the thrill and strangeness of the mob of Chinese, monks and neighbours, who crowded in when the wounded man was brought in after the attempted assassination in the fourth scene. With their frightened gestures and their low, excited chatter they produced an effect of great dramatic tension.

In The Sacred Flame I attempted a greater elaboration of dialogue than I had been in the habit of using. In certain passages I tried, quite deliberately, to make my characters use not the words and expressions that they would have used in real life on the spur of the moment and in the give and take of conversation, but words and expressions that they might have used if they had had time to set their thoughts in order. Several very good critics blamed my dialogue for being ‘literary’, more suitable to a novel than to the stage, and I realised myself, on hearing it with an audience, that it was sometimes none too easy to speak. I did not insist. I was in the position of the tenant of a house whose lease is running; even though he finds certain things about it inconvenient, it is not worth his while to attempt structural alterations.

[…]

For some years I had had in mind the four plays with which I proposed to finish my career as a practising dramatist. I was prepared to write them only on this account, for I did not think any of them was likely to succeed and I knew how difficult it was for a dramatist to recover a popularity that he had lost. I was much surprised that The Sacred Flame and The Breadwinner had a considerable success. I expected nothing of For Services Rendered. During the rehearsals of this piece I amused myself by devising the way in which it might have been written to achieve popularity. Any dramatist will see how easily the changes could have been made. The characters had only to be sentimentalised a little to affect their behaviour at the crucial moments of the play and everything might have ended happily. The audience could have walked out of the theatre feeling that war was a very unfortunate business, but that notwithstanding God was in his heaven and all was right with the world; there was nothing to flash oneself about and haddock a la crème and a dance would finish the evening very nicely. But it would not have been the play I wished to write.

The Unknown was produced immediately after the First World War, and the circumstances of the time helped it to a certain success. I could not anticipate it, for in performance it turned out to have an error of construction that I had not seen. I took up again in it an idea I had used many years before in a forgotten novel called The Hero and the drama I saw in my mind’s eye lay in the conflict between two persons who loved one another and were divided by the simple piety of the one and the lost faith of the other. But to my surprise it appeared in representation that the drama lay in the arguments on one side and the other, and not at all in the personal relations of the characters. The result was that the play came to an end with the second act; the third consequently was meaningless and there was no trick or device I could think of that could make it significant.

Sheppey puzzled a good many of the critics. Some of them, strangely ignorant of the principles of the drama, reproached me because I had set a problem and had not solved it. The dramatist takes a situation and wrings out of it all the dramatic value he can. Sheppey does not set out to be a problem play; I should describe it as a sardonic comedy. When I wrote it I was aware that the last scene might displease. It seemed to me to be in the same vein as the rest of the play, and I did not think I was asking an audience to accept too much when I set before them a hallucination of Sheppey’s disordered brain. But it would be foolish not to recognise that they were as puzzled as the critics. I grew conscious that I was no longer in touch with the public that patronises the theatre. This happens in the end to most dramatists and they are wise to accept the warning. It is high time for them then to retire.

I did so with relief.

[…]

It is often said that a good actor can bring out of a character far more than the author ever put in it, and this is doubtless true, though it is more often the case that a bad actor brings out far less; but I do not know that this is a matter on which the author must necessarily congratulate himself. I once saw Mrs. Patrick Campbell give a magnificent performance of Hedda Gabler, but I think it would have driven Ibsen to distraction. She put so much into the part that he had never thought of that the character he had drawn was entirely obliterated. I should not like these remarks to be taken as a mark of ingratitude to the actors and actresses who have acted in my plays. To take only the plays in this volume, I can say that I have never seen such a moving performance as that of Haidee Wright in The Unknown, and that of Miss Flora Robson in For Services Rendered. My earlier plays owed much of their success to the deft comedy of Marie Tempest and to the great and versatile gifts of Irene Vanbrugh. I have spoken in a previous preface of Miss Fay Compton. I know how much I am indebted to Miss Gladys Cooper. She is as beautiful now as when she first went on the stage, and she has become an actress of extraordinary variety, emotional force and sensitiveness. She can play nothing without distinction.