The joy of our village Christmas play

We are just recovering from the village play. This annual Christmas event was taken over last year by our son William, who writes it and acts in it, and his wife Hannah, who directs. Last year, it subverted the genre (as critics like to put it) of ghost stories. This year, it did a similar trick with whodunnits. It was entitled Death on the Dudwell, a reference to the trickle of a tributary which runs beside our fields. The play, set in 1935, opens with the idle would-be heir Arthur Prince (William) reading a contemporaneous Spectator on a sofa. It concerns the murder of his father, the unsavoury Lord Haremere (played by William’s former prep-school head, David Chaplin) who, though already dead before the play starts, has a good many lines. Almost every member of the cast has a motive for killing the old wretch. Since David still had Covid last week, there was very real pressure from typecasters that I would have to step in and read out Lord Haremere’s lines on stage. Luckily David rallied, and the performances (two nights, by popular demand) were a great success. All the cast of 23 were local, the great majority from the village. The character names suggest the style – Miss De Meener, Charity Frost, Gabby Gobb (the parish news reporter). The (real) rector brilliantly managed the sound effects, including the noise of fist connecting with face. The plot was ingenious, as proved by the fact that the audience on opening night, when invited to guess in a secret ballot during the interval who done it, all got it wrong.