Five Little Plays — Story, Setting & Ideas

Conversational Rhythm and Verbal Sparring

Sutro's dialogue moves in short, clipped exchanges that mimic natural speech while carrying subtext. In The Open Door, Sir Geoffrey and Lady Torminster trade banter about books and bedtime: 'There are three hundred ways, they say, of cooking a potato—there are as many of dressing up a lie, and calling it a novel.' The line is both a joke and a self-conscious comment on the play's own artifice. Sutro often lets a character's voice define them instantly—Hector's grumbling, Walter's dandyish ease, Mary's exhausted pleading. The rhythm shifts between rapid-fire repartee and longer, more deliberate speeches, especially when a character reaches an emotional breaking point.

Compressed Settings and Escalating Stakes

Each play is confined to a single room or outdoor space, and the action unfolds in real time. The Man on the Kerb uses a bare, impoverished interior where a couple debates suicide: Mary says, 'I'm so tired!' and Joe responds with a cry, 'God, O God, give us bread!' The stage directions note a child's wail and Mary's act of wrapping her shawl around the little girl—small physical details that heighten the desperation. Sutro builds tension through incremental revelations: a character's true motive, a hidden debt, a past betrayal. The one-act structure forces the crisis to surface quickly, often within the first few pages.

Shifts in Tone Across the Collection

The five plays vary markedly in mood. The Man in the Stalls and A Marriage Has Been Arranged… lean toward social comedy, with characters in well-appointed rooms trading witty complaints. The Man on the Kerb and The Open Door move into darker territory—poverty, exhaustion, moral compromise. Sutro does not signal these shifts; he lets the dialogue and setting do the work. The same clipped, naturalistic speech that serves comedy in one play becomes devastating in another. Readers should note how the author's voice remains consistent while the emotional register changes, and how the brevity of each play forces a concentrated effect.

Because the excerpts offer only partial texts, the full arc of each play—and the collection's overall design—remains partly inferred. Readers may wish to compare the opening scenes with the endings to see how Sutro resolves (or withholds resolution from) his tightly wound situations. The plays reward attention to small verbal cues and stage directions, which often carry as much weight as the dialogue itself.

That collection, Five Little Plays, left me thinking about how much silence can sit inside a single room, especially the quiet before someone says something they can’t take back. I found myself carrying that weight into the evening, much like the conversations in A Woman of No Importance — Reading Companion, where every polite line feels borrowed from a longer, sadder story nobody tells aloud.