While at the Malacca outpost Travers had little work and much leisure; in the local library he found a complete set of the plays of Pinero. He later said he fell on them with rapturous excitement and found each volume "a guidebook to the technique of stagecraft." They rekindled his interest in the theatre, his earlier wish to be an actor now overtaken by his determination to be a dramatist. He later told Pinero that he had learnt more from him than from all other playwrights put together. His greatest lesson from Pinero was that "however absurd the incidents of a play they had to arise from a basis of reality. The people should never be mere grotesques. Ideally they should be as matter-of-fact – or apparently so – as the people across the road."