Bill Crichton has got to play the game.

I wonder what he meant by circumstances might alter cases.

I hadn't read Marquee, a collection of ten American and British plays, since my senior year of high school Drama. (Not "high school drama", though we did have a good deal of that too a quarter-century ago.) There's only one of the ten I remember Mrs. Hooten had us read in there, Oscar Wilde's "The Importance of Being Earnest" -- normally plays get italics, but since I'll mention so many today I'm putting the play titles in quotation marks. But I started getting into a few others when I actually had some spare time; that is, when I wasn't rehearsing lines for a play myself or performing classwork in this or six other classes. I didn't have an after school job through high school other than wherever I happened to be, and I did learn a bit from the other plays I read in here, such as George Bernard Shaw's "Saint Joan", Eugene O'Neill's "The Hairy Ape", and the play that lends me my title and a few between-paragraph quotes here today, James M. Barrie's "The Admirable Crichton".

I would therefore most respectfully propose that henceforth every time Mr. Ernest favors us with an epigram his head should be immersed in a bucket of cold spring water.

The man you likely better know as the creator of Peter Pan was also quite the playwright. And I was interested as I planned out this item today that historically there actually WAS an "Admirable Crichton", specifically James Crichton, born in Scotland middle sixteenth century and gifted with perfect recall -- spoke twelve languages (heck, I gave Iris my child prodigy in The Progeny Cycle six!), served two years in the French army, entered the employ of an Italian duke who later killed him out of jealousy (not for his mind, but for his having become the lover of the duke's former mistress) at twenty-two years old. As for BILL Crichton, he's the perfect butler, the perfect servant. And the household he works for knows it; until chance leads Lord Loam of the manor, his nephew Ernest, his three daughters Catherine, Agatha, and Mary, maid Tweeny, clergyman Treherne, and Crichton to shipwreck on a deserted island. And in short, the servant with practical skills becomes the master.

Only a master of evil, Darth.
[Wait a second, wrong production. (Going through my notes) Ah, here it is!]
Odd? Seems to me it's natural. And whatever is natural, John, is right.

Until a ship gets sighted just as Crichton, who's been the "Gov." of the island for quite some time and all the former aristocrats have been willing to become his servants, and he makes the decision to set off the signal flares they've built. From there, things go back to a new normal; Loam and the party are rescued and a history of their ordeal on the island is published that gives scant credit to Crichton, and everybody within the house knows it! A quarter-century ago (1990) when I read this, I remember wanting to roast Loam's family at the stake -- okay, not quite that, but I was disappointed by the outcome when all Crichton had done was keep them from dying! Now that I re-read it this weekend, I'm finding I would say to Crichton (or I would if he were not a fictional character and we could dialogue) what the heck is wrong with YOU? If you don't want the recognition that's one thing, but to let your employer outright lie, or at least condone another person lying -- that's just wrong!

George, watch whether Crichton begins any of his answers to my questions with "The fact is."
Why?
Because that is usually the beginning of a lie.

So in the final act of the play, Crichton's interrogated by a family friend and her son, who happens to have been engaged to Lady Mary, Lord Loam's daughter, before they landed on that island two years ago. And now they're back, and now everything's going on as before because everybody agrees that the Victorian/Edwardian world of masters and servants, ladies and gentlemen, is seen as "natural". Whatever that means, and Crichton is hardly emboldened to ... we would say, buck the system today. At least, coming to the end of the play, I don't believe he is. But his dialogue with Lady Mary, whom he was about to marry before they got rescued from the island, is telling when he says he plans to leave their service (that is, to quit). Thinking back on that, I figured that is his way of saying that he believes, and his erstwhile employer and his family know, that something is wrong with the way they have treated him in this matter. While Bill Crichton may have to play the game,

I won't, David