The London theatre season of 1933-4 announced a new work by Somerset Maugham. It was, Maugham said, to be the last play he would write—called Sheppey. 

Ralph Richardson was to fill the main role. His was a personality and a talent I liked, both on and off the stage. As a young dramatic critic, not long from Australia, I used to attend nearly every play presented in London. I thought I had a job in a million, to be actually paid by my newspaper for the privilege of attending plays night by night and writing my impressions. Richardson had done well in Shakespeare at the Old Vic. He had a natural warmth and reality and could identify himself, unselfconsciously and uncondescendingly, with a variety of types. And now here was to play a barber, born on the Isle of Sheppey at the mouth of the Thames and taking his nickname from it, a barber who before the end was to see himself, and to behave and to be persecuted, as though he were a modern Christ.