For Services Rendered

Synopsis

Fifteen years after Armistice day Leonard Ardsley remarks: "I think the world is turning the corner... This old England of ours isn't done yet." Written in 1932, For Services Rendered poignantly dramatises provincial middle class English life in the depression after the Great War. Set in the picturesque Kentish village of Rambleton, it becomes a metaphor for the shattering effect of the Great War on British society. Written by a man who experienced first hand the horrors of this catastrophic conflict whilst serving as part of an ambulance unit behind Allied lines, the play asks what has happened to "the land fit for heroes' promised by Lloyd George. This scathing anti-comedy was described in 1932 by the Daily Express as: "a play of malevolent propaganda". It is now recognised as the dramatic masterpiece of one of the 20th century's most successful writers of prose and drama.

Our Review:

29 March 2007

W Somerset Maugham wrote his most immediate response to the horrors of war as eye-witness accounts in his Writer’s Notebooks during the First World War. The play For Services Rendered, his more considered response, came in the early Thirties, when economic depression meant unemployment for millions and the prescient could see war threatening again.

The family and friends who gather at the Ardsley’s comfortable Home Counties mansion may expect to find tea on the table promptly at five pm, but their cheerful exteriors and social niceties conceal so many souls in turmoil. Passion and lust, unrequited love and bankruptcy, and even terminal illness, all threaten what proves to be a fragile status quo.

Relationships and individuals break down. At the shocking climax, Sydney, the son of the family (a convincing Richard Clothier), who lost his sight winning a DSO “for services rendered” in the First World War, delivers Maugham’s devastating attack ...

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