One Law for Both

Examiner of Plays' Summary:

A crude and wildly impossible melodrama with a moral which it fails, through ignorance of life, to enforce. The prologue shows how the ne'er-do-well son of a foolish millionaire mother nearly becomes the victim of a scheming girl, who at the instigation of her rascally father tries to so compromise him that he is bound to offer her marriage. Rather than do so he runs away from his mother and her money to the wilds of Mexico, where through drink he again commits himself through the influence of a shabby hotel keeper who induces him by gross trickery to become his accomplice - though in a sense an innocent man - in the ruin of an innocent one - of a fellow lodger. In horror at his deed he kills or thinks he kills, the rascally landlord and returns home after an absence of 6 years believing himself a murderer. But the girl whom he has seduced has returned there before him, and turns out to be his cousin whom his mother wishes him to marry, greatly to the disgust of the plotter who drove him away. By another gross absurdity the pair do not recognise one another, but fall in love, when the hero's objection to marriage is removed by the revelation that the murder was not committed by him at all. There is no offence, save crudity, in the long involved nonsense, which is accordingly Recommended for License. Ernest A. Bendall.