First Plays

Robert Crawshaw, M.P., is offered £50,000—with one condition: he must change his name to Wurzel-Flummery. His wife is already planning a second car; Robert can think only of the name.

That is the predicament at the heart of the opening play in A. A. Milne’s First Plays, a collection written in the years around the First World War. In a June-morning London drawing room, politics, love and good manners collide as Crawshaw weighs a fortune against the public identity he has spent a lifetime building. Across five plays, Milne turns social pride and private hopes into sharp, comic conflicts. Can a Pillar of the State bear to become Mr. Wurzel-Flummery?

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