Errol O'Neill was commissioned by former La Boite artistic director Sue Rider in 1999, to write this drama.

Author's note: Ultimately, playwrights don't and can't deal definitively with questions of proving what happened or didn't happen, or why. The dramatist's task is to search out possible explanations for action, ponder on the motivations of characters, and speculate about the clashes of will between characters and the outcomes of those clashes...The Mayne Inheritance - a play - does not claim to present the definitive version of the story of the Mayne family. It is rather an attempt to gather the threads of the story which are known or knowable, combine these with other thematic considerations, and put them all into a broad social and historical context, ultimately saying something about the human condition. pp.9-10.