The Understudy's Alibi

About

Rhea Calder is found dead in the fly gallery above the Kestrel Repertory Theatre at 6:12 on a Monday, three hours and forty-eight minutes before the half, and Vivian Cross — thirty-five, the understudy who has said every line of Rhea's part four hundred times to an empty house — is the woman standing nearest her when the body is found. Vivian has an alibi, and the alibi is a man: Marcus Rhee, a detective sergeant who asked to be seconded onto this case and who will put his career under the file to keep one fact where he put it. By ten past eight she is playing the lead. By the papers she is the woman the police want. The Kestrel has a 640-seat house, eleven people on the books and a three-year regional arts grant of £412,000, of which £96,000 is tickets. Nine performances remain. The director asks Vivian to go on and frames the ask as a favour owed to the dead. The leading man cannot say where he was that evening. The stage manager has told the police one true sentence that dismantles the alibi in fourteen words. The costume mistress has built every costume in the production for twenty-two years and knows every body in the company by the way it sits in a seam. *Ash* is a two-hander: a woman returns to the house she burned, and the other holds the door. Rhea played the Woman. Vivian plays the Woman now, and the Woman is a liar by construction. Every alibi in this novel is a rehearsed line, including the ones Vivian believes. The Understudy's Alibi is an adult noir about a body in a loft, a role that outlives the woman wearing it, and the discovery that the finest thing anybody ever builds about you is a thing you said while pretending. Six endings. All six keep Rhea dead on the page. All six keep the production's alibi a lie somebody is still being punished for. None of them gives Vivian back the four hundred nights she stood in the dark being good at a dead woman's part, and none of them is the least bad.

Cast

• Vivian Cross protagonist; the understudy who becomes the lead
• Rhea Calder the lead; found dead in the fly gallery
• Julian Mercer director; sleeps with the cast in rotation
• Odette Faure costume mistress; twenty-two years in the building
• Marcus Rhee detective sergeant; her former lover; on the case he asked for
• Lena Ostrowski stage manager; runs the prompt book, the deck and the log
• Theo Banks leading man; Rhea's lover on stage and off it