Murder in the Title Read Free Page A

that’d be terrible.’
    â€˜Terrible,’ Velma concurred.
    After
The Message Is Murder
Charles didn’t feel so sure. And despised himself for the meanness of the thought.
    He managed to escape the Inchbalds and get another glass of the Spanish red, which was tasting increasingly as if the bottle had been left open for a week. It matched the sourness of Charles’ mood.
    He knew its basic cause, but he also knew that it had been aggravated by the events of the evening. It really hurt him to have been described as unprofessional by Kathy Kitson at the end of the first act. And it hurt the more because he knew the charge was justified. No excuses about the state of emotional tension he was in could excuse his childish giggling at the idiocies of Leslie Blatt’s dialogue.
    As he thought of the playwright, he looked across to the old man, whose claw-like hands were pawing his eighteen-year-old companion, trying to dissuade her from her assertion that she really ought to be going home. Charles shuddered. For a man in his fifties with a taste for young actresses, the sight of Leslie Blatt prompted unwelcome comparisons.
    Still, one thing he could do – indeed, should do – to regain some of the day’s lost ground, was to make his peace with Kathy Kitson.
    He looked across at her. She had changed out of her Lady Hilda De Meaux costume, but didn’t look any different. Kathy Kitson never looked any different. She was an actress who lacked the humility Mahomet had shown to the mountain. She didn’t go to her parts; they came to her. And if a few of the lines – or even the whole emphasis – of the play had to change to accommodate her performance, then that’s the way it had to be.
    Kathy Kitson’s only performance consisted of Kathy Kitson, her hair set that afternoon, walking elegantly round stages in waisted silk dresses, and speaking with brittle elocution whatever lines she thought appropriate to Kathy Kitson. This she had done endearingly in West End comedies during the fifties, popularly in the television sit com,
Really, Darling?
during the late sixties, and with decreasing éclat in decreasingly prestigious provincial theatres during the seventies and into the eighties. This performance she had finally brought, with the desperation of the last dodo, to
The Message Is Murder
at the Regent Theatre, Rugland Spa.
    And this performance, to judge from what she was saying to a young man in a leather jacket as Charles approached, was the one she intended to give in the forthcoming production of that searing indictment of contemporary society by one of Britain’s most controversial young playwrights,
Shove It
. .
    â€˜You see, darling,’ she murmured huskily, ‘I don’t think all that . . . language is necessary.’
    â€˜But,’ protested the young man in the leather jacket, ‘Royston Everett’s language is an authentic reflection of life on the streets of Liverpool.’
    â€˜I’m sure it is, darling, but one can’t just present plays for the people of Liverpool.’
    â€˜It’s not
for
the people of Liverpool, it’s
about
the people of Liverpool. Everett was brought up in Toxteth. He knows what he’s talking about.’
    â€˜I’m sure he does, but that is not really the point. You see, my feeling is that playwrights tend to fall back on bad language when their confidence is threatened.’
    â€˜Oh.’
    â€˜When they’re afraid their points won’t get across, they reinforce them with bad language.’
    â€˜Well –’
    â€˜In my young day that wasn’t necessary. We used something else to reinforce the playwright’s points – an old-fashioned little thing called
acting
.’
    This left the young man in the leather jacket without speech, and gave Charles the opportunity to intervene. ‘Kathy, I just wanted to apologize –’
    â€˜And another thing I think