The Fires of Youth

Examiner of Plays' Summary:

This is an earnestly written, and in its central situation, a strong play. It opens in an atmosphere of lightness and sentiment. Eily, the eighteen-year-old daughter of Anthony and Kitty Strickland, is in love with Dick Templeton, a young man of twenty-seven, who is supposed to be the son of Anthony's greatest friend (now dead) and has always been treated as one of the family. He asks her to marry him, but when Anthony is told of the affair by his wife he absolutely refuses to sanction it and, driven into a corner for his reason, confesses that Dick is his own son, the result of a love affair when he was a boy at Oxford. But then Kitty, rather than that the young people should be parted, is driven to the confession that young Eily is not Anthony's child. At first he thinks she means that she was unfaithful to him, but they are interrupted by Margaret, Kitty's sister, who upbraids Anthony for his want of trust in his wife, and explains how Eily is her child. She had been in love with a man who could not marry her, because his wife was alive in an asylum; Eily was born and Kitty - who had longed for a child and could not have one - and she agreed that she should pass as Kitty's and Anthony's - he being out of England at the time. Then, of course, there is no reason why Eily and Dick should not marry. I find nothing offensive in the situation. The people are all good sort of people who - given the original fault - act for the best. Some of the language is strong, as when Anthony in his mistake upbraids Kitty, and Margaret's when she turns on him and points out the unfairness of the rules as applied to men and women, but not too strong in a serious play. Its fault is a little theatricality, but it is quite a creditable piece of work. The atmosphere is throughout 'sympathetic' and that prevents the plot, with so much about illegitimacy in it, from jarring. Recommended for Licence. G. S. Street