Current Productions

Tabitha by Arnold Ridley and Mary Cathcart Borer

Christmas Eve in a shabby attic room, in the small cathedral city of Linchminster. The gas fire has gone out and nobody wants to spend the shilling to relight it. Down in the street, the congregation is arriving for the carol service, and the choir is practising across the road at St Jude's.

Upstairs, three elderly lodgers are getting on with the evening as best they can. There are cards to open, a little sherry to be found from somewhere, and paper chains that have been up rather too many years running. It is all perfectly ordinary.

Until Tabitha the cat is discovered dead!

What follows is a light hearted mystery about the people nobody looks at twice. Three retirees of very modest means who decide, since the police aren't going to take a poisoned cat seriously, that they will simply have to look into it themselves. Their methods are unorthodox and their nerve is remarkable. But by eleven o'clock that night, the police are taking it extremely seriously indeed.

Tabitha was first performed at the Duchess Theatre, London, in March 1956. It was co-written by Arnold Ridley, best known to television audiences as Private Godfrey in Dad's Army, and to theatregoers as the author of The Ghost Train. Tabitha is a warm, funny, thoroughly English piece with something genuinely unnerving moving about underneath it.

Join us for an evening of tea, sherry, small kindnesses and creeping suspicion.

Past Productions

2022 All By Myself - Robert Scott
2022 The Haunted Through Lounge and Recessed Dining Nook at Farndale Castle - David McGillivray and Walter Zerlin Jnr
2023 An Evening of One Act Plays
2024 March - Lucky Numbers - Mike Yeaman
2024 November - Farndale..Christmas Carol - David McGillivray and Walter Zerlin Jnr
2025 April - Agatha Christie Double Bill. The Rats & The Patient
2025 October - A Bolt From The Blue - David Tristram