Thornton Wilder is perhaps best known as an innovator, one of America's most original novelists and playwrights of the twentieth century. Although his output was small as he spent much of his life teaching and lecturing, his novel The Bridge of The San Luis Rey won a Pulitzer Prize, as did his plays Our Town and The Skin Of Our Teeth. They all broke the mould of conventional form and content revealing the extraordinary within the ordinary. He related the theatre to celebrations and festivals not to naturalistic imitations.

This particular play has an interesting history. Just as Shakespeare based many of his plays on earlier works, so Thornton Wilder based his first effort on an obscure English farce by John Oxenford - A Day Well Spent - which later developed into an Austrian comedy by John Nestroy -Einen Jux Will Es Sech Machan - and called it The Merchant of Yonkers. By introducing the character of Dolly Levi to the Merchant and developing the plot still further, he eventually arrived at The Matchmaker, which was first produced at the Edinburgh Festival in 1954. From there it travelled to London and America where it re-emerged many years later as the musical Hello Dolly!

"My play," Wilder said in the 1950's, "is about aspirations of the young (and not only of the young) for a fuller, freer participation in life."

What would he have made of the world of TV and the computer in the 2000's?To quote The Matchmaker - "Think it Over?"