Farce

John Stape is making progress. He now isn’t just teaching about farce, he’s living one. It wouldn’t feel that way for him, of course. He has to figure out how to quietly dispose of a body while everyone is everywhere around him. But for us, the audience, the latter half of the week has been a lovely tour de farce.

The real Colin Fishwick has removed the need to return his identity to him. He dropped dead in John and Fiz’s house. After he got a beating from the cuckolded husband, he came to John to complain.

Charlotte happened to be there and when she poked him to emphasize a point about how difficult all this was for her and John, Colin keeled over. Dead as a mackerel. John was supposed to be at the café for Chesney’s 16^th birthday party, Charlotte was supposed to be not there, and now they have to deal quickly with a corpse.

John conveniently found a carpet upstairs so they rolled up Colin to take him to Charlotte’s car. Lots of people on the street, spilling out from the café. Norris in the alley complaining about what people put in their garbage bins, while Charlotte and John surreptitiously load Colin into one.

John and Charlotte get him in the bin and to the curb by the car. Then we have a lovely laugh out loud moment. Rita stops for a chat. Leans across the top of the bin, laying her arm on the carpet bundle. “Hello, love, I don’t believe I’ve had the pleasure” she says to Charlotte.

She looks more closely at the carpet. John explains he inherited it from his grandmother and it was too big for their place.

“It’s a beauty” Rita says as she strokes the pile. I was holding my breath, fearing she was going to say ‘that would look lovely in my flat, d’ye mind if I take a look?’ John forestalls that by saying “Charlotte’s having it.”

After a number of misadventures, they end up putting poor Colin in a huge hole in the floor of the factory construction site. They’re not planning to bury him there, only because they have no way of doing that. It’s just a temporary hiding spot for him.

But as of the end of the week, John hasn’t been able to retrieve him. Charlotte, who thought this was such a splendid adventure, is having a meltdown and telling John “I should have known you were a lunatic.”