was an adaptation by others of his short story "Rain", which opened on Broadway in 1921 and ran for 648 performances. The majority of his original plays were comedies, but of his serious dramas East of Suez (1922), The Letter (1927) and The Sacred Flame (1929) ran for more than 200 performances. Among his longest-running comedies were Lady Frederick (1907), Jack Straw (1908), Our Betters (1923) and The Constant Wife (1926), which ran in the West End or on Broadway for 422, 321, 548 and 295 performances respectively. Raphael remarks about Maugham as a playwright, "His wit was sharp but rarely distressing; his plots abounded in amusing situations, his characters were usually drawn from the same class as his audiences and managed at once to satirize and delight their originals". As in his novels and short stories, Maugham's plots are clear and his dialogue naturalistic. The critic J. C. Trewin writes, "His dialogue, unlike that of many of his contemporaries, is designed to be spoken ... Maugham does not write elaborately visual prose: that is, it does not make a fussy pattern on the page". Trewin quoted with approval Maugham's observation, "Words have weight, sound, and appearance; it is only by considering these that you can write a sentence that is good to look at and good to listen to". Unlike his elder contemporary Shaw, Maugham did not view drama as didactic or moralistic; like his younger contemporary Coward, he wrote plays to entertain, and any moral or social conclusions were at most incidental. Several commentators have characterised him as a pessimist, who did not share Shaw's optimistic belief that art could improve humanity. Christopher Innes has observed that, like Chekhov, Maugham qualified as a doctor, and their medical training gave them "a materialistic determinism that discounted any possibility of changing the human condition". When Maugham's The Circle was revived in the US in 2011, the reviewer in The New York Times wrote that the play had been criticised "for not having anything substantial to say about love, marriage or infidelity. Actually it has extremely complicated things to say about them, but its most important message may be that actions have real consequences, no matter how casually those actions may be taken". Trewin singles out The Circle, calling it one of the great comedies of the 20th century, and comparing it with Congreve's The Way of the World, to the