Arsenic and Old Lace played to a large and appreciative audience at Colwall Village Hall last week.

This play, by Joseph Kesselring, was a great choice for the Colwall Players, whose production was professional and hugely entertaining.

Set in a genteel sitting room in a respectable area of Brooklyn, New York, in the 1940s, the play is about two sweet, old ladies and their gentleman visitors.

The old ladies, brilliantly played by Dianne Lloyd and Angela Meredith, are not quite what they seem and, as the play progresses, we learn that they are serial poisoners who bury their victims in the cellar.

There are corpses, cops and murderous gangsters behind the faade of velvet curtains and cut-glass decanters. But the old ladies mean well and despatch their lonely victims out of kindness, with a glass of arsenic-laced elderberry wine, and never fail to check whether a Methodist or Presbyterian funeral would be the more fitting.

The play becomes more frantic and farcical as events progress and the only sane member of the family, Mortimer Brewster, desperately tries to cover up the crimes of his mad relations.

With a mad brother who thinks he's President Roosevelt, an insane German plastic surgeon, called Dr Einstein, and a would-be writer for a cop, chaos is inevitable.

With strong performances from the whole cast, Arsenic and Old Lace was a thoroughly enjoyable production.

Sue Vickers