ABSTRACT
In 1914 Thurston was sufficiently well established to receive the dubious honour of being addressed by Carneades Junior, in a regular Academy column, 'Letters to Certain Eminent Authors'. It is now more than seventy years since Ernest Temple Thurston (1879–1933) died, but there has never been any re-evaluation of his work and his claims to be recognized as an important twentieth-century writer have never really come to much. In 1911 he was on the Committee of the New Players Society, formed for the purpose of stimulating the serious side of English drama'. Invariably Thurston used the structural model of the 'well-made' play. Thus Driven is a familiarly genteel West End melodrama in which a dying woman is tempted to elope. Thurston's belief in the wartime theatre not just as a venue for escapism but as space for shared experience may be a way to approach The Cost.
