Arthur Wing Pinero

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Pinero, 1891

Sir Arthur Wing Pinero (24 May 1855- 23 November 1934) was an English dramatist.

Born in London, the son of a Sephardic Jewish solicitor (John Daniel Pinero), Arthur Wing Pinero studied law at Birkbeck Literary and Scientific Institution before going on the stage.

In 1874 he joined R.H. Wyndham's Company at the Theatre Royal in Edinburgh. After also acting in Liverpool, Pinero joined the Lyceum Theatre company in London in 1876. He began writing plays shortly afterwards, and became one of the most prolific and successful playwrights of his time, authoring fifty-nine plays. These include serious social dramas, some dealing with social hypocrisy surrounding attitudes to women in second marriages, including:

His House In Order and
The Second Mrs Tanqueray (1893)

He is best known for his comedies, of which the most notable are:

The Magistrate (1885)
The Notorious Mrs. Ebbsmith (1895)
Trelawny of the 'Wells' (1898)
The Gay Lord Quex (1899)

His 1923 romance The Enchanted Cottage was successfully filmed in 1924 and 1945. His opera in the style of a medieval morality play, The Beauty Stone, (with Arthur Sullivan and J. Comyns Carr) has grown somewhat in popularity in recent years, having gained a recording, but the dialogue is often heavily abridged.

He is attributed with the saying, "While there is tea, there is hope."

Pinero was knighted in 1909. While tremendously popular in his day, his plays are rarely revived. Even in his final years he saw his work starting to go out of style. He died in London in 1934, aged 79.

Pinero was about the only dramatist of his time, apart from Wilde, who wrote strong parts for leading ladies, and many powerful lady-actors had their own ideas about how to play certain scenes, quite differently from how he had visualised them. After much trial and error, he eventually hit on a solution to this recurring problem. At rehearsal, he would explain loudly and clearly how he wanted the scene played. Then he would take his place in the stalls, to watch the lady playing it her own way, not his. Immediately he would rush up and shout "Perfect, perfect! Play it exactly like that on the night!" And for some reason, on the night, they would play it his way, not theirs! It was a remarkable piece of applied psychology that might baffle many theatrical directors to this day.