His Last Leave

Examiner of Plays' Summary:

This crude old-fashioned melodrama, brought up to date in this violence of motive and action by the convention aid of the war. Its hero, the son of a country clergyman, and happily married to a girl who has the misfortune to rouse the passion of a villain, resolved, as he says, to ‘possess her at any risk and at any cost’. The hero enlists in a regiment of which the villain is a major, and when he comes home on leave he is induced by the major’s female accomplice to believe that his wife has been guilty of an intrigue of which she is really innocent. His stupidity in falling into this trap is equalled only by his folly in leaving his poor wife to be the defenceless prey of her base admirer, who nearly succeeds in forcing her to become his wife after he and his confederate - who has become a hospital nurse - have made out that her husband has been killed in the trenches. The absurd scenes on the battlefield, the breaches of discipline, etc have no more verisimilitude than is possessed by the extraordinary series of coincidences which is always bringing all the dramatis personae, serious and comic, together in the least likely places. But there is no offence, save that of wild improbability, in any of sensational nonsense, which may accordingly be recommended for license, Ernest A. Bendall.

Researcher's Summary:

Clifford Rean’s ‘His Last Leave’ was mainly performed by one of Will H Glaze’s touring companies from May 1917 to December 1919 (with the occasional revival thereafter), although for most of the time the company was led by Fred E Chabot because Glaze was on military service. The play was also staged by some theatres’ resident companies (Cheltenham, Hull, Plymouth, Sunderland, Hull again and Bristol) and by Maggie Morton’s touring company. The play was regularly billed as ‘the most realistic play of the times’ with reference to scenes in a dug-out somewhere in France, in No Man’s Land and in a dressing station behind the trenches. The first of those scenes provided the expected comic relief and the character of one of the soldiers who delivered it (Private ‘Erb) could be described in a shorthand way as ‘the Bairnsfather character’ (Coventry Evening Telegraph, 4 September 1917), and when Chabot advertised for a replacement actor to play him he needed only to say that the role was a ‘Bairnsfather Character Comedy Part’ (The Stage, 22 November 1917). Initially described as a ‘military’ or ‘war’ play, with thrilling melodramatic elements and a happy ending, when ‘His Last Leave’ was performed after the Armistice it could be called a ‘domestic drama’ (Runcorn Examiner, 26 July 1919). Glaze’s company was eager to stress the play’s continuing appeal in 1919, claiming in several advertisements in The Stage, January-April 1919, that it was generating better than ever box office returns, but towards the end of that year ‘His Last Leave’ was dropped. Clifford Rean wrote in The Stage, 21 November 1918, that he did not think that war plays ‘are going to come to a sudden end. The public taste is not going to change in an instant, and I certainly expect that some of them will be playing to the same big business twelve months hence as they are to-day, and a good many resident managers think the same’. While his optimism was self-interested, the performance history of 'His Last Leave' suggests that he had a point. Rean reused parts of its plot in his later play ‘On Leave for his Wedding’, which is also in the Great War Theatre database, advertisements for which often referred to Rean as the author of ‘His Last Leave’.