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The coming of peace (A family catastrophe) cover

The coming of peace (A family catastrophe)

Chapter 3: SCENE.
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About This Book

The play unfolds on Christmas Eve in a rural family home where an aging head of household, his anxious wife, grown children, a neighbor and a long-serving servant gather as holiday rites mask simmering tensions. Gradually domestic rituals reveal secrets, inherited weaknesses, ideological clashes and moral compromises that threaten to fracture relationships. Scenes alternate ordinary detail and charged confrontations, exposing how private history and social expectation shape behavior across generations. The drama balances bleak revelations with restrained sympathy, suggesting both the weight of heredity and a cautious possibility that younger members may avoid repeating past errors.

SCENE.

A high, roomy, white-washed Hall—hung with old-fashioned pictures—horns and heads of different animals. A chandelier of stag’s horns hanging from the middle of the roof-tree is filled with fresh candles. At the back, in the middle of the wall, is a porch, which projects into the hall, with a glass door, through which is seen the heavy carved oaken door of the house. On the top of the porch is a stuffed moorcock: right and left above the level of the porch are windows—frozen and partly dim with snow.

To the left is an open arch, built like a gateway—which leads by the staircase to the upper stories. Two low doors in the same wall lead—one to the cellar, the other to the kitchen.

Two other doors in the opposite wall both open into one room; between these stands an old grandfather’s clock, on the top of which squats a stuffed screech-owl. The furniture of the room consists of heavy old oak chairs and tables: parallel to the left wall is a table covered with a white cloth. Down the stage to the left is a small iron stove, the flue of which runs along the wall. All the doors are gaily coloured, the panels filled with old-fashioned paintings of parrots, etc.