La Dernière torture

Examiner of Plays' Summary:

A vigorous and painfully realistic little sketch of the last stand made by the French Consul and his half-dozen men at the Legation which they have held gallantly for a month against the Boxers during their rebellion. They are at the end of their food and almost of their courage, as, while waiting in vain for help in the carnage and incendiary fires around them, they go nearly mad with the frenzy of starving despair. The 'last torture' is that of the consul when, to prevent his daughter falling alive into the hands of the Chinese, he implores her lover to kill her at the critical moment of the final assault announced by the cannonade. The lover refuses, so the father shoots the girl himself only to find, as the corpse drops from his arms, that the firing is that toff the rescuing troops, who have arrived just in time to be too late. Necessarily painful; but with no offence either of taste or discretion in its tragic thrills. Recommended for license. Ernest A. Bendall.