The Gay Lord Quex (play)

[5] Lady Owbridge invites the other characters to her country house, where the Duchess, an old flame of Quex's, insists on his drinking a farewell glass of champagne in her room after dinner.

[8] A production at His Majesty's in 1923 was directed by Basil Dean and starred George Grossmith Jr. as Quex, Irene Browne as Sophy and Viola Tree as the Duchess.

[9] In 1975 Sir John Gielgud directed a production at the Albery Theatre, with Daniel Massey in the title role, Judi Dench as Sophy and Siân Phillips as the Duchess.

[13] The Morning Post expressed minor reservations about the moral tone of the play, but was otherwise full of praise, making comparisons with Sheridan's The School For Scandal.

[16] The Times commented that intellectually Pinero stood alone among British dramatists, and praised the "undeniable humanity and interest" of the piece, but wished it had sprung from something loftier than "a combat of wits between a roué, who has to shuffle out of a discreditable past, and a young woman who, though it be for a good motive, has descended to immodesty and mean cunning".

The theatrical newspaper The Era promptly ridiculed the bishop and pointed out that the play depicted a formerly wicked man renouncing his old ways and turning to constancy and virtue.

He has an excellent company, and a play which, for unconventionality, deft workmanship and real interest, stands out as conspicuously as gratefully in the dreary wastes of the contemporary drama.

[20] In The Manchester Guardian, Ivor Brown ridiculed Dean's decision to update the action to 1923, but praised the author's "narrative power … a triumph of talent and a rare good tale".

[22] Reviewing Gielgud's 1975 revival, Robert Cushman wrote in The Observer that the standard description of the play as a society drama was wrong, and that it was in fact "a social comedy with farcical interludes".

Cushman praised Pinero's accomplished plotting and what he described as very funny dialogue, but found Dench's Sophy and Phillips's Duchess more completely convincing than Massey's Quex.

Morley continued: "the play is less than perfect, which is to say it's marginally worse than The Importance of Being Earnest, but still more stylish and more intriguing than any comedy I can think of written between Wilde's and Private Lives which is all of forty years".

Later BBC television versions were transmitted in 1953 with André Morell as Quex, with Joyce Heron and Alan Wheatley; and 1983, starring Anton Rodgers, Lucy Gutteridge and Hannah Gordon.