Comedy con

The theatre is a place of darkness and light, a cocoon, where stories are woven and spells created. The audience settle down in comfy seats and wait to be entertained. They will happily suspend belief, accepting that the crook they see in TV's soap is , just for now, a handsome young squire, that someone on stage is capable of committing murder, that the attractive young woman with innocence in every word and gesture has wicked intentions. So it feels like a con, a betrayal, when we are asked to accept something that does not ring true. I can “ooh” and “ahh” with the best of them as Peter Pan flies across the stage but cringe when four ordinary women decide, at the suggestion of a newly arrived neighbour, that the solution to being a bit hard up is to become prostitutes for a week.

This was the premise of “The Tart and the Vicar's Wife” by Joan Shirley at The Grand Theatre, Wolverhampton last week. It was billed as a comedy and early scenes looked promising; it could develop as a comedy or even be pushed to farce. Instead, it followed an unreal story line, veered into serious drama, threw in a love story and ended “happily ever after”.

The set up is that a bright young, successful couple find their lives turned around when the husband decides to become a vicar as a result of deliverance from a serious car accident. They sell off their possessions and their house to fund his training and here he is in his first parish, with his wife regretting the loss of the high life she previously enjoyed. Her only source of income is writing risquee stories for lads' magazines, much to her husbands disgust.

Enter the new neighbour, a likely lad, former lorry driver and lottery winner. He bought the local manor at a bargain price, before moving in and discovering that it has a resident ghost. He asks the vicar to exorcise it, but the newly ordained vicar has no experience of such matters and in any case is about to go off for a month's training.

Enter the remaining characters, an American back-packing student en-route to Europe, an attractive middle aged divorcee who has an antique shop, and the farmers wife and mother of five.

Off goes the vicar, in comes the curate, the fun figure, to ask the ladies to organise some fund raising activities for the imminent church fete. Now, forgive me for being pedantic, but I doubt that vicars get sent off for four week training sessions by the C of E these days and any village lady worth her salt would have the fete planning sown up months before the event.

In comes the neighbour, Joe, driven out by Moaning Minnie, and after listening to the moans of the ladies about the shortage of cash, suggests they use the vicar's absence to turn the house into a high class brothel for some American businessmen who are nearby at a conference and looking to spend their expenses allowance before heading home, up to £5,000 each!

This is where I and the author part company. It was also where one of our party decided to sit out the second half in the theatre lobby. I was left with a nasty taste in the mouth and fuming. By next morning I was reworking the story, so here goes:

The ladies challenge Joe, to stop being a wimp and running over every time he sees the ghost (which occurs with dreary regulatory) and let them use the old manor to make money from tempting the American businessmen to “stay a night at the haunted house”. Each of the ladies can use their talents (writing, cooking for the hordes, antiques etc) and a proportion will go to the church funds. Meanwhile, Joe, scared witless, can move into the vicar's house to keep an eye on things.

There is plenty of scope for village misunderstandings as to what is going on at the manor, and for cases of mistaken identity with Joe standing in for the vicar. The student's Dad could even turn out to be one of the visiting Americans. At the end of the week the vicar returns and all is returned to normal, with Joe coming to an understanding with Moaning Minnie and the ladies in profit.

Now, that is a story I can live with and leave the theatre smiling.