Loyalties

About

Galsworthy's 1922 play is one of his most concentrated and disturbing: a Jewish man's theft accusation against a gentile ex-officer sets off a chain of loyalties — to class, to regiment, to race, to friendship — that reveal the pervasiveness of anti-Semitism in English upper-class culture. The play refuses a simple moral position: everyone in it acts out of genuine conviction, but the convictions are conditioned by prejudices so deep they are invisible to their possessors. It was considered daring in 1922 and has grown more rather than less relevant.