Frank R Long

At last from the murky files of MI5 anti-espionage archives comes this account of a KGB endeavour that was as much attempted Hollywood publicity coup as it was conventional Warsaw Pact stratagem. Red Square awaited its success with baited breath and the Kremlin was decked in bunting in anticipation. But at the eleventh hour, an MI5 part-time employee turned the tables and in dubious reward the whole story was inexplicably shrouded by HMG from public scrutiny for a generation. Now it can be told.

A PLAY IN THREE ACTS THE SCENE IS THE LOUNGE OF THE LLEWELLYN LUXURY HOME ON THE PACIFIC COAST OF MEXICO. IT IS LARGE, HAS DOORS TO LEFT AND RIGHT AND A WIDE, DEEP VERANDAH AT REAR. COCONUT PALMS CAN BE SEEN AGAINST A TROPICAL BLUE SKY ALONG WITH A PERFUSION OF RED AND WHITE TRUMPET FLOWERS THAT TEND TO INVADE THE VERANDAH...

A FILMSCRIPT BY FRANK R LONG. It is raining heavily. All the sounds concomitant with a violent storm are present. Lightning stabs the sky at frequent intervals accompanied almost immediately by a crash of thunder. CAMERA ROVES SLOWLY...

THIS PLAY IS IN TWO ACTS Two young Americans, one a white Rhodes scholar and the other a black professor acting as a servant, are boarding at an English stately home founded on eighteenth century slave money when the Adonis is recruited as an artificial insemination donor. But he catches 'flu and is delirious and his friend, having had a few drinks and wanting to help out, supplies the specimen...Thus Spense, the Afro-American intellectual, who is also researching his ancestry, finds in one fell swoop that he is sixth cousin to the present lord of the manor and apparently father of the imminent heir.

A semi-pornographic portrait painter and his pretty wife are hard at work in their isolated farm in darkest Exmoor. Two beautiful, well upholstered models arrive to pose. But the wife's first husband, a ne'er-do-well violent prisoner, has escaped from Dartmoor Prison as 'Long John Silver' (whom he thinks he is, having got a knock on the head during a pantomime) and is bent on murder. There are two naive Dartmoor screws in pursuit of Long John and a virginal vicar pursued by the models. A pantomime horse and a gorilla suit help to complicate matters in this end-of-pier eisteddfod. Read it and produce it!

A crap-strewn strip of suburban beach with two empty knocked-about deck chairs. GERRY and MCGINTY stroll into view dressed in theatrical tramp-like gear. This could be a novelle vague Laurel and Hardy about to launch into a particularly untuneful version of the Trail of the Lonesome Pine. One is fat and the other thin. Or one is tall and the other short. But they are different...

Two couples, joined in matrimony only partially holy, by sheer happenstance find themselves occupying adjacent honeymoon suites in a Monte Carlo hotel in 1931. What a situation! The author suspects such a situation and ambience has occurred in our theatre several generations ago. But never like this. Oh dear no. The lives of our four are of a kind that could never have been explored on stage pre-war for fear of the Lord Chamberlain's Office and our ever vigilant thought police. So are their lives improper? Do take your seats to find out...