The Circle: a Comedy in Three Acts is a play by W. Somerset Maugham. It was first produced at the Haymarket Theatre, London on 3 March 1921, and has been revived several times in the West End and on Broadway. The play, which caused some outrage among a small minority of playgoers at the time of the premiere, depicts a young married woman contemplating leaving her husband for another man, and looking to an elderly peer and his partner, who eloped thirty years earlier, for advice.
The action of the play takes place over a single day at Aston-Adey, Arnold Champion-Cheney's country house in Dorset. At the beginning of the play, the prim Arnold is dreading the first visit of his mother, Lady Catherine Champion-Cheney, and her partner, Lord Porteus. She had caused scandal by eloping with Porteus thirty years earlier, leaving her husband and only child. Arnold's wife, Elizabeth, is looking forward to meeting Catherine, whom she sees as a romantic figure for sacrificing her social position in England for love. In reality the older couple are not romantic figures: Catherine hates being rejected by polite society, dresses and makes up too young for her years, "a ridiculous caricature of a pretty woman grown old", and regards her partner as "simply a testy, crotchety old gentleman who makes himself a nuisance at the bridge table". Nonetheless, they remain bound together by reluctant affection. Their visit is complicated by the unexpected arrival of Arnold's father, the deserted Clive Champion-Cheney, but he is quite friendly to the couple. Elizabeth is tempted to repeat history by eloping with Edward Luton, a friend of her husband, aware that in doing so she would be sacrificing a comfortable life in England for the probable hardships of life as a planter's wife in Malaya. Arnold, to whom she confesses her emotions, gives her his blessing to leave him if she wishes. This calculated ploy, suggested to him by his father, makes her feel so guilty that she almost resolves to end her relationship with Edward, but the latter tells her candidly that he offers her love and not necessarily happiness. This decides her in his favour, and Porteus and Lady Catherine lend them their car to elope in. Clive, unaware that his ploy has failed, joins Porteus and Catherine, boasts of his clever plan, and the play ends with "all three in fits of laughter"
The Circle was "the first of Maugham's plays to be booed". As The Times put it, "It is, of course, a bold ending – too bold, apparently, for some orthodox moralists in the gallerylast night – but approved, we think, by the more mundane majority in the house. The writer Robert Bechtold describes the play as a comedy of manners – "a rewrite of Lady Windermere's Fan a quarter of a century later in a post World War I atmosphere." The critic of The Times took a different view:
Adaptations
The play was adapted for the cinema in 1925 under the same title.
