For Services Rendered sheds a harrowing light on provincial middle-class England after the First World War. "A play with these characters, to whom we are introduced at a tennis party, as in a conventional drawing-room comedy of the period, could have been written mainly for smiles. But here the traditional plot is turned on its head. Instead of being given a lump in the throat we get a smack - a series of smacks - in the chops, scabrous anti-comedy on the present condition of England."