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Galsworthy: Five Plays: Strife / Justice / The Eldest Son / The Skin Game / Loyalties
Galsworthy Five Plays Strife / Justice / The Eldest Son / The Skin Game / Loyalties Author:John Galsworthy, Benedict Nightingale (Introduction) John Galsworthy, novelist, dramatist, winner of the Nobel Prize for literature, is most widely known as the author of The Forsyte Saga, but recent productions testify to the power that his plays still exert over modern audiences and the strength and relevance of the issues he raised. — STRIFE: — First produced in 1909, Strife is the characterizati... more »on of conflicts between industrial workers and their would-be masters. A great strike has been in progress for several months at Trenartha Tin Plate Works, on the borders of England and Wales, and we are shown the effects of this strike at their culmination, within a constricted period of six hours.
The strikers are led by David Roberts, a crude, enthusiastic, single-minded workman, who has a grievance against the company because it has paid him insufficiently for a valuable invention that he has devised. Robert's demands are excessive, and he has therefore lost the support of the trades union, represented by a diplomatic walking delegate named Simon Harness.
The workmen themselves have grown disaffected under the hardships and privations of protracted disemployment, and are held to the cause only by the force of Robert's fiery fanatism. The directors are led by John Anthony, an elderly, iron-minded man, the founder of the company, and for two and thirty years, its president. He has fought and put down four preceding strikes, and is absolutely inflexible in his attitude toward the present insurrection. His directors, however, are becoming worried over the losses to the company and the prospective necessity of passing the next dividend.
JUSTICE
Justice, originally published in 1910, was his most famous play, and led to a prison reform in England.
The play opens in the office of James How & Sons, solicitors. The senior clerk, Robert Cokeson, discovers that a check he had issued for nine pounds has been forged to ninety. By elimination, suspicion falls upon William Falder, the junior office clerk. The latter is in love with a married woman, the abused and ill-treated wife of a brutal drunkard. Pressed by his employer, a severe yet not unkindly man, Falder confesses the forgery, pleading the dire necessity of his sweetheart, Ruth Honeywill, with whom he had planned to escape to save her from the unbearable brutality of her husband.
Falder: Oh! sir, look over it! I'll pay the money back--I will, I promise.
Notwithstanding the entreaties of young Walter How, who holds modern ideas, his father, a moral and law-respecting citizen, turns Falder over to the police.
THE ELDEST SON
The Eldest Son is a play about injustice-how there is one law for the rich and another for the poor.
THE SKIN GAME
"The Skin Game," Galsworthy's first commercial success and a hit London play, presents class conflict in the enmity of two families - a fierce rivalry between a landowner and his immediate neighbor, complete with nasty tactics, class-based hostility, and dirty secrets that beg to be unearthed. The play was adapted by Alfred Hitchcock and his wife, Alma Reville, and filmed in 1931.
LOYALTIES
John Galsworthy's Loyalties premiered to acclaim in 1921. This classic suspense drama by the Nobel Prize-winning author of The Forsyte Saga hinges on delicate issues of money, ethnicity, truth and social acceptance, which combine to move toward tragedy when a wealthy young Jewish guest at an aristocratic country house finds a large sum of money missing from his room and has the effrontery to accuse a fellow guest.« less