They soon discover that the real ruler of the area is the seemingly diffident Private Napoleon Alexander Trotsky Meek.

The Elder, an atheist, debates religion with Sergeant Fielding, a soldier undergoing a crisis of faith.

The first New York performance was at the Guild Theatre, followed in the same year by a production in Malvern, Worcestershire starring Beatrice Lillie, Claude Rains, and Leo G.

[1] It received a Broadway revival in 1963, directed by Albert Marre and starring Robert Preston, Lillian Gish, David Wayne, Cedric Hardwicke, Cyril Ritchard, Glynis Johns, and Eileen Heckart.

This production featured incidental music by Mitch Leigh, who would later work with Marre on Man of La Mancha.

[2] It was revived by the Royal Shakespeare Company at the Aldwych Theatre in 1975 with Judi Dench, Michael Williams, Anna Calder-Marshall and Ian McKellen.

The play explicitly deals with the existential crisis that hit Europe after the end of the First World War, especially the emergence of a "modernist" culture fuelled by uncertainties created by Freudian psychology and Einstein's new physics.

In a mirror of Lawrence's career he repeatedly enlists with the army, quitting whenever offered a promotion, hence the fact that he is only a private.

[9] Lawrence wrote to Walter Hudd, the actor who played Meek, to congratulate him on his performance, saying "I only wish nature had made me look half as smart and efficient as yourself".