Switch No. 7

Examiner of Plays' Summary:

Surely spectacular play, the main interest being in what the audience sees going on outside the signal box, which is the scene of the Play. A Signalman is knocked out by a shock in a storm and telegraph and telephone also go dead. The officer guarding the line carries off the signalman to the relief post, to send a relief. Enter an escaped German officer. Enter also a canteen worker. The German grasps the situation, that a troop train is due, overcomes the canteen worker, shoots the driver of a goods train and gets into a goods train to run it into the troop train. Back [...] the officer on guard and eventually he and the canteen worker manage to work switch No. 7 which blow up a bridge and with it the goods train and so save the troop train. This catastrophe is seen by the audience and should be a fine effect. Recommended for Licence. G. S. Street

Researcher's Summary:

Only the original performance week has been found, 1-6 April 1918 at the Victoria Palace, London, when the play was part of a variety bill. Reviews in The Era, 3 April 1918, and The Stage, 4 April 1918, called it ‘a sensational episode’ by George Rollit that was ‘originated and devised by Harold Heath’. The Era noted that three members of the cast had served in the Mercantile Marine, the E. Surreys and the French Red Cross, and the R.F.A (the Royal Fleet Auxiliary?). The Era thought that the piece required ‘a little more confident and deft handling to bring out all its dramatic possibilities’. The Stage thought that ‘it will require to be overhauled in order to secure sustained success’, the opening passages being inclined to drag and the final episode being too abrupt. Tantalisingly, The Stage observed that ‘there are also certain dangerous lines which call for revision’ but it did not identify them. The dramatisation of an attempt to destroy a troop train might have reminded the audience of the Quintishill train disaster of 22 May 1915 in which over 200 soldiers and several other people died, and as many again were injured, when a troop train hit a stationary local train and a third train, an express, collided with them both.