Plays - W. Somerset Maugham.

The play that remains in memory after over three decades is Constant Wife, although others are good as well - and it is a softer version of the later one named Women by Claire Booth Luce. There are other differences, such as Women has no men on stage, while men are equally present in The Constant Wife, but the key difference is in the delightful twists in Maugham's English version with its dry humour while Booth Luce's Women remains sanctimonious and absolves men, as US versions of English originals often do whether sitcoms like Man About The House (copied as Three is company) or more serious comedies such as Yes Minister and Yes Prime Minister (anyone remember the boring, pompous President on US television? didn't last a season, and it was too much at that!) - thereby destroying much of the delight of the original.

Constant Wife is about a husband indulging in extramarital affair, and how the wife deals with it.

He has been having an affair, and she has been trying to keep a good front for sake of the home, the children, the society.

A friend returns from abroad with love for her still in his heart, and his eyes light up when she walks into the room. She takes him up on his offer to go away - and the husband confronts her.

How she smoothly irons those difficulties is the delight and the charm of this work, this writer. She intends to go, have the holiday, and return to her home - and cannot be threatened out of her well deserved vacation or her home either, the husband has lost the moral right and does not have the courage to be exposed to the public eye as the philanderer he has been and they have all known.