THE Lace Market Theatre's next production is Somerset Maugham's For Services Rendered. Director Di Richards explains why...

WE needed to find a play to mirror the commemorations in Nottingham for the Great War. Among others, we read For Services Rendered and I loved it. Everyone was in complete accord. This play is a gem! We just had to do it.

For Services Rendered is an anti-war play. On one level it deals with the destructiveness of war fuelled by Maugham's experiences in the First World War and his growing sense of the ominous deterioration of international affairs in the early 30s.

It is a lovely sunny afternoon in 1932, the French windows are open and the family and friends are playing tennis, taking tea and chatting in a comfortable middle-class home.

What we might have thought to be a conventional play of the period is turned on its head as time marches on.

The play is dramatic, poignant and thought-provoking, with a story that involves.

Its subject is England after the Great War, revealing a middle class family clinging on to a pre-war world with all its constraints of class and gender.

The play is anti war, anti-patriotism and aims to tell the truth, re soldiering, the war, marriage and love.

There is something about its dialogue, sharp, witty, with the playwright seeming to have an instinctive ear for the truth, startling modernity and, despite its theme, funny.

It was first performed in London at the Globe Theatre in 1932 and revived by the Royal National Theatre in 1979 when it was hailed as Maugham's theatrical masterpiece and had multiple nominations for the Olivier Awards.

The set design is by Catherine Hellyer, a graduate from the Design School at Nottingham Trent University who is a new member, with Max Bromley and Doreen Sheard on costume.

Martin Curtis is designing the lighting and sound.

Read the full story here.