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2-4 May 1968
The playbill seems to be the only surviving record of the Players’ production of Somerset Maugham’s third-last play. It is a comedy written in 1930, focusing on Charles Battle, who faces bankruptcy following the previous year’s stock market crash. Maugham hides the disaster facing Charles for much of the play, when we learn what the effect would be on his wife and teenage children. Judy Battle’s line “since the war the amateurs have entirely driven the professionals out of business. No girl can make a decent living now by prostitution” was cut in the original West End run for fear that the play would fall foul of the censorious Lord Chamberlain. |