This Rough Magic

> People work hardest when they are working for no material reward. The cause need not be very great, providing it is greater than one man's advantage; quite a small crusade is enough to set a light to humanity's too little used enthusiasm. This is the theme of the novel. >The story concerns the Theatre Working-Party. It was born out of a public meeting, at which a young man worked off his personal grievances by calling attention to the barren communal life of his under-privileged little town. If an adroit councillor had not turned the challenge back upon the challenger, if his disillusioned wife had not nagged him about it afterwards, it might have been a still-birth. >But the Working-Party grew, and swept up in its course many unexpected people, clerks, teachers, miners, railwaymen, shop assistants, country gentlemen, children, complicating all their lives with problems of growth, change and responsibility. By the time the first production takes the stage, the whole world may have changed for some of the players. >For an old widower, for instance, adventurously adrift from his station because his anchor is gone; for a spoiled little boy, suddenly brought up against values for which a doting parent and carefully selected schools have failed to prepare him; for a husband and wife whose mutual disappointment in their marriage has been based on a series of mistaken observations; for a young son trying ardently to live up to his adored father, and always depressingly convinced in advance of his inevitable failure. >For all these the curtain that rose on The Tempest rose also on a translated world, beset with dangerous adjustments from which they might have retreated had they been warned in time, but offering also unsuspected rewards. >In the words of one of the moving spirits: 'Nobody's going to come out of this venture quite the same person as he went into it we may as well make up our minds to it.'