Directed by Mark Kimsey
Produced by Ritchard Tysoe
February 4, 5 & 6, 2010

Location: The action takes place on the stage of a small theatre at the end of a pier.
Time: The present

Programme Notes       [ Photographs ]

About Tonight's Playright

"People go to amateur theatre to be amused and entertained", explains Bettine Manktelow, who has been writing plays for amateurs for 30 years. "They don't want to be shocked or outraged and they don't like swearing or nudity. They like middle of the road entertainment, a good mystery or something to make them laugh."

Manktelow wrote her first play, They Call It Murder, for Thanet Dramatic Society in 1976 after she found it did not have enough male members to cast any of the available plays in print. So she wrote something in which all the speaking parts bar two were for women. It was subsequently produced by Folkestone Repertory Company and published by Samuel French.

"Like many people of my generation I was influenced by John Osborne and the angry young men of the fifties", says Manktelow. "I tried to write socially significant plays when I was younger but they never seemed to get anywhere and I was always getting letters of rejection from the BBC and various places. So I toned down my ambitions and started writing mysteries and thrillers."

Since moving to Kent in the early nineties, Bettine Manktelow set up her own amateur company, the New Deal TC, based in Deal, which premieres all her new plays. She never submits anything to French's for publication until she has given it a test run with New Deal.

About Tonight's Play

An amateur dramatic company are rehearsing a thriller in a theatre at the end of a pier when they find they are locked in and gradually the members are being killed off. Is it one of their number or is there somebody else locked in the empty theatre who will not stop till they are all dead?