Frank Williams
SOLDIERING ON
Mask for Murder by Frank Williams
Theatre Royal Brighton, 1996
“When I was a young actor, I played a couple of small parts in a repertory production of Agatha Christie’s Witness for the Prosecution. Night after night, I would listen to the gasps from the audience as during the last few minutes, three or maybe four surprises are revealed in that brilliant plot. I think it was then that I realised why the thriller is such a favourite with British audiences…”
It may come as a surprise to many of Frank Williams’s fans to learn that the man who played the vicar in Dad’s Army for seven years is also a successful writer of thrillers. The crafting of murder mysteries for the stage might seem a startling departure for someone who is also a lay member of the General Synod of the Church of England, but Frank Williams the playwright recognises no such conflict of interest.
“Members of the clergy quite like thrillers,” he says, “some even write them. Besides, my thrillers aren’t really about the grisly mechanics of murder so much as the question of ‘Whodunnit?’ or, as in the case of my earlier play Alibi for Murder, ‘Will he get away with it? Will he get marched off to the gallows at the end?’” (Not that any murderer should ever go to the gallows, in the author’s opinion: Frank Williams has always been a firm opponent of capital punishment.)
It's the puzzle aspect that attracts him to the form, and the game of cat and mouse with the audience who are sometimes ahead of the characters, sometimes lagging behind, frequently surprised, “But always, one hopes, entertained.”
Most of his thrillers are set some time in the past, although Mask for Murder is the first to go back as far as the Victorian period. “This is probably because I feel nostalgic, though I hope not sentimental, about the past,” he explains, “but some stories, and particularly murder mysteries, seem to work better set in a bygone era.”
Alibi for Murder, for example, was set in the early fifties not just as an exercise in nostalgia, but rather because the story belonged “in a more innocent age when certain things were dark and mysterious and not talked about, an age when tensions were often beneath the surface rather than out in the open”. The further back an author goes, the more research he is likely to need to do, but for Frank Williams such research is usually general rather than specific. “You want to get the details right. If you’re talking about the price of a suit or something, it helps to make sure it’s correct because it keeps the play in context and makes it sound more real.”
Like so many authors, he can’t say exactly where his ideas come from but Mask for Murder makes reference to the famous Bravo Case which held the Victorian public in thrall for a time and which provided a kind of inspiration – though for further detail you will have to listen closely to the dialogue, as to say any more here may impair your enjoyment!
Although Frank has had about half a dozen plays performed, it is, perhaps paradoxically, the works which have yet to be seen on stage that currently interest him more. “I’ve written several straight plays which I’m quite keen to see produced. There’s one about an older woman and a younger man in the same building and how their relationship helps her enjoy life again. There’s another about the end of an era, a family on holiday in the late 1930s enjoying – although they don’t know it – the last days of peace. But I think my favourite is one set in a boarding school which concerns a prefect and a boy in his house. A lot of people tell me ‘Oh, that’s a bit like Another Country’, but that play was a while ago now, and besides, it had a lot to do with politics whereas mine isn’t political at all, it’s more about the characters’ feelings.”
Another play, The Substitute, is a religious drama and possibly the one closest to his heart, dealing as it does with the crucifixion. Religion has always played an important part in Frank Williams’s life hence his lay membership of the General Synod. “I have always felt that the lay members of the Church have a vital role to play. Each diocese has a certain number of lay and clergy members, and we meet two or three times a year to debate Church matters and discuss wider moral issues.”
It is perhaps for this reason that he so successfully incarnated the role of the vicar in Dad’s Army, although his previous television roles were not by any means exclusively men of the cloth. He freely admits that his very first television part, that of a hopeless squaddie in a documentary about national service, was probably type-casting. Frank Williams himself was exempt from military service and remembers telling the sergeant who was technical adviser for the programme, “It’s just as well I’m meant to be getting things wrong!” Nevertheless, the experience probably stood him in good stead for his role as the captain in The Army Game a few years later. In those days, of course – the late 1950s – television sitcoms were broadcast live, and only two episodes of The Army Game were ever committed to film. When things went wrong, there was no opportunity to stop and do a retake. Frank recalls one particular incident involving Alfie Bass. “They turned on some dry ice to give the impression of a dream sequence, only they must have used too much because poor Alfie became completely engulfed in smoke. I’ve no idea how this must have looked, or whether anyone saw anything of him at all. And of course, because no recording was made, we have no idea how it came over on the television screen.”
The process of performing live for TV was both nerve-wracking and difficult, and different to performing live on stage. “Although there was always a studio audience present for comedy shows, you found yourself acting half to them and halt to the camera. As for straight drama, that was even more difficult because there was no audience at all to get any feedback from.”
There also appears to have been an unspoken hierarchy between comedy and drama in those days which sometimes came to the fore. “I was in a TV production of Anna Karenina in the early sixties with Claire Bloom and Sean Connery, and the director said rather loftily, ‘Oh yes, you’re in that little comedy programme over on the other channel…’”
But the thing Frank enjoys most about the successful TV series he’s been in is the camaraderie. “We used to have great fun, especially on location. And of course doing Dad’s Army for seven years, and then, You Rang M’Lord?, the sets become very familiar. That room in You Rang, and the church hall in Dad’s Army, they were like a second home.”
Having juggled his acting and writing hats for most of his professional life, Frank admits it is hard to say which of the two he enjoys more. “I like the fun of filming and the company of the other actors, but writing is a solitary business and you need to spend long periods alone in order to work at it.” How long did it take him to write Mask for Murder? “That’s impossible to say really. You go to rehearsals with a draft of the script but things get altered by the actors, or this scene is cut down because it drags, or that line is altered to something which sounds better. It’s a process of refinement. And sometimes one has – I won’t say arguments – long debates with actors over how to say a particular line. But generally the advantage of working with professional actors is that they can bring so much to a script that is looks and sounds better immediately and one should have confidence in them.”
As a regular pantomime performer himself, Frank has also written pantos for amateur companies and says they’re much easier to write for than professionals. “All you have to do is make sure there are lots of parts, but writing for professionals is quite different and often parts need to be tailored to individual stars.”
Frank Williams has been acting for nearly fifty years now and can’t see himself retiring. “Actors don’t retire,” he says cheerfully. “Look at Dad’s Army, that provided second careers for actors into their seventies and even eighties.” And unlike old soldiers, those actors, far from fading away, have kept coming back to delight further generations. There is no reason why Frank Williams should ever drop from view either – and, who knows, maybe we shall shortly be seeing more of him than ever before if some of his favourite unperformed plays find a producer. Watch this space.
(Frank Williams passed away on 26 June 2022, aged ninety.)
