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"I
believe the future is only the past again, entered through another gate."
Born on May 24, 1855, in London, to Portuguese parents, Arthur Wing
Pinero studied law before turning to the theatre, becoming an actor in
Edinburgh at the age of 19 (earning one pound a week). to
pursue a career as an actor.
He served a five-year apprenticeship with Sir
Henry Irving's company, during which time he took up writing. A brief
one-act play was performed as a "curtain raiser" and soon Pinero
was writing full-time.
His first
major success came in 1885 with The Magistrate, a farce about a woman
who has not only lied about her age in order to remarry, but she has also shaved five years off the age of
her son, making him fourteen instead of nineteen.
One of his early attempts
at tragedy was The Profligate (1887) in which a man takes poison
after he realizes that his marriage has failed. The hostile public
reaction forced Pinero to rewrite the ending, resulting in a much happier outcome. In the years that
followed, however, English theatre-goers were exposed to the harsh social
dramas of Henrik Ibsen and George Bernard Shaw, prompting Pinero to write The Second Mrs. Tanqueray (1893),
about a "woman with a past" who tries to make
herself into a "respectable" member of society. The
play's subject matter raised protests from conservatives, but the
box-office success of the play brought Pinero widespread recognition as a
serious social dramatist.
Beside The Magistrate and The Second Mrs.
Tanqueray. perhaps the most frequently produced of his plays is Trelawny of the Wells
(1898), an affectionate spoof of a ragtag theatre company. A 1975
revival at Lincoln Center featured in its cast, among others, Meryl Streep,
Mandy Patinkin, John Lithgow, Michael Tucker, and Christopher Hewitt.
Knighted in 1909, Pinero continued to write plays for the rest of his life, but
his prominence as a social dramatist was eclipsed by that of Bernard Shaw.
After
1910, his popularity began to decline. The
Enchanted Cottage (1921) blended Pinero's social realism (it was among
the first plays to deal directly with the aftermath of World War I) with
the rise of German Expressionism in the theatre, a style best known today
through the film The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1919). Pinero
couldn't resist treating several characters farcically, most notably the
"country copulatives" Mr. and Mrs. Corsellis.
Other plays by Pinero include The
Schoolmistress (1886), Dandy Dick (1887), Sweet Lavender (1888),
The Notorious Mrs. Ebbsmith (1895), The Gay Lord Quex (1899), Iris (1901), and Mid-Channel
(1909).
Pinero died on November 23, 1934, in London. |
