Home-on-Leave

Examiner of Plays' Summary:

This is a skilfully-constructed and well-written play, with an awkward motive which will need all the art of actor and actress to render it either plausible or sympathetic. The hero who comes ‘home on leave’ is Lieut. Owen Fletcher, Frank, boyish, manly and thoroughly loveable. To meet him he has summoned by wire his mother and sister and - much to their surprise - his former flame Constance, who, just before he went to the front, jilted him and married a Mr Luscombe. when, in the suite at the Ritz, which in his dashing way the lieutenant has taken for the whole party, he and Constance meet, it is soon made clear that the pair were parted by a silly lovers’ quarrel, that he has regretted it ever since, and that he is as fond as ever of his old chum, whom he has invited quite pour le bon motif merely to renew for his brief holidays the memory of happy days gone by. So far so good; but it speedily turns out that Constance’s husband is surly old drug-taking brute, and that when she left him for her secret jaunt to town she suggested to a new and wholly detrimental lover of hers, a Mr Probyn, that they should make use of this opportunity for a stolen meeting. Probyn calls on Mrs Luscombe to renew their warm flirtation: Owen unsuspiciously helps, by inviting him to join them at dinner: and the action, all comprised within 6 hours, leads, with rare ingenuity, to a situation in which Constance’s infuriated husband on following her to town naturally believes her to be compromising herself with her former fiancé. Then comes the awkward development of motive already alluded to. Though Owen has now discovered that Constance is as false to him as she thought of being to her husband, he chivalrously proposes to take the brunt of the threatened divorce suit upon his own innocent shoulders; and he is prevented from doing so only by finding that the dishonourable Probyn has no intention whatever of marrying Constance even when she is legally free. Finally, when his leave is suddenly cut short by a wire from the War Office, the hero completes what seems to us his false heroism by forgiving the shameless heroine before he goes, and by promising to make her his wife after all, as soon as her wretched spouse has drugged himself to death although, in spite of its cleverness of delightful but inconsistent characterization, the comedy may not ring true, there is never any offence in its sound, which, rendered as it is likely to be at the royalty, may well rouse keen interest, even if it fail to carry full conviction. Recommended for license. Ernest A. Bendall.

Researcher's Summary:

The Era, 6 September 1916, reported that Edward Knoblauch had recently changed his name to Knoblock: 'Born in New York forty-two years ago and educated at Harvard University, he recently became a naturalised British subject'.