The Bread-Winner (play)

It is a comedy in one continuous act, lasting about 2 hours, but with the curtain lowered twice to rest the audience.

Maugham keeps his audience ignorant of the disaster facing Charles for much of the play, at which point we learn what the effect would be on his wife and teenage son and daughter.

The play was in written in 1930 and first produced by Athole Stewart at the Vaudeville Theatre London on 30 September that year.

The title format for the Vaudeville playbill, as reproduced in Who's Who in the Theatre, (Seventh edition, 1933) is The Breadwinner.

No girl can make a decent living now by prostitution," was quoted so much by 'the gentlemen of the Press' that it was cut after the first night, the management anticipating rightly that the Lord Chamberlain would be paying the theatre a visit.