His charwoman, the macabre Mrs Newsome, warns her favourite, Hector's daughter Valentine, 20, a student home from Oxford, that her mother Judith (who has been out shooting) is having an affair with her visitor, the writer Hugh Gifford.
Her brother Vernon, 19, a student home from Cambridge, is indifferent to bourgeois morality; he is a Communist, dislikes his father, and finds Hugh charming.
Now Mrs Newsome confides in Valentine: she has written to the absent master, and the latter has just returned secretly to England to surprise the adulterous pair.
That evening, while Valentine and Vernon are in Penzance at a dance and the two lovers are alone in the gale-buffeted house (the scene never changes from this cluttered claustrophobic drawing-room), Galbraith walks in.
After amusing himself by toying with the trapped lovers, he takes control of his house, downing brandy, throwing open the windows, brandishing a revolver, telling Judith she is starting for Africa with him (a plane is standing by at Lympne aerodrome), and giving Gifford five minutes to get out.
Just in time: Valentine and Vernon come back early from the dance, full of news: a car has gone over the cliff and is still burning in the cove!
By ill luck, Valentine sees in the grate a tell-tale Russian cigarette stub, discarded by Hector before the duel – and recognises its significance.
[2]) Anmer Hall and Leon M. Lion directed an amended text[3] in a West End production at the Westminster Theatre, 23 February to March 1938 (29 performances), with Cathleen Nesbitt, Cecil Trouncer and Alan Napier among the cast, and with decor by Peter Goffin.
", her long skirt caught the edge of the cloth and as she walked on "rolled it up into a neat little sausage" – to the delight of the balcony and the puzzlement of the groundlings, who couldn't see what had happened.
[5] One of Paul Scofield's earliest roles was in the Birmingham Rep's revival of the play in 1945 (13 March – 14 April), with Gwen Nelson and Scott Sunderland among the cast.
"At its best," she wrote, "Mr Lucas's dialogue convinces us that it is the talk of people of high intelligence when all their faculties are working at top pressure: wise, incisive, and sometimes memorable."
[4] A. V. Cookman, theatre-critic of the London Mercury, thought it "a bad play" because melodramatic, but nevertheless "full of interesting talk and subtle psychological cross-lights".
The quickness and tension of the third act, when everyone's future hangs on the girl Valentine, an Electra with a green conscience, lasts to the final curtain.
The melodramatic Land's End was the playwright's reply,[12] as was his Cowardesque romantic comedy, Surrender to Discretion, first produced by the People's Theatre, Newcastle upon Tyne, from 18 – 25 November 1933.