The ‘party pieces’ are of a slightly different order to the play spoofs (or spooves). They were written to be read out late in the evening of the after-show party of various play productions I had been in with the New Bristol Theatre Company. This explains their greater length and rather coarser tone.

The partisan audience for these readings had just spent all week playing the piece so they were all intimately familiar with the play, its workings, and everything that had gone wrong. In our An Inspector Calls, for instance, a flat did indeed collapse at one point, crushing our Goole to the floor, which is why in my version he comes on wearing a crash helmet. After playing the role of twins in Christopher Fry’s Ring Round the Moon, based on Jean Anouilh’s French original L’invitation au château, I was inspired to butcher that one as well with the unedifying results you see here. Vanbrugh’s The Provok’d Wife, on the other hand, led to my The Provok’d Beaux, which in turn led to an extended one-hour version of the same idea, The Double Beaux, which went on to win a prize and a performance in an amateur competition at Bridgwater.

(If you will indulge me for a moment, I need to further unburthen my bosom vis-à-vis Ring Round the Chateau. Decadent, I think, is the word for this. By the time I came to write it, I’d become so used to rattling off these pieces for the cast party that on this occasion I seem to have gone for baroque with the result that it probably won’t mean much to anyone who wasn’t closely connected with that particular production. Not only that but in this one, in the pursuit of laughs, I seem to have forgotten my manners. There are far too many personal remarks here about my fellow cast members, which is not only ungallant, it’s downright rude. I am ashamed and humbled, and only publish the piece now as an act of contrition… but also out of a sense of completeness. I mean, the thing was lying there, and I did spend a couple of days churning it out…)