Suburban Groove

Examiner of Plays' Summary:

This play if officially described as a mild satire and the definition proves quite accurate. Its scene is the dining room of the house in a Dublin suburb occupied by a clerk of modest means, his wife of snobbish ambitions and his daughter of level headed but unromantic matrimonial aspirations. The girl has two lovers, one of them a clerk like her father, but with cravings for work of more possibilities as a London journalist, and the other a typical suburban swell with a taste for Shakespeare, and the musical glasses. The girl prefers the former, her mother the latter, and the rivalry results in a story with very little plot but with an elaborate study of rather mean characters. In the end the prosaic influence of the heroine induces the hero to give up his hopes of escaping from his 'suburban groove' and settle down to the safe monotony of life as lived by his future relations. Of dramatic point the comedy has very little; of offence it is wholly void [...]