In 1936, he starred as Sir John Brute alongside Kulia Crawley and Marda Vanne in an Embassy Theatre production of Sir John Vanbrugh's The Provoked Wife,Mervyn Johns in The Provoked Wife "MERVYN JOHNS, JULIA CRAWLEY, MARDA VANNE" prompting the renowned theatre critic and newspaper journalist James Agate (styled "the best judge of acting of the day") to remark that his acting was "blazingly good" and his role a "magnificent performance which would have warmed the heart's cockles of the old playgoers", saying that "in this actor's hands, Sir John is a brute indeed, not a pewling mooncalf, but a roaring bull. Mr Johns lets us see the pleasure he is taking in the fellow's brutish gusto. There are actors who could make the man as unbearable to an audience as he was to his own circle. Mr Johns, by lifting a corner of the brute's mind to show us his own, is right with Garrick."
