Smoke Screen' Everyone is behind some smoke screens having his own to grind, discuss.

“Smoke Screens” is a beautiful play by Brighouse. It is a serious social comedy. Its story is a three-sided conflict. Primrose, the young heroine, is a modern girl. Her mother Lucy Aston is a liberal lady divorced from her charming husband. Susan her aunt is conservative. She does not like the free social contacts of her niece. She wants to give her a lecture but she does not listen to her. Primrose thinks that she needs no lectures because she can look after herself. The play is basically about a self-made woman who has divorced her husband and successfully established herself in society. Perhaps while busy in her fight against life, she has not been giving proper attention to her daughter Primrose. The play also shows the generation gap. It also has a lesson for the parents who try to crush the individuality of their Children and want to tailor them according to their own liking. Lucy is living with her daughter primrose of twenty in a well-furnished flat. She worked hard and established a taxi cab business.
Her sister Susan comes to meet her she is a married woman of fifty. When the curtain rises, Susan is seen in the room. The door opens and primrose enters. She searches for her bag, which contains her lipstick and three pounds cash. Susan asks her that she wanted to talk to her. She says that she has no time for her and takes her bag and goes out. She has been somewhat harsh to her aunt.
Lucy enters and Susan talks to her about Primrose‟s rudeness. Lucy says she might have made some mistake somewhere. Susan says that it was not so. She thinks that Lucy was a splendid woman who had fought life like a heroine. Lucy says that life is crook and fights back crooked.
Lucy could not be a domestic mother to Primrose while she was running a business. Susan complains that primrose was a spoiled child. Lucy says that each generation has its own techniques. When we want our children to be like us, they want to be left alone to be themselves. She says that she doesn‟t know whether Primrose is a mess, or just a nice kid with a hard modern surface.
Clarice, a friend of Primrose, enters and paints a very ugly picture of her brother John. Both the women don‟t understand why she was presenting such a horrible picture of her brother. Just then Primrose enters and announces that she was marrying John. She thinks that marriage is a jolly fine institution. She says that Lucy had married a handsome man but failed. Now she was marrying an ugly man out of love, not for his physical charms.
Lucy admits that it is always a losing game to be a mother. She is ready to see John, the future husband of her daughter.
Lucy exclaims, “The smoke Screens.” She expresses her determination that she will shoot John if he is not kind to primrose. Because it is true that

“One of the most important things in life is to profit from your losses.”
Thus Lucy remains behind the screen. Her handsome husband had been a smoke screen of an ugly man. Ugly John is a smoke screen of a nice man, rude and impertinent. Primrose is a smoke screen of a yielding mother. Thus all the important characters of the play are smoke screens. The writer has very successfully presented the human theme in the play.