She expects that her father the Count will disapprove of the play, as he hates the vulgarity of modern life.

The aesthete Gilbert Gunn insists that's so full of tired clichės "as old and stale as a fried fish shop on a winter morning" that it must be by Harley Granville-Barker.

Another critic, Vaughan, is convinced that only Arthur Pinero could have written it, since it betrays "the author's offensive habit of saying silly things that have no real sense in them when you come to examine them".

Flawner Bannal, a critic from a tabloid, thinks it was written by Bernard Shaw, as the paradoxical statements about the English by the French character are a dead giveaway.

Its lesson is not, I am sorry to say, unneeded--that in an age when custom has been substituted for conscience, and the middle class are as dead as mutton, the young had better get into trouble to have their souls awakened by disgrace.

"[4] The play was first produced in April, 1911, having been hurriedly rehearsed because the previous production, of Ibsen's The Master Builder, had ended early.

Even the theatre programme identified the author as "Xxxxxxx Xxxx", a pattern of letters that clearly points to "Bernard Shaw".

He told the Pall Mall Gazette "nothing shall ever induce me to betray the authorship of Fanny's First Play.

He helped to make Claude King, the actor playing Trotter, resemble himself in manner and clothing.

In his review he joked that Trotter is a "pure figment of the imagination, wholly unlike any actual person".