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Research dossier · Arts & Letters

Happy with Either

1948 play

Manuscripts, fine bindings, an engraving plate and preserved performance ephemera
Arts and lettersInterpretive dossier study · Crown Archives visual atlas
Record originEnglish Wikipedia
Text licenseCC BY-SA 4.0
Source revisionJun 18, 2026
Entity authorityQ109974111 ↗
Source-derived summary

Happy with Either is a 1948 comedy play by the British writer Margaret Kennedy. Best known as a novelist, it was her last play. It ran for 35 performances at St James's Theatre in London's West End between 22 April and 22 May 1948. The original cast included Cyril Raymond, Wilfrid Hyde-White, Adrienne Corri, Valerie Taylor, Angela Baddeley and Constance Cummings. It was produced by Basil Dean. The plot revolves around a bigamist who is allowed back into the lives of his two wives because they miss him.

References

Bibliography

Gale, Maggie. West End Women: Women and the London stage, 1918-1962. Routledge, 1996.

Vinson, James.

Editorial summary

Begin with the source’s own compact description: “Happy with Either” is 1948 play. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Happy, Either and play, not as a finished interpretation.

Editorial reviewA useful identification and reception guide that helps separate the work itself from editions, performances, ownership and later interpretation. The current lead gives the account dated anchors—1948, 1918, 1962, 1996—that can be checked directly. The selected authority fields contribute no independent date. For this dossier, Happy, Either and play is the immediate research focus.
Editorial analysis

Why this record matters

The phrase “1948 play” supplies a clear boundary for inquiry. It also exposes the unanswered questions: who defined that boundary, when it became stable and which sources sit outside it.

Evidence profile

Object files, edition statements, performance records and contemporary criticism preserve different stages of the work’s history. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jun 18, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q109974111. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1948, 1918, 1962 and 1996.

Critical limits

Rights, attribution and provenance may remain disputed even when a general reference summary presents a stable account. The source lead contains qualifying language; that uncertainty should survive quotation, summary and reuse. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.

How to read it

Separate the work, its editions or performances, and its later reception. Catalogue records, publication histories and object files often preserve different parts of that story.

Best used for
  • Identifying works and editions
  • Tracing reception history
  • Finding collection records
Verify next

The original object or edition, catalogue raisonné, performance record, rights file and holding institution.

Three-step research path

  1. Establish the record: confirm the title “Happy with Either”, its source revision and the description used here.
  2. Expand the search: follow Happy with Either primary sources, Happy with Either archive and Happy research across catalogues and specialist indexes.
  3. Test the account: compare the strongest cited source with the responsible institution’s current record and note any disagreement.

Questions for further research

  1. Which source most directly establishes the central claim about “Happy with Either”?
  2. Where is authorship, date or provenance documented?
  3. Which edition, object, performance or recording is being described?
Subject index

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Source & attribution

This entry incorporates text from “Happy with Either” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.