The Greville Theatre Club
May 2008

 Snake In The Grass
by Alan Ayckbourn.
  

Directed by
Adam Thompson

"Gripping, mesmeric viewing"
Herts & Essex Observer

"Entertains from start to finish"
Braintree & Witham Times

 

Alan Ayckbourn’s 61st play, his thriller Snake In The Grass, is set in the garden of the family home where Miriam has cared for her father during his vituperative last years with the help of a nurse, Alice.  On Father's death, Miriam's older sister, handsome, divorced Annabel, comes home after over twenty years in Tasmania to find Daddy has left the bulk of his fortune to her.  The garden is filled with long-buried childhood memories for the two sisters, but as night falls, is it just the past that returns to haunt them, or something worse?

 

Nurse Alice Moody (Karen Ashton, left) arrives to tell Annabel Chester ( Carol Parradine) that her sister
Miriam killed her father and that she has a letter
to prove it

 

Alice tells Annabel that she wants a lot of money to keep quiet otherwise she will go to the police

Miriam (Cheryl Ferris) arrives sobbing that their
father had been terrible to her and that she pushed
him down the stairs "by accident".  She tells
Annabel that Alice wants £300,000.

 

Next day, Annabel and Miriam decide how to deal with Alice's demand for money.T

 

Alice returns find out whether Annabel and Miriam
will meet her demand.

Annabel offers Alice £15,000 which Alice rejects.  Miriam offers Alice a glass of wine.

 

The wine is drugged and Alice collapses.

 

 

Miriam drags Alice into the summerhouse and throws her down the well.

 

With Alice dead, Annabel and Miriam believe they
are in the clear but Miriam starts to frighten Annabel,
who has a weak heart, with stories from the past.

 

After terrifying Annabel with tennis balls and a recording of her father's voice, Alice rises out of the well covered in slime.  Annabel dies from heart failure and Miriam believes she now has her father's estate.  She reckons without her father's ghost...