Despite the early 1930s chintz curtains, there is something morbidly contemporary about Somerset Maugham’s drawing room melodrama, For Services Rendered, recently produced at the Union Theatre. Or as the affluent older generation noted, ‘The nation can’t afford itself the luxury of keeping an army of officers it has no use for… Times are difficult… Today’s young people are facing difficulties we never had’.
Yes, it’s a depression; yes, the global outlook is uncertain, but James Bound’s light and breezy staging found more nuanced points of comparison in Maugham’s unflinching portrayal of family breakdown than in the easy analogies between two Britains, wearied by military sacrifice and jaded by boom-and-bust economics.
Maugham’s tale of a proto-Sloane family cosseting their crippled, war hero son (while his friends struggle to survive economically without a regular army salary) taps into a now-familiar consensus about the futility of the First World War.
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