This is one of the few plays Saki wrote, or actually co-wrote. It was published posthumously, but it doesn’t suffer at all from the problems that his other posthumous works did. It’s the story of a tyrannical old woman that runs an English estate with an iron hand. Friends and family are eager for her son to marry so that his new wife will take over at the estate, but the son seems to be in no hurry to settle down. He’s the “watched pot” of the title, a young man being pushed into marriage on all sides and yielding to none. It’s a very funny play and it also proves my theory that Saki didn’t intend for all of his unpublished stories to be published after his death, because he reuses a ton of jokes in this play. Obviously, those stories were indeed first drafts that Saki set aside in order to recycle the jokes later. I’d love to see this one performed live; it has a lot of Saki’s dry, biting humor, but none of the underlying dark misanthropy of most of his works. It’s not unlike Wodehouse, really. Anyway, really entertaining. 3 ½ stars.
tl;dr – Saki co-writes witty, acerbic play about young man being pushed into marriage; typically funny and surprisingly, for Saki, light-hearted and joyous. 3 ½ stars.