For Services Rendered

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.