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The Constant Wife | |
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Written by | W. Somerset Maugham |
Characters | Mrs. Culver Bentley Martha Culver Barbara Fawcett Constance Middleton Marie-Louise Durham John Middleton FRCS Bernard Kersal Mortimer Durham |
Date premiered | November 1, 1926 |
Place premiered | Ohio Theatre, Cleveland, Ohio |
Original language | English |
Genre | comedy of manners |
Setting | A house in Harley Street, 1920s |
The Constant Wife, a play written in 1926 by W. Somerset Maugham, is a comedy whose modern and amusing take on marriage and infidelity gives a quick-witted, alternative view on how to deal with an extramarital affair. [1]
A “sparkling comedy of ill manners”, [2] The Constant Wife features the resourceful and charming Constance Middleton, who has long known that her husband had been having an affair with her best friend, Marie-Louise. When the affair is publicly acknowledged, rather than reprimanding or divorcing him, she embraces the opportunity to create an independent life, starting a new job, paying her husband for room and board, and taking on her own lover.
The Constant Wife was later published for general sale in April 1927. [3]
The Constant Wife was most recently on Broadway in 2005, where Variety described it as "an antecedent to the women of Sex and the City ”. [4] The production's Kate Burton (Constance) and Lynn Redgrave (her mother) were nominated for Tony Awards.
Called one of Maugham’s “most clever and captivating creations”, [5] Constance is the calm, intelligent, and self-possessed wife of John Middleton, a successful London doctor. Knowing full well of her husband's infidelity with her best friend Marie-Louise, Constance purposefully pretends that she has no idea of the affair. When Marie-Louise's jealous husband publicly confronts Constance about their spouses’ affair, Constance protects both her husband and Marie-Louise by cleverly lying to disprove his evidence. She later reveals to her family that she has known of the affair all along, and further confounds them by demonstrating a total lack of sentiment on the subject of matrimony. Resolving to establish her own economic independence ("which she considers the only real independence"), she goes into business as an interior decorator with her friend Barbara. After taking London by storm in her new role, she determines to pay her husband for her room and board, and then announces she is going off for an Italian vacation with a longtime admirer. Her husband is, in turn, shocked and outraged at this turn of events, but finally capitulates to her outrageous charm—and to their unusual arrangement—as the curtain falls.
The play was first produced in Cleveland, Ohio, at the Ohio Theatre, on November 1, 1926, with Ethel Barrymore playing the title role, and Mabel Terry-Lewis and C. Aubrey Smith in support. It subsequently opened on Broadway, running for 295 performances, and was successfully toured by Ms. Barrymore afterwards. When the first edition of the play was published in 1927, Maugham dedicated it to her. Years later, he said that her performance was the best he had seen in any of his plays. [6]
The Constant Wife has been produced multiple times in London—Ruth Chatterton (Globe Theatre, 1937); Ingrid Bergman (Albery Theatre, September 1973), Jenny Seagrove (Apollo Theatre, April 2002, then transferring to the Lyric Theatre, June 2002)—despite a rocky premier starring Fay Compton at the Strand Theatre in April 1927, in part due to the theater’s muddling of seating arrangements and Ms. Compton’s insulting the audience. [6] [7]
In December 1951, a U.S. revival starring Katharine Cornell was staged for a summer festival in Colorado. It was such a success that Cornell took the production to the National Theatre on Broadway starring herself and Brian Aherne. It grossed more money for Cornell's production company than any play she and her husband-director Guthrie McClintic ever produced.
In addition to the 2005 revival on Broadway, other revivals include John Gielgud's staging, also starring Ingrid Bergman and Jack Gwillim, at the Shubert Theatre on Broadway (1975), Minneapolis (2005), Charleston, SC (2007) and the Gate Theatre, Dublin (2016) starring Tara Blaise. [8]
It was adapted as the film Charming Sinners (1929), with William Powell, Clive Brooks, Ruth Chatterton and Mary Nolan, directed by Robert Milton, Paramount Pictures. [9]
William Somerset Maugham was an English writer, known for his plays, novels and short stories. Born in Paris, where he spent his first ten years, Maugham was schooled in England and went to a German university. He became a medical student in London and qualified as a physician in 1897. He never practised medicine, and became a full-time writer. His first novel, Liza of Lambeth (1897), a study of life in the slums, attracted attention, but it was as a playwright that he first achieved national celebrity. By 1908 he had four plays running at once in the West End of London. He wrote his 32nd and last play in 1933, after which he abandoned the theatre and concentrated on novels and short stories.
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Dame Gladys Constance Cooper, was an English actress, theatrical manager and producer, whose career spanned seven decades on stage, in films and on television.
Ethel Barrymore was an American actress and a member of the Barrymore family of actors. Barrymore was a stage, screen and radio actress whose career spanned six decades, and was regarded as "The First Lady of the American Theatre". She received four nominations for the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress, winning for None but the Lonely Heart (1944).
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Katharine Cornell was an American stage actress, writer, theater owner and producer. She was born in Berlin to American parents and raised in Buffalo, New York.
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Dame Mary Susan Etherington,, known professionally as Marie Tempest, was an English singer and actress.
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Katherine Burton is a Swiss-American actress, the daughter of Welsh actors Richard Burton and Sybil Christopher. On television, Burton received critical acclaim as Ellis Grey in the Shonda Rhimes drama series Grey's Anatomy, and as Vice President Sally Langston on Scandal. She has been nominated for three Primetime Emmy Awards and three Tony Awards.
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Marie Lohr was an Australian-born actress, active on stage and in film in Britain. During a career of more than 60 years she created roles in plays by, among others, Bernard Shaw, J. M. Barrie, Frederick Lonsdale, Somerset Maugham, William Douglas-Home and Noël Coward. She appeared mainly in the West End, but toured the British provinces at intervals throughout her career, appeared in Broadway productions and toured Canada.
Lottie Venne was a British comedian, actress and singer of the Victorian and Edwardian eras, who enjoyed a theatre career spanning five decades. Venne began her stage career in musical burlesque before moving into farce and comedy. She appeared in several works by each of F. C. Burnand and W. S. Gilbert and was often in plays with Charles Hawtrey later in her career.
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Charming Sinners is a 1929 American pre-Code comedy film directed by Robert Milton and Dorothy Arzner, with a screenplay by Doris Anderson adapted from the 1926 play The Constant Wife written by W. Somerset Maugham. The film stars Ruth Chatterton, Clive Brook, Mary Nolan, William Powell, Laura Hope Crews and Florence Eldridge. The film was released on August 17, 1929, by Paramount Pictures.
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Our Betters is a comedy play by the British writer Somerset Maugham. Set in Mayfair and a country house in Suffolk, the plot revolves around the interaction between newly wealthy Americans and upper-class British society.
The playwright, novelist and short-story writer W. Somerset Maugham, was a prolific author from the late 19th century until the 1960s. Most of his earliest successes were for the theatre, but he gave up writing plays after 1932. Many of his plays have been adapted for broadcasting and the cinema, as have several of his novels and short stories. The New York Times commented in 1964, "There are times when one thinks that British television and radio would have to shut up shop if there were not an apparently inexhaustible supply of stories by Maugham to turn into 30-minute plays. One recalls, too, the long list of movies that have been made from his novels − Of Human Bondage, The Moon and Sixpence, The Painted Veil, The Razor's Edge and the rest.