In 1884, London’s Court Theatre commissioned young playwright-celebrity Arthur Pinero to write a play. Their only hope was an immediate hit; the previously-successful theatre’s attendance rates had dropped dramatically in recent seasons, so that by 1884 their management needed to either bring in thundering hordes, or face the possibility of financial ruin. Pinero first approached the management with a new play titled The Weaker Sex, a serious, if slightly-sentimental, drama which though not revolutionary in its own right, contained the seeds for Pinero’s greatest classic, The Second Mrs. Tanqueray. One of the Court Theatre managers, John Clayton, had mixed feelings about The Weaker Sex, and refused to produce it (though a different company would pick the work up in 1888). Luckily, Pinero had just finished The Magistrate and presented it to Clayton as an alternative, suggesting that a comedy might draw larger audiences than the Court’s recent tragic productions. Clayton and the other managers agreed, and The Magistrate opened at the Court on Saturday, March 21, 1885 – for context, the same year as Gilbert and Sullivan’s The Mikado at London’s nearby Savoy Theatre. The Magistrate was instantly and enormously popular, filling the Court Theatre night after night for an unbroken run of 363 performances. The Court’s normal summer hiatus was ignored to meet audience demand; several famous actors of the day had to request temporary replacements so they could take the vacations they’d planned months before.

Pinero and The Magistrate’s fame soon spread worldwide. The Magistrate was produced quite successfully in New York and Boston, becoming an annual offering as part of a Boston classics festival. In 1896 Pinero himself traveled to the United States to help direct the first New York production, but would refuse to ever return to America after his New York producers pressured him to watch his own opening night – which he absolutely never did for any of his works, too shy about his plays to face an audience. The play received additional English-language productions in Australia, India, and South Africa. Various translations also achieved great success; a German-language version titled Die Blaue Grotte (“The Blue Grotto,” or “The Drunken Grotto”) had successful runs in Germany and Austria, and an 1890 translation by J. T. Green into Bohemian or Czech-Slavonic was produced at the National Theatre of Prague. A French translation was attempted, but vetoed by Arthur Pinero himself, unappreciative of what he identified as a French influence on his work – proving himself a loyal British subject, as colonial conflicts between France and Britain remained fierce through the end of the nineteenth century.

The Magistrate’s success prompted the Court management to commission a series of works by Pinero for the next two years. Pinero was critically hailed as “the most original and remarkable of living English playwrights” for the innovative, masterfully-built farces he wrote during his time with the Court Theatre, and these plays – The Schoolmistress (1886) and Dandy Dick (1887) – live on as some of his greatest commercial successes. Pinero would eventually write a total of fifty-nine plays over the course of his career, including The Second Mrs. Tanqueray in 1893, a revolutionary, wildly-controversial problem play which revealed the double-standard regarding male and female sexuality in Victorian England.

What made Pinero’s plays so remarkable was not so much their characters or dialogue as their flawless structure. His use of improbabilities and his characters’ faithful reactions to these improbabilities made Pinero an excellent tragedian, but a brilliant writer of plot-based comedy. He was a master of the improbable addition of justifiable events: every single decision that Mr. Posket makes in The Magistrate is the logical conclusion of his character and circumstances, and yet he still ends up in ridiculous, farcical scrapes. Pinero was unusual in that he never depended on the Wilde-ian one-liners of his day to sustain the humor of his work; instead he used an Anglicized version of the old French style to create farces that were unmistakably new, and unmistakably British. No one framed as decent in Pinero’s plays does anything so distasteful as put on a moustache, make a fart joke, or pat a saucy housemaid’s behind. Instead, The Magistrate functions on the clean conventions one now finds inseparable from British comedy: the buffoonery of a well-meaning but stodgy “pillar of the community,” a young amoral fop out for “good fun,” an appearance-focused “woman of a certain age” looking to advance or maintain her reputation, an utter loony, and an easily-hoodwinked cast of well-meaning secondary characters.

The Magistrate and the British farces which followed were an important development that would shape the future of British comedy, most recently in the form of television sitcoms (which Pinero would probably have loved). In Pinero’s play we see flashes of modern-day comedy. Mr. Posket’s trials foreshadow the improbable adventures of Mr. Bean, the panic and pretension of Mrs. Posket can be seen in Keeping Up Appearances’s heroine, and the man-childish behavior of Dylan Moran’s character Black Book is easily linked to Cis’s double-age. The Magistrate was an important stepping-stone in the development of British comedy, and yet in its outrageous, anxiety-dream-like freneticism and flawless structure, has maintained its comedic appeal for a modern audience, proving Pinero to be a true master of timeless dramatic writing. This is the third Pinero play TACT has presented. The others include Trelawny of the “Wells” (1998) and Dandy Dick (2007).