The Circle: A Comedy in Three Acts
Lady Kitty Champion-Cheney abandoned her husband and young son thirty years ago, running off with a dashing young adventurer. Now she's returned to find her son married to Elizabeth, a young woman on the verge of making exactly the same choice. The irony is exquisite: the woman who shattered her family to pursue happiness now watches her daughter-in-law prepare to do the same thing. Can Kitty convince Elizabeth to stay? More urgently, should she? Maugham constructs this as elegant theatrical machinery, each act turning screws of revelation and recontextualization. The dialogue crackles with period wit, but beneath the comedy lies a darker proposition: perhaps it isn't our choices that determine our happiness, but something fixed in our natures. The title becomes both literal and philosophical. A sharply observed comedy of manners that refuses easy resolutions, where every character is neither wholly sympathetic nor contemptible. For readers who savor intelligent dialogue, Edwardian social comedy, and plays that leave you arguing with them long after the final curtain.
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“I don't know that in life it matters so much what you do as what you are. No one can learn by the experience of another because no circumstances are quite the same. If we made rather a hash of things perhaps it was because we were rather trivial people.””
— W. Somerset Maugham
“C.-C.: Tell me frankly, Kitty, don't you think people make a lot of unnecessary fuss about love?LADY KITTY: It's the most wonderful thing in the world.C.-C.: You're incorrigible. Do you really think it was worth sacrificing so much for?LADY KITTY: My dear Clive, I don't mind telling you that if I had my time over again I should be unfaithful to you, but I should not leave you.””
— W. Somerset Maugham
“C.-C.: My dear Arnold, we all hope that you have before you a distinguished political career. You can't learn too soon that the most useful thing about a principle is that it can always be sacrificed to expediency.ARNOLD: But supposing it doesn't come off? Women are incalculable.C.-C.: Nonsense! Men are romantic. A woman will always sacrifice herself if you give her the opportunity. It is her favourite form of self-indulgence.ARNOLD: I never know whether you're a humorist or a cynic, father.C.-C.: I'm neither, my dear boy; I'm merely a very truthful man. But people are so unused to the truth that they're apt to mistake it for a joke or a sneer.””
— W. Somerset Maugham
“I'm only twenty-five. If I've made a mistake I have time to correct it.””
— W. Somerset Maugham
“PORTEOUS: Do you mean to say you were going to steal my car.TEDDIE: Not exactly. I was only going to bolshevise it, so to speak.””
— W. Somerset Maugham
