Read Online Dead Room Farce by Simon Brett - Free Book Online

room, which was fine, offered him an evening meal, which he declined, and directed him towards a late-opening supermarket, where he bought a chicken pie and, it has to be admitted, another half-bottle of Bell’s.
    By his standards, he didn’t reckon he’d had that much, but the effects of alcohol are cumulative and, as he slipped, later than intended, into a drunken sleep, Charles Paris knew he’d have another hangover with which to face his second day of reading
Dark Promises
by Madeleine Eglantine.
    His last thought, before he surrendered consciousness, was once again – What
did
happen between me and Cookie Stone?

Chapter Four
    COOKIE Stone sidled up to him at the Vanbrugh Theatre in Bath on the Monday afternoon, and winked. ‘I remember what you said on Thursday night.’
    Charles Paris smiled weakly. He wished to God he did.
    Fortunately, there wasn’t much time for embarrassment. The rest of the day ahead promised to be too busy for reminiscence or recrimination. The cast of
not on your wife!
was about to rehearse the play for the first time on set, and they all knew that, whatever standard the show had reached in the rehearsal room, on stage everything would be different.
    The schedule for the next two days was tight. The get-in to build the set had happened on the Monday morning. (In the old days, Charles Paris reflected nostalgically, that would have taken place on the Sunday, but now prohibitive overtime rates made any theatre work on Sundays a rarity.) On the Monday afternoon the lighting director would work out a basic lighting plot, to be tweaked and refined during the tech. run, which was scheduled to start at five, and to take as long as it took. Fortunately,
not on your wife!
was not a complicated show from the technical point of view. The basic set of the two adjacent flats, once built, did not change throughout the play, and the lighting plot was a simple matter of switching between the two acting areas.
    The Tuesday morning was to be reserved for final adjustments to the set and lights. The company would then be called at twelve o’clock for notes arising from the tech. run. At two-thirty they would start a full dress rehearsal, which everyone in the company knew would not be enough to drag the show back to the standard it had reached on the previous Thursday in London.
    Then, on the Tuesday evening at seven-thirty,
not on your wife!
would face its first-ever paying audience, amongst whom would be critics from the local press. This last detail, when announced, had distressed many of the cast – particularly Bernard Walton. The show, he argued, would be terribly rough on the Tuesday night. Give it a chance to run itself in for a couple of performances before admitting the press. But for once the star didn’t get his own way. The view of Parrott Fashion Productions, relayed through the company manager, was that, yes, the show might have rough edges, but, more important, they needed to get newspaper reviews as soon as possible.
The Western Daily Press
, as its title implied, came out every day, but Bath’s other local newspapers had midweek deadlines. If their critics came any later than the Tuesday, the notices wouldn’t make it into print until the Thursday week, by which time
not on your wife!
would have only four more performances to do in Bath, before the whole caravan moved on to Norwich. The company manager apologised to Bernard Walton for this fact of life, but stood firm. The star might have total artistic control, but when it came to purely commercial considerations, he had to give way. Advance booking for the show wasn’t as good as they’d hoped, and Parrott Fashion Productions insisted on a Tuesday press night.
    It was clear on the Monday that the show’s director was more than a little out of his depth. Though he’d got by all right in the rehearsal room, actually getting a play into a theatre presented different challenges to