Second Plays

A. A. Milne, the creator of the world's most beloved bear, was also one of London's most celebrated playwrights in the 1920s. "Second Plays" gathers his theatrical works that followed his initial success, showcasing the same gentle wit and observational precision that would later populate Hundred Acre Wood. The collection opens with Milne's disarmingly honest introduction, where he pokes fun at theater critics and reflects on the peculiar art of making people believe in imaginary worlds - a subject he understood better than most. The centerpiece, "Make-Believe," captures something true about childhood: the urgent, serious business of pretending. Young Rosemary decides to write a play for Christmas, dragging the patient butler James into her schemes while the line between play and reality dissolves delightfully. Yet Milne never condescends to his young characters. He understands that children inhabit their fantasies completely, and that this imaginative intensity is its own form of wisdom. For readers who know only the Hundred Acre Wood, these plays reveal thefull range of Milne's talent - his ability to find profundity in domestic comedy, his ear for the way people actually speak, and his lifelong fascination with the boundaries between what's real and what's imagined.