Rumors

Rumors opens ten minutes after a gunshot, in the upstairs bedroom of a deputy mayor who has shot himself through the earlobe. The first guests to arrive for his tenth anniversary party find him bleeding, his wife missing, the cook and the maid gone for the night, and no explanation available.

Rather than call anyone, they decide to protect him. Each couple that arrives afterwards is told a slightly different version of what happened, and each then repeats its version to the next arrivals with improvements. By the second act four couples are maintaining incompatible stories in the same house, a state trooper is at the door, and one of them has to stand in the living room and account for the entire evening on the spot.

Neil Simon wrote it in 1988, and it is his only farce in the strict sense: doors, entrances, mistimed exits, and a plot that runs on characters lying to people who are already lying to them. He kept the machinery classical and set it among lawyers, analysts and political appointees who have careers to lose.

The comedy is built for precision rather than warmth. Lines overlap, injuries accumulate, and the funniest passages are the ones where somebody is being careful. Timing does most of the work, and the second-act monologue in which one guest invents an entire sequence of events under questioning is the set piece the whole play is aimed at.

For all the noise, it turns on something small and recognisable: a group of people who will say anything at all rather than admit that their friends' marriage, and possibly their own, is not what they have been telling everyone it is.