ADAPTATIONS excepted, Cyril Scott wrote plays with one thought uppermost: how to expand his audience by presenting his ideas in a different format, a format that gave him scope to write prefaces and programme notes to amplify his message. He wrote thirteen plays and three adaptations. His first original play Prigs in Clover, written 1926–7, was set to be produced in the West End the following year with one of the leading actors of the day, Dennis Eadie, but circumstances prevented that from happening, and Eadie unexpectedly died before it could be rescheduled.

A Victorian comedy set in the 1880s, the play's major theme is ‘What will people think?’ It deals with a stereotypical Victorian couple who demonstrate many of the qualities the Victorians were thought to have, among them conventionality, sanctimoniousness and hypocrisy. Scott's ‘ideal’ man, a character who also features in some of the later plays, makes his first appearance. Tolerant, easy-going, totally unprejudiced, eminently reasonable and unconventional, he is always in contrast to the rest of the cast. Here called John, he discovers that his wife, Evelyn, has fallen in love with another man. He is unperturbed:

He then gives Evelyn a speech that has real feeling and is the most genuine in the whole play: