It has long been customary to deal with the social theatre of the 1930's in terms of explicit content; I shall deal with it in terms of theatrical style.

The first point that needs to be made is that realism was not a discovery of the social theatre of the 1930's. Both as an ideal and as a practice, realism was strongly in evidence in the 1920's, if not indeed in the successful Belascoism of earlier decades. The producer-director Arthur Hopkins, whose Shakespearian productions in association with his distinguished designer Robert Edmond Jones were notably symbolistic, had perhaps his greatest success with his naturalistic production of What Price Glory? in 1924. The nascent Theatre Guild, which was about to collapse after its initial production in 1919 of Benavente's symbolist commedia dell'arte, The Bonds of Interest, was launched upon a successful career with its next, ultra-realistic, production of St. John Ervine's John Ferguson.

The nineteenth-century popular theater in England is generally presumed to have been innocent of politics, and indeed of almost any other concern which could be mistaken for intellectual substance. Among other disabilities, the nineteenth-century theater dwelt under an official censorship which had been instituted, in response to the burlesques and extravaganzas of Fielding and Gay, specifically to keep politics off the stage. Nevertheless, our presumptions and the censorship notwithstanding, politics, both topical and general, had an important place in the nineteenth-century English theater; and the normal vehicle for topical political satire in the theater was the Burlesque-Extravaganza.

Various people, during Bel Geddes' lifetime, wrote about his artistic ability and his achievements in the theatre. He did not often reveal his own ideas or artistic theories in published writings except in regard to theatre architecture. In addition to the chapter on theatres in his book, Horizons, there are several published articles appearing from 1919 to 1950 which describe his hopes for a large flexible, easily accessible, comfortable, and useable theatre structure to be built some day, somewhere in the United States. A more personal and theoretical article appeared in 1919 under the title, “The Theatre of the Future”.

The work of those designers who followed Jean Nicolas Servandoni (1695–1766) at the Royal Academy of Music, at Court, and elsewhere in Paris, is, like his own, preserved only in the pages of Le Mercure de France, L'Avant-Coureur, and other journals and memoirs. While the museums abound in easel canvases and drawings by François Boucher (1703–1770), we are hard-pressed to find one print which has even a remote connection with the stage. On the other hand, we have several volumes of costume sketches and a few scene prints by Louis-René Boquet (1717–1814) which give us a rather good impression of at least one side of his style. Unfortunately, the work of the men who may have been more influenced by Servandoni than any others—Pietro Algieri, Louis-Alexandre Girault, Antoine de Machy, Tremblin, Baudon, Guillet, Moulin, de Leuze, Canot, Lallemand, Spurney, etc.—is probably lost to the eye forever. Their careers, which took place in an extravagant age of theatrical design, must be pieced together from scattered paragraphs in the Paris periodicals. In most cases, we cannot even assign dates to the spans of their activities.

Maurice Browne died on January 21, 1955, shortly before his seventy-fourth birthday. If his name is known at all to theatre people today, it is known as that of the man who was a prominent West End producer several decades ago, who produced Journey's End, and who, over fifteen years before the destruction of Hiroshima, collaborated with Robert Nichols on a play about the atom bomb, Wings Over Europe. Yet according to Bernard Shaw, “none of these things matter a tuppenny damn. The work this man …did… years ago on a fourth-floor-back in Chicago—this is what matters.”