Alfred Sutro wrote more than forty full-length and one-act plays in a career that began in 1895 and continued until a few years before his death in 1933. The most productive and the most acclaimed period of these years was the decade before the outbreak of World War I, when he was regarded as a leading exponent of the well-made play of limited social criticism and extramarital amorous intrigue popularized by Henry Arthur Jones and Arthur Wing Pinero in the 1890s and hailed by critic William Archer as renascent drama.

Born in London, Sutro was of Sephardic descent. He was the third and youngest son of Dr. Sigismund Sutro, a naturalized Englishman who had migrated from Germany as a young man, and the grandson of a German rabbi. Educated at the City of London School and in Brussels, Sutro became a clerk in London. When he was twenty years old...