production of "Private Lives" (a Noël Coward play in which they had appeared together in their acting days), while pretending to be the visiting vicar Arthur Humphrey who is due to preach the Sunday sermon the next day. Just before they set out, Penelope and Clive re-enact a fight scene from "Private Lives" and accidentally knock Miss Skillon (who has come back unannounced) unconscious. Miss Skillon, wrongly thinking she has seen Lionel fighting with Penelope, gets drunk on a bottle of cooking sherry and Ida hides her in the broom cupboard. Then Lionel, arriving back, is knocked silly by a German spy on the run, who takes the vicar's clothes as a disguise. To add to the confusion, both Penelope's uncle, the Bishop of Lax, and the real Humphrey unexpectedly show up early. Chaos quickly ensues, culminating in a cycle of running figures and mistaken identities. In the end, a police sergeant arrives in search of the spy to find four suspects, Lionel, Clive, Humphrey and the German, all dressed as clergy. No one can determine the identity of the spy (or anyone else for that matter) and the German is almost free when he is revealed and foiled by the quick work of Clive and Ida. The scene calms down as the sergeant leads the spy away and Humphrey leaves. Miss Skillon emerges from the closet, and she, the Bishop and Lionel demand an explanation. Penelope and Clive begin to explain in two-part harmony, getting up to the scene from "Private Lives," when Miss Skillon again manages to catch a blow in the face. She falls back into Ida's arms as the curtain falls. Changes In the original, Clive is an English actor and former co-star of Penelope's, now conscripted into the British army – in the rewrite he is in the US Army. In the original, the prisoner is a German escapee from the local POW camp – in the rewrite, he is a captured Russian spy escaping from the nearby American base. In the original, Penelope speaks in RP British English – in the rewrite, she becomes an American. Quotes "The only other bishop's niece I know is in the chorus at The Windmill" "Darling, a woman with a bottom like that could say anything" "Sergeant, arrest most of these vicars" "You can't shoot me! I have diabetes!" (film version) "How about The Wreck of the Hesperus?"