Play which works in Chesterton's ideas of the importance of the magical. A duke hires a magician to keep company with his niece because she believes in fairies. When her brother, a severe rationalist, returns home the magician is revealed as a fraud, but the magician causes several strange things to happen, which throws the rationalist brother into a breakdown. All of them try to get the magician to reveal how the trick is done; when he does, the answer is more upsetting than the problem.

I don't think this would make much sense as a stage production. Chesterton believed that the severely rational way of looking at the world was more dangerous than heresy and he uses his characters as types to illustrate various ideas. I enjoyed it--Chesterton is always both fun and thought-provoking. ( )