The Years Between (play)

His wife Diana is persuaded to take over the Colonel's parliamentary seat, and she is supported in her endeavours by her neighbour Richard Llewellyn, a sympathetic farmer with whom she strikes up a romantic relationship.

He has been playing a key role in organising the resistance movement in Occupied Europe, and his disappearance and death were staged by the authorities to provide convincing cover for his activities.

After 60 years of neglect the play was revived by Caroline Smith at the Orange Tree Theatre in Richmond upon Thames on 5 September 2007, starring Karen Ascoe, Mark Tandy and Michael Lumsden in the principal roles.

Du Maurier had begun writing the play in the summer of 1943 which, according to Margaret Forster’s biography, she frankly admitted was autobiographical, although also based on another real-life story.

The rumour turned out to be untrue.” (Note 3, page 434) Involved with the West End production and being at Wyndham's (her father Sir Gerald’s old theatre) du Maurier found “was a disturbing experience.” Clive Brook as the soldier-husband was so sympathetic, while Nora Swinburne as the wife made her character unattractive, "and it seemed to her the whole balance of the play was wrecked.” Reviewing for the Evening Standard on 13 January 1945 (four months before VE Day), under the headline 'It Might Have Been So Good', the critic (and MP) Beverley Baxter wrote: "When the curtain rose again we waited for the unfolding of a tragedy or the playing out of an ironic comedy.

He calls Compton Bennett's film "a poor and empty adaptation of a poor and empty play" which “enshrines the worst characteristics of the British film, and condones the worst qualities of the least representative section of the British race.” Chiding the producers, Sydney Box and his sister Betty, who also wrote the screenplay, he describes it as a "novelettish distortion" of a contemporary problem.

He notes how the play deals not with the Second World War, but its consequences in changing the lives of men and women irreversibly, 'exemplified and exacerbated in a middle class marriage.'