I Read Plays: The Ticket-of-Leave Man

The Ticket Of Leave Man

This is a play by Tom Taylor, a Victorian playwright perhaps best known for having written Our American Cousin, the play Abraham Lincoln was watching when he was shot. This play is mostly of interest as it is considered the first play about a detective; the name of the detective character Hawkshaw was used as a slang word to mean detective for some time afterwards.

Anyway, this is described as a melodrama, which seems about right. Robert Brierly is down from Lanacashire, his first time in London, and he falls in with a bad crowd, falls in love with May and is arrested for passing a forged note (from one of the villains pretending to be his friend). In the second act he is released from prison (on parole – given a “ticket of leave” that must be endorsed by the police) falls on his feet into a job at a brokerage firm, repays the money that was lost in the forged note and prepares to marry May. At this moment the villains attempt to pass off some bad notes and Hawkshaw turns up to catch them. Brierly is recognised then blackmailed by the villains leading to a final, almost farcical final heist scene.

Anyway, there’s some good jokes, a lot of over the top coincidence and several bits of period business I enjoyed. I’m assuming that the disguises of the detective are supposed to fool the audience, so you’d have a lot of make-up and costume changes and whoever plays them would need to put on different voices.

The actual crime business moves seamlessly between quite detailed forgery and fraud, which relies on details of how notes were redeemed that the audience is presumed to understand, to ridiculous thefts that are just there. The detective puts on disguises, and overhears things, but he’s no deducer; he already knows the main villain is a villain, he’s just trying to catch him in the act. Still, his judgment of character comes into play a bit.

Read This: For an old fashioned play that’s about crime, and society and even romance, and is sometimes kind of funny.

Don’t Read This: If details of Victorian society do not interest you and jokes about them even less so