Plays of Dorothy L. Sayers

Dorothy L. Sayers, known as a novelist, also wrote the following plays:

Dorothy L. Sayers began writing plays for public performance in 1935 with Busman’s Honeymoon, a dramatic incarnation of the characters from her Lord Peter Wimsey books. She collaborated on this script with her friend from her college days at Oxford, M. St. Clare Byrne who was a lecturer at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art. Busman’s Honeymoon opened in December 1936 at the Comedy Theatre in London. It was later worked into the last novel in the series, and published in 1937.

In 1936 Sayers was approached by Margaret Babington, organizer of the Canterbury Festival, to write a play for their 1937 Festival. This was prior to the production of Busman’s Honeymoon, but Sayers had been recommended to Babington by the Festival’s playwright of 1936, the poet Charles Williams. In 1934 the Festival began honoring various professions each year, and the theme for 1937 was artists and craftsmen. It was also tradition that the subjects of the plays have something to do with the history of Canterbury Cathedral. Accordingly, Sayers’ script centered on William of Sens, the architect chosen to rebuild the Cathedral’s choir in 1174 after it was destroyed by fire. While completing the work on the choir, William of Sens suffered a crippling fall. Sayers’ plot hinged on the eyewitness account of Gervase the Monk who attributed the fall to "either the vengeance of God or the envy of the Devil." Based on this enigmatic line of Gervase’s, Sayers created a prideful William of Sens whose intrigue with the choir’s benefactress leads inadvertently to the tragic accident. The title of the play was taken from Psalm 69:9, “For the zeal of thine house hath eaten me up." The Zeal of Thy House was presented at the Canterbury Festival June 12 – June 18, 1937 with a cast of forty professional and amateur actors. Harcourt Williams co-directed and also played the role of William of Sens. Frank Napier was the other co-director and played the role of Theodatus. It was later produced in London at the Westminster Theatre in March 1938, and was revived at the Canterbury Festival in 1949.

He That Should Come is a one-act nativity play originally written for radio. Sayers' main concern was to portray the birth of Christ in a realistic, "crowded social and historical background." To this end, she used ordinary prose and insisted on everyday speech patterns with no tones of reverence. He That Should Come was originally broadcast on Christmas Day in 1938.

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