Pupils at the Royal Hospital School, Holbrook, recently put on a stylish rework of the British comic thriller, The Lady Vanishes, as their end of term play.
This superb ensemble piece show-cased some highly entertaining character roles. Simone Rossouw captured the clipped aristocratic tones of Iris Henderson, while Serena Brown also stood out as the glamorous Mrs Todhunter. For the men, Sam Dixon’s sinister ‘brain surgeon’ and Sam Christmas’s buffoonish young man doing the ‘tour’ of Europe stood out, while Matt Adams as the heroic musicologist, Gilbert, moved deftly through the action, unravelling a conspiracy and getting the girl. The staging cleverly managed the wide variety of locations through the use of a selection of vintage trunks and a range of well-placed ‘silent movie’ style placards.
The Lady Vanishes was a play adaptation of the 1938 film directed by Alfred Hitchcock and based on the 1936 novel The Wheel Spins by Ethel Lina White. The story is about a beautiful English tourist travelling by train in Europe who discovers that her elderly travelling companion seems to have disappeared from the train. After her fellow passengers deny ever having seen the elderly lady, the young woman is helped by a young musicologist, and the two proceed to search the train for clues to the old woman’s disappearance.