Maugham Plays: Two: For Services Rendered, The Letter, Home and Beauty, and Lady Frederick

In this, the second volume comprised of Maugham's best works, the four plays in this selection provide significant evidence of the playwright's powers as a dramatist. For Services Rendered sheds a harrowing light on provincial middle-class England after the First World War. The Letter, a tense drama of sexual passion set in the Malay States, shows Maugham as the colonial storyteller. In contrast, Home and Beauty treats the marital complications of a returning war hero with Mozartian joie de vivre. W. Somerset Maugham established his reputation as a master of the social comedy in the tradition of Oscar Wilde with Lady Frederick in 1907.