IBNA- ‘The Circle: a Comedy in Three Acts’ (1939), a play by English writer W. Somerset Maugham known for his plays, novels and short stories has been published in Persian and is available in Iranian bookstores.
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…
Outwardly cynical, ‘The Circle’ may be, yet it is by no means a comedy of manners. The moral implicit in its fun is something very different from the sententious couplets which Congreve perfunctorily tagged on to plays which pretended to neither feeling nor morality. ... The "bold" ending is surely frivolity's rather wistful salute to sincerity.
Story Code : 334635
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