Production History
The Constant Wife premiered on Broadway on November 29, 1926, in a production that ran for almost 300 performances and starred Ethel Barrymore (famously depicted the next year in The Royal Family). One of Maugham's favorite stories was of the first our-of-town preview of the play, when Barrymore had trouble with her lines, improvised badly, and even added lines from other plays. Furious, Maugham rushed backstage to confront her, but Barrymore deflated him by saying, "Oh darling, I've ruined your beautiful play, but it'll run a year." Added Maugham, "She had and it did!"

The London premiere came in April 1927, in a production that featured Fay Compton and ran for only 60 performances. The play’s failure resulted in part from a disastrous first night when a row of stall seats were mistakenly opened to the holders of pit tickets and chaos ensued. There was, however, another and more fundamental problem: the English audiences were simply not yet ready to accept Maugham's portrait of marriage and the role of the modern wife. London's leading theatre critic, James Agate, panned the play, and Herbert Farjeon, writing in The Graphic, questioned whether even Compton's glamour would "entirely blind audiences to the ethical questionability of her stage conduct."

The Constant Wife’s great success in the United States can in part be ascribed to societal climate. As the economic liberation of women was more advanced in America, both audiences and critics found the play's arguments more palatable - the critic Robert Benchley observed that it had "a great many lines of high comedy and not a few of wisdom." For many people, that wisdom gained more relevance in the feminist climate of the latter part of the twentieth century when, like A Doll's House, The Constant Wife was frequently revived on both sides of the Atlantic. Most notably, Ingrid Bergman played the lead in productions in both London and New York in the 1970s, and since 2005 the play has several new productions in the U.S., including a Broadway revival starring Kate Burton and Michael Cumpsty, plus a season long run at the Shaw Festival in Canada. It is perhaps not an exaggeration to say that the ideas in The Constant Wife were too advanced for Great Britain in the 1920S and that it took forty years for the play to find a truly responsive audience there.


Programme Notes
In his thirty-odd years as a successful playwright, Somerset Maugham's plays were mostly about two things: the middle or upper-middle class, and marriage. He believed that by studying the class system from the inside, and especially the marriage contract, fresh insight could be had on how men and women relied on its rules and regulations to guide their actions inside the patriarchal structure. In his early plays, it is the achieving of the marriage contract that drives the action. In his middle period it is the struggle to maintain the sanctity of marriage that the plots revolve around. And in his late period, including The Constant Wife, the marriage contract is revealed as an essentially flawed concept that binds women to a moral life that is foreign to their nature.

To Maugham, marriage is not religious and not romantic: it is social. It was a middle-class patriarchal construct, the purpose of which was to ward off the primal interactions of human folly and its resultant chaos, which lay just around the corner for any civilization. The fact that the marriage contract put all its power in the hands of men left its women in various stages of social imprisonment, both sexually and spiritually. Maugham's comedy takes a fresh look at Ibsen's A Doll's House, which had premiered in England only forty years before. Constance, like Nora, comes to see the bondage of her marriage as something to be resisted; but unlike Nora, Constance does not turn her back on marriage and home and family. She merely rearranges the nest's psychic furniture more to her liking.

Wry, witty, and with themes that are still very much with us, The Constant Wife is a comedic admonition to all those who rely on love and sentiment to ward off the lazy middle-class habit of infidelity.

About the Company
Shakespeare '70 is Mercer County's only classical theatre company and was founded in 1970 by the late Gerald E. Guarnieri and John F. Erath. The company is committed to bringing the works of Shakespeare, his contemporaries, and the works of other great dramatists to the audiences of the Delaware Valley. In conjunction with The College of New Jersey and acting in the role of its “theater company in residence”, Shakespeare`70 presents two productions on campus annually that are tied to the course material of the College’s English Department. In this way the company provides an additional learning experience for the student body, enabling them to see the written word from their coursework come to life on stage. The Company is especially grateful to Dr. Lincoln Konkle for his championship of this College program and his guidance in coordinating curriculum with play selection, and for the support shown by the College adminsitration. In addition, every summer, Shakespeare`70 presents one of the Bard’s works for local audience enjoyment. This summer’s production will be Shakespeare's “The Taming of the Shrew”.  The company will present "The Skin of Our Teeth" by Thornton Wilder this upcoming fall (2008) at the College.


Additional Notes
In The Constant Wife, written in 1926, Somerset Maugham shows a woman achieving financial independence by embarking on a new career in interior design. He did not have to go far to find a model for this transformation, as his soon-to-be-divorced wife Syrie Maugham was then on the verge of becoming London's most fashionable interior designer.

When the Maughams married in 1917, both had been married before (Syrie serially) and their daughter Liza was almost two years old. This marriage, too, quickly deteriorated. "It was a marriage of convenience on both sides," a friend said. "Willie knew about her past and her lovers, and Syrie knew about his homosexuality... The trouble was she fell in love." Maugham felt he had been pressured into getting married, resented her continued demands on him, and considered his ten years with her a misery. Syrie had always been interested in antiques and interior decoration, and in 1923, partly to console herself for another failing marriage, she opened a small shop in Baker Street. (Maugham was dismayed that his wife had "gone into trade," and described her dismissively as selling chamber-pots to millionairesses.)

The Maughams' story has odd parallels in The Constant Wife. Like the Middletons, Maugham was a doctor, Syrie an interior designer. But in their real life, it was the husband who went on extended travels with another man.

Though Somerset Maugham was a leading playwright in the theatres of London, New York and Paris from 1908 to 1933, he became convinced that prose drama was the most ephemeral of all the arts. In particular, he believed that plays of ideas - even those by Ibsen and Shaw – become museum pieces when social attitudes change and the ideas become familiar and accepted. "Now that everyone admits the right of a woman to her own personality," he claimed, "it is impossible to listen to A Doll's House without impatience." Looking at his own plays, Maugham gave them a performing life of about twenty years.

Maugham was forgetting, of course, that great plays of ideas are made up of much more than thesis and argument: they can be rich in character, brimming with wit, and fascinating in their construction. Moreover, if the play actually challenges its opening-night audiences with advanced social thinking, rather than simply mirroring the mores of its time, it will have a relevance and a life until that thinking becomes universally conventional.

So even today, certain vestigial aspects of the inequality between the sexes still cause this play to resonate with modern audiences.

Incidental Music
The music chosen for this production is from a recording entitled Forgotten Dreams – Archives of Novelty Piano, 1920s-1930s, produced and performed by Dick Hyman and John Sheridan (Arbors Records).