A Series of Murders Read Free

about casting.’
    â€˜Ah.’
    â€˜Not the greatest little actress in the world, I’d say.’
    â€˜As an actress, Sippy Stokes is absolute death.’ Then Will added mischievously, ‘And she hasn’t even got the excuse of having been a pop star for the last five years.’
    â€˜â€™Ere, what do you think you’re –?’
    â€˜I was joking, Jimmy. Just joking.’
    Jimmy Sheet subsided with a grin, but he didn’t look totally reassured. Once again, Will’s attack – if attack it was – had been ambiguous.
    Sippy Stokes, the object of their bitchery, had been cast for the series in the role of Stanislas Braid’s beloved daughter, Christina. This was another character who worked better for enthusiasts of the crime novels of W. T. Wintergreen than for Will Parton. He had had considerable difficulties in making the part even vaguely playable, though he was quite pleased with the lines he had eventually come up with. Played by an actress of real skill and energy, he reckoned they would just about work.
    On the evidence of the rehearsal of the previous week and of that week’s filming, Sippy Stokes was not such an actress. Even Russell Bentley, usually far too absorbed in giving his performance as Russell Bentley to notice what any of the rest of the cast did, had been heard to comment on her incompetence.
    â€˜No, some people are born actresses,’ Will Parton mused aloud, ‘some achieve actressness, but I’m afraid you could thrust everything you liked upon Sippy Stokes and you’d never make her into one.’
    â€˜She speaks well of you, too,’ said Mort.
    â€˜Well, quite honestly,’ Will persisted, ‘I would have thought the basic minimum requirement for an actress is the ability to act.’
    â€˜Don’t you believe it, boofle. Lots of actresses have made very good careers from completely different “minimum requirements”.’
    â€˜Nell Gwynne, for example,’ Charles suggested.
    â€˜Yes, very good example. I mean, she did all right. Now there was a girl who knew her onions.’
    â€˜Or her oranges.’
    â€˜Thank you, Charles – always rely on you for a cheap line, can’t we? Point I’m making, boofle, is that you never hear much about what old Nellie was like as an actress, do you. Never read any notices . . . “Nell Gwynne made an enchanting Ophelia . . .”’
    â€˜Or even “I would have enjoyed the evening more without Nell Gwynne’s Juliet”.’
    â€˜Yes. Mind you, Charles, I don’t think any critic would be quite that vicious.’
    â€˜Ah.’ Charles grimaced apologetically.
    â€˜Oh, really? Who?’
    â€˜
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. And I’m afraid the actual line was “I would have enjoyed the evening more without Charles Paris’s Romeo”.’
    â€˜Oh, bad luck. Anyway, point I’m making, boofle, is –’
    But Mort Verdon never got on to the point he was making, for they were interrupted at that moment by the arrival of Ben Docherty, the Producer, and Dilly Muirfield, the script editor, of
Stanislas Braid
. Will Parton greeted their appearance with a groan. He knew it would be him they wanted to see, and he knew it would be about more rewrites that they wanted to see him. ‘As someone once said,’ he had growled at Charles a few evenings before, ‘you don’t write for television, you rewrite for television.’
    Sure enough, there were ‘a couple of points’ on the next week’s script that Ben and Dilly wanted to ‘just have another look at,’ so Will allowed himself to be dragged away, protesting that he was sure Shakespeare didn’t have this trouble.
    Though the coffee break had another five minutes to run, the taciturn A.S.M., Tony Rees, also reckoned it was time he was getting back to the studio, and Jimmy Sheet wanted to check some lines in his dressing