"This was a man"

A three-act comedy that follows a successful portrait painter and his fashionable circle as romantic entanglements, jealousies, and social pretenses are unveiled. Action moves between the painter’s studio and a friend’s flat, where clandestine meetings, confidences, and flirtations reveal tensions between public decorum and private desire. Witty situations and incisive observation expose changing social manners and the characters’ attempts to manage reputation and intimacy, with complications building to dawn reckonings and ironic reversals.