It is 1940 and Mrs Mudge, the cleaning lady is busy tidying the Little Theatre in Lulverton, which is run by the local amateur dramatics' society. But she is in for a surprise when she finds a corpse in the ticket office, stabbed with a dagger - a prop from the society's latest play, Measure for Measure. The novel is in two sections. In the first, the narrator, Vaughn Tudor, describes the formation of the small amateur theatre group, in a sleepy village...