A prolific dramatist, novelist, and screenwriter, Ben Travers is best known for a series of nine farces that enjoyed a long run at the Aldwych Theatre in London during the 1920s and 1930s. His comedy has its roots in Victorian and Edwardian theater, especially Arthur Wing Pinero's farces of the 1880s and the witty and elegant performance style of actors such as Charles Hawtrey and Seymour Hicks, whom Travers admired in his early days of theatergoing. After dominating the British popular comic stage for more than two decades, Travers continued to write intermittently through the 1950s and 1960s, albeit at a diminished rate and with diminishing success. To some extent he was out of step with a world that had changed irreversibly in 1945 and with a theater that had been radically transformed in the years after 1956.

In the last years of his life, however, his career and reputation...