Play: The Ivory Door

Overview
A. A. Milne’s The Ivory Door (1929) is a fable-like drama, subtitled “A Legend in a Prologue and Three Acts”, set in an unnamed, quasi-medieval kingdom. At its center is a forbidden ivory door in the royal palace, surrounded by sacred myth and fear. Milne, better known for Winnie-the-Pooh, turns to satiric, philosophical theater here, probing how societies manufacture taboos, how power depends on shared stories, and what happens when truth contradicts a sustaining lie. The play blends wit and charm with a surprisingly dark edge, culminating in a sobering meditation on belief, authority, and moral courage.

Plot Summary
A prologue sketches the origin of the legend: long ago a door of ivory was sealed, and tradition grew that anyone who passes through is taken by demons or gods, never to return. Generations later, a young, intelligent king inherits a people who fear the door and a court that treats the taboo as the cornerstone of civic order. He is curious rather than devout; the door, for him, is a test of reality over superstition.

Despite priests, counselors, and courtiers urging obedience to the myth, the king and his loyal companion privately open the door and step through. They discover no underworld, no terror, merely a passageway, the ordinary air of the world. Elated, they return to announce the good news: the fear was baseless.

But truth collides with communal need. The court and clergy recoil; if the door is harmless, the foundations of their authority crumble. The populace cannot reconcile the men they see with the tale they have been taught: since “no one returns,” these must be impostors, demons wearing familiar faces. Political calculation and religious zeal coalesce; to preserve order, the narrative must survive and the witnesses must be discredited. The companion pays with his life at the hands of a frightened crowd. The king slips into hiding, torn between candor and the task of ruling a people who prefer their myth. In the end, unwilling to sanctify a lie, he abandons the throne and passes once more through the ivory door, into exile, truth, or simply the unknown, while his kingdom resumes worship of the symbol that comforts it.

Themes and Ideas
- The power of myth: Milne shows how a shared story can bind a society, even if untrue, and how institutions will defend it to maintain cohesion and power.
- Truth versus usefulness: The play asks whether truth that unsettles a community can be responsibly told, and what one owes to honesty when honesty harms stability.
- Fear and scapegoating: The crowd’s violence dramatizes how fear demands a victim; inconvenient truth-tellers are recast as monsters.
- Authority and complicity: Priests and politicians are not caricatured villains so much as pragmatic guardians of order, exposing the ethical ambiguities of leadership.
- Integrity and exile: The king’s final choice frames conscience as a lonely path; sometimes the price of truth is separation from one’s own people.

Style and Legacy
Written with Milne’s light, ironic touch, The Ivory Door balances lyrical dialogue and gentle humor with stark, unsettling turns. Its fairy-tale surface masks a modern skepticism about ideology and collective belief. Though less famous than Milne’s comedies, it endures as a concise, haunting parable about how societies decide what is real, and what they will do to those who disagree.