West Wittering Players tackle classic farce sequel

This time round they are offering the sequel, Caught In The Net which picks up the story 20 years on. The original play tells of John Smith, a London cab driver with two wives, two lives and a very precisely planned schedule for juggling them both. And he is juggling them still when we see him again in Caught In The Net – but this time with added complications. The show will be at West Wittering Memorial Hall from Wednesday, April 10-Saturday, April 13, with tickets £10 and £8 from Sayas News, Rookwood Road, phone 01243 513110.

Dennis said: “I was quite surprised there was a sequel but I realised that at the end of Run For Your Wife neither the wives knows of the existence of the other wife. One thought the other was a nun and the other thought that the other was a transvestite and now here we are 20 years on. It's the same characters but in this one the play introduces the two children of the two wives and the two children meet on the internet which causes quite a panic!

“Run For Your Wife last year was very well received. The place was full of laughter for every performance. We do get good audiences down there. The audiences are pretty good to us and I would say that capacity was about 90 per cent for the performances which is fantastic – and pretty unheard of in some places.”

Dennis had to stress last time that the company were depicting attitudes which probably wouldn't go down too well now and which were very much from a different era. Maybe that's slightly less the case now with the show set two decades on, in 2004.

“But John Smith is still trying to keep the two sides of his life apart, still trying to live the two lives but then he realises that the children have met on the internet which causes him quite a worry! It is very much a farce. There are lots of doors involved! But it has got a really good and rather surprising ending. We will be asking all our audiences not to disclose that ending to other people! The only disappointment is that we have not managed to keep the whole cast together. The two wives are the same and John Smith is the same but we've got someone else to play the friend and we've got two youngsters to play the two teenagers. I am directing but I've also been forced to be on the stage in the second act when I will be playing the dad. The way I play him is as your bluff Yorkshireman and I think it's the first time that I've actually acted my age!”

The real challenge directing it is “fitting it all onto the stage. It is about having enough entrances and exits that you can make it work but we don't actually have as many doors as the script asks us for. We just don't have enough room for that. There's also a chase scene that needs a bit of choreography with one character chasing around with a big carving knife. You've got to get the timing right and the energy right. There's a lot of business going on.”