The Circle (play)
The Circle: a Comedy in Three Acts is a play by W. Somerset Maugham that premiered at Haymarket, London on 3 March 1921, with a cast including Fay Compton, Allan Aynesworth and Ernest Thesiger.[1] It is a comedy of manners that has been described as "a rewrite of Lady Windermere's Fan a quarter of a century later in a post World War I atmosphere."[2]
The action of the play takes place over a single day at Aston-Adey, a stately home in Dorset. The protagonists are:
- Arnold Champion-Cheney, M.P., a man of about thirty-five
- Elizabeth, his wife
- Clive Champion-Cheney, Arnold's father
- Lady Catherine Champion-Cheney, Arnold's mother
- Lord Porteous, current husband of Lady Catherine Champion-Cheney
- Edward Luton, a planter in the Federated Malay States
At the beginning of the play, the house-proud Arnold Champion-Cheney is dreading the first visit of his mother and her new husband, who left England for Italy under the shadow of a scandal after divorcing his father many years before. Arnold's wife, Elizabeth, is looking forward to meeting Lady Catherine, who she sees as a romantic figure for having sacrificed her social position in England for love.
Meanwhile, Elizabeth is tempted to repeat history by eloping with Teddy Luton, a friend of her husband, aware that in doing so she would be sacrificing a comfortable life in England for the probable hardships of life as a planter's wife in Malaya.
Reception
The Circle was "the first of Maugham's plays to be booed".[3] However, it received glowing reviews from the critics and was wildly successful commercially, bringing in $20,000 a week during its run in New York.[4] Louis Kronenberger hailed it as "one of the very few creditable high comedies written in English in the 20th century".
Adaptations
The play was adapted for the cinema as The Circle (1925 film).
