Daddy’s Girl

Examiner of Plays' Summary:

An average melodrama, commendably free from unpleasantness, Sir Marcus Bentham is a proprietor of munition works. His son, Emil, by a German mother and brought up in Germany, is a traitor and scoundrel of the deepest die. Having seduced by a false marriage Violet, the beloved daughter of Daddy Coleman, he casts her of and subsequently murders their child, by poisoned sweets, to pave his way to marriage with an heiress. He also tempers with shells and otherwise tries to injure the country, unavoidably killing poor Daddy in his stride as it were and he would have escaped in Stanley Freeman’s newly invented biplane, had not Stanley, the hero of the play, in love with Violet, jumped into it as it was starting and fought with Emil, finally ousting him, in mid-air. This is given as a ‘tableaux’ and should be exciting. After this it is found not only that Violet (who had become a great singer in the meantime) was legally married to Emil after all, but that Stanley was really Sir Marcus’s son from a first marriage. So right is done at last, as it might have been without all the trouble, had not ordinary legal processes been ruled out by the laws of melodrama. I have marked a passages, Act 1, p25, as suggestive. Otherwise the piece is harmless. Recommended for license. G. S. Street