THE HOWE-SPONG COMPANY.

New Zealand Herald, Volume XXXI, Issue 9503, 5 May 1894, Page 5

THE HOWE-SPONG COMPANY.

The following is a brief outline of the plot of the drama " True as Steel," which this company will produce at the Opera House 011 Monday evening:—" True as Steel " is a drama depicting the troubles of an ironmaster during periods of depression and strikes, and the incidents are enacted in the iron districts of England. A prologue concludes with an exceedingly touching death-bed scene, in which the hero, John Inylesant, an ironworker, arrives just too lato to see his wife die from starvation in a ruined cottage. The roof has been torn off in order to force the tenants to leave, and there lay the wife dead, with the snow falling upon her through the torn roof. Her child knelt ab the bedside and witnessed her last hours. Tho ironmaster arrives at the cottage and wrongfully accuses Jack Inglesant of murdering his (tho ironmaster's) wife, who had been shot during the troubles, Jack threatens violence, but remembering Ins own dead wife, he gives himself up, but declares his innocence. Subsequently, in the drama proper, he is convicted, and transported to the Transvaal, where he becomes " a diamond king," and turns up jußt in time to trump the knave, ti villain, Cuthberb Calderon, nephew and partner in the firm of Hartland and Co., the head of which is Mr. James Cathcart, formerly the Ironmaster. The king of diamonds also frustrates the designs of the villain upon Lillian Lesanb, an heiress (really his own daughter, who had been kidnapped at) the time of his j wife's death).