"We all have it in us to be criminals", says Selsey playwright

The Window Cleaner and The Allotment will be on Friday, April 26 at 7.30pm and Saturday, April 27 at 3.30pm at St Peter’s Hall, Selsey, with a total running time of one hour 50 minutes including a 20-minute interval.

In The Window Cleaner, when Jill, a window cleaner, encounters a young man in the apartment she’s working on, she realises immediately he’s up to no good. In an effort to avoid becoming his victim, Jill quickly manages to persuade him to tell her about his upbringing and the road that has led to his criminal career. Jill has a few secrets of her own to share, but there is one more surprise for both of them that might end up getting them both in big, big trouble.

“It’s so easy to make mistakes and things go wrong and then needs must. The window cleaner is making good but she has been in prison.

"But she is now trying to get on the right track and she is a hard-working window cleaner and she is very, very trustworthy. And she finds herself in the very, very rich apartment but there she finds a burglar... and it's the relationship between them. Tragedy and comedy go hand in hand but it's an uplifting slice of life. But the burglar has already found that in the next bedroom there is a dead body. It's funny but also just how awful is that!”

The Allotment tells of four friends who are working together on an allotment on a lovely spring day: “They are a group of ladies who have been asked to do community service for one reason or another. They're not young but things have happened in their lives and they have committed misdeeds and that's why they're doing the community service. They are a strange mix and in the allotments they all try to live their own dreams but there's someone that wants to bring them face to face with the truth. The point is that anybody can get into trouble. The thing is how we get out of it.”

The four friends share carrots and hats and a mutual dislike for Tuesdays. Marcie and Norah make plans to attend Lara’s Shakespearian performance with their respective families while they wait for Bella to return from her trip to pick up a new rotavator. Bella returns without the rotavator but with disturbing news of the new man, Mr Barnes, who seems adept at teasing secrets out of them. Marcie, Norah and Lara will not be so easily taken in… or will they?

The double bill concludes a series of five plays for spring 2024 from Gillian, all presented in the style of radio plays to mark the centenary of the radio play.

“It has been a lovely, easy thing to do. It means that you don't have to have a set or lots of rehearsals, just one or two days’ rehearsals script in hand and then you do it. And I'm just so lucky to live in a little town like Selsey where they will do my work.”