Emlyn Williams wrote "The Corn Is Green" out of his boyhood experience. He wrote "Night Must Fall" out of his inventive imagination, touched off possibly by a newspaper clipping. "Yesterday's Magic" he wrote chiefly out of his memory of other men's plays. His personal contribution amounts to little more than Welsh names for the principal characters and a Welsh song in the opening act.

It's the play about the celebrated actor who sold out to John Barleycorn. In a squalid room in a cheap boarding house overlooking Covent Garden, his crippled but chipper daughter nurses his hangovers. His lovely young bride, it goes without saying, died at her daughter's birth, and her name has never since crossed the widower's lips. A knock at the door: the new tenant wants to borrow a hammer. A poor but ambitious young artist, is he? Wrong; a poor but ambitious young musician...