Absent Without Leave

Examiner of Plays' Summary:

This melodrama is of the violent and unpleasant type, with much of the brutality which I think much more unwholesome than ordinary suggestiveness. However it is not the custom to interfere with it. The plot is of course idiotic. One Curtis schemes to get his cousin, Major Jatley Gordon's money, by a plot against his wife and child. A German spy, disguised as a Belgian, breaks into Mary’s bedroom, and the idiot hero, Stanley, of course thinks she is guilty and turns her out. This bedroom scene (pp.23) is not at all indecent and may pass. The child is abducted and there is a scene of his and another boy’s being brutally ill-used by a horrible hag (scene 3). Stanley goes back to Flanders and saves the life of the German spy, who confesses. He returns to England and not being able to find his wife, is drinking himself to death, after adopting unknowingly his own son. Then his wife is restored and the villain arrested. Apparent from the brutality, which is of the usual sort, the only objectionable features it’s the comic relief, which needs attention. Scene II. p. 1 (slip) the comic man enters with only a skirt on and I note two jokes on the same page regard to this. He must be decadently dressed and the jokes must come out. Scene VII, p.7 (slip). The business of the comic man’s being disguised as a flapper is all dubious, and the sentence marked on p.9 ‘I’ll sleep with that tonight’ is outrageous and of course must be cut. Page 8 - there is talk about the villain’s being a ‘white slave’ trader, but nothing happens in regard to that. However scene VI, p12, there is a sentence marked which should come out. Otherwise the play is regretfully recommended for license. G. S. Street. [In note] undertaking received from manager and also the producer that items refused to will be omitted from script.