Andy Marshall moves to London looking for a fresh start after breaking up with his long-term boyfriend. To stave off boredom from his day job as an accountant and to meet new people, Andy joins a local amateur dramatics society called the Sarky Players based in Greenwich, South London. Despite his best efforts to avoid it, Andy is cast as one of the leads in a truly dreadful play called Whoops, Vicar, There Goes My Trousers, written by a local playwright.
The play might be bad, but the Sarky Players are a friendly bunch. Andy quickly makes new friends and finds himself attracted to Phil Cormack, a local artist helping with the props. But life doesn’t run to a script, so Andy and Phil will have to work hard to improvise their own happy ending.
The handout turned out to be a few pages of the play stapled together. Andy had expected the script for Cold Comfort Farm—this definitely wasn’t that.
“Er, Derek, have you given us the right play? This says it’s from Whoops, Vicar, There Goes My Trousers.”
“You old dog, Derek,” said Ryan with a guffaw. “You’ve lured in this poor man on the promise of a proper play.”
“It is a proper play, Ryan. Just because it was written by a local doesn’t make it any less credible.”
Dear God, what had he gotten himself into? He quickly checked the flyer and saw for the first time that the date for Cold Comfort Farm audition was the year before. Derek must’ve used the flyer to scribble down the audition times, but whether he’d deliberately meant to mislead Andy was another matter. Andy skimmed through the partial script. Instead of the gentle comedy based around a young woman who arrived in an airplane and something nasty in the woodshed, he had a 1920s farce involving a runaway goat, a vicar, and a large quantity of stolen French brandy. And that was just the scene in front of him.
Rebecca Cohen is a Brit abroad. Having swapped the Thames for the Rhine, she has left London behind and now lives with her husband and son in Basel, Switzerland. She can often be found with a pen in one hand and a cup of Darjeeling in the other.
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