to betray the authorship of Fanny's First Play. The performance last night was superb; and the audience enjoyed it as much as I did." The play referred to the many criticisms that had been made of Shaw's own work, while also including digs at Granville-Barker (who ran the theatre company that performed it) and at the critics themselves. Three of the critics are based on real journalists A. B. Walkley is caricatured as "Trotter", Gilbert Cannan as "Gunn" and E. A. Baughan as "Vaughan". "Bannal", as his surname suggests, represents the most banal popular taste. Walkley, a friend of Shaw's, was aware of the plan beforehand. He helped to make Claude King, the actor playing Trotter, resemble himself in manner and clothing. In his review he joked that Trotter is a "pure figment of the imagination, wholly unlike any actual person". He praised the play highly saying that Shaw had created "one of the most amusing plays he had ever written, one of the wittiest and most audacious plays of all his attack on 'the mean things which men have to do to keep up their respectability'." A letter, purportedly written by Flawner Bannal "the critic of The Matutinal Meddler" was published in The Play Pictorial'' protesting that the supposedly anonymous play was being marketed with the quotation "'Bernard Shaw...at his best.'--The Daily Graphic." References External links Project Guttenberg text of the play 1911 plays Plays by George Bernard Shaw