Female Domestic Abuse
The play is one of the earliest—and still one of the most searing—depictions of domestic abuse in which it is the husband who is the victim. The abuse is emotional rather than physical, of course, but if any play manifests how this distinction is ultimately meaningless in terms of the damage that can potentially be inflicted, it is the portrait of how Millie Crocker-Harris almost single-handedly destroyed whatever man her husband used to be.
British Repression
This must be a very strange play to compare a reading with a viewing a performance. As a written text, it is impossible to ignore the reality that the dramatic tension is constructed upon a bedrock of really quite violent emotional content. In performance, however, that violence must dampened so that the simmering embers beneath never ignite into the conflagration that would surely be result were the story transferred to America. It is not often that the adulterous lover of another character winds up calling that person “evil” and the audience is at a complete loss to find reasons to disagree. The crux of the plot at hand turns on Andrew Crocker-Harris temporarily violating the British codes of conduct toward open displays of emotion while every individual scene is almost written in code which in which the actual emotional motivation of dialogue has to be deciphered to according to what information has come before.
A Critique of the Education System
On a certain level, the play is asking a fundamental question: why can’t students be objectively graded simply upon what they have actually learned in class? Constant references are made to the transactional nature of the academic system in which instructors must put on a show for students and students must curry favor with faculty. Looming over all this is a system operating within a dubious mechanism in which process is strictly followed for punishing employees while rewards are given for arbitrary reasons existing outside the borders of actual job performance.
