Busybody
Written by Jack Popplewell
Directed by Ted Brooks
11 – 14 October 1967
This hilarious play centers on a voluble cleaning woman who keeps telling the cops how to mind their business and who steps forward with the right evidence in every pinch. She lives in the basement of the office building she cleans and one night finds a body. By the time the police arrive, there is no body and no evidence. The wrong alarms are sent out, murdered men turn up alive, and the whole thing is chalked up to the cleaning woman’s imagination until an unidentified body is discovered on a distant hill and the cleaning woman uncovers more evidence in the course of her duties. Is the company owner staging his own murder? Or did he kill his wife’s lover? Is the lover a firm employee or someone else? Where do the two female assistants fit in? What is the wife withholding?
Cast
Mrs Piper – Margaret Baird
Det. Constable Goddard – Martin Wood
Det. Inspector Baxter – Alan Bowman
Mrs Marshall – Marion Ellis
Miss Selby – Jill Hodder
Vickie Reynolds – Stella Kirby
Robert Westerby – Maurice Tripp
Mr Marshall – Harry Randall
Crew
Stage Managers – Elsie Coleman, Janice Howe
Assistant Stage Manager – Pat Dole
Lighting – Jean Burgess
Sound – Gordon Lawrence
Set built by – Theatre Workshop