Snake in the Grass
| Snake in the Grass | |||
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| Written by | Alan Ayckbourn | ||
| Characters | Annabel Chester Miriam Chester Alice Moody |
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| Date premiered | 5 June 2002 | ||
| Place premiered | Stephen Joseph Theatre, Scarborough | ||
| Original language | English | ||
| Series | Things That Go Bump | ||
| Subject | Ghosts, child abuse, domestic violence | ||
| Genre | Black Comedy | ||
| Setting | The garden of Chesters' house | ||
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Snake in the Grass is a 2002 play by British playwright Alan Ayckbourn. The play is about a middle-aged older sister who returns to the family home where her younger sister still lives, shortly after their abusive father's death. It was written as a female companion piece to the 1994 ghost play Haunting Julia, and in 2008 these two plays, together with new play Life and Beth were folded into a trilogy named Things That Go Bump.
Ayckbourn's first "ghost" theme play, Haunting Julia, had a cast of three men, all haunted, in different ways, by the suicide of the daughter of one of the men. Subsequently Ayckbourn had expressed a wish to write a female counterpart of this play. This was further encouraged by the continuing success of Stephen Mallatratt's adaptation of The Woman in Black (itself a heavy source of inspiration for Haunting Julia). The success of this play, along with Yasmina Reza's 'Art' also suggest that small-cast plays were becoming popular in commercial theatre.
A further factor was Ayckbourn's move towards more contemporary issues – in particular GamePlan, on the theme of teenage prostitution. This was the first play in the 2001 trilogy Damsels in Distress. The following year he wrote Snake in the Grass and it went one step further, with one of the characters a victim of sexual abuse as a child, although this is never explicitly stated in the play, only implied. The older sister is a victim of domestic violence.
There are a few notable differences to Haunting Julia. In Haunting Julia, a father is haunted by his dead daughter, whilst in Snake in the Grass the two daughters are haunted by their father, and for very different reasons. The supernatural scenes are far less prevalent; in Haunting Julia, the play climaxes in an appearance of the ghost of Julia, but in Snake in the Grass, there is much less clarity as to which "ghosts" are real ghosts, which are metaphorical ghosts in the sisters' minds, and which events are not ghosts at all but staged hoaxes. However, the play is, if anything, a considerably darker play than Haunting Julia.
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