Cash On Delivery

The play is a full-on farce, complete with slamming doors, dead bodies, bald-faced lies, mistaken identities and men dressing as women.


Eric Swan lost his job a couple years ago and, unable to find new work, was delighted when a Social Security check for Rupert Thompson, a former tenant, came in the mail.

The tenant had moved away, so Eric cashed the cheque himself and assumed his identity, at least as far as the government was concerned.

Unfortunately, the British government is not content to just give out Social Security. When they learned Rupert Thompson had the gout, they began providing him with disability money. Soon Eric had other alter egos, too, each of them unemployed, disabled, or in some other way eligible for government assistance. His wife of course, had no idea anything was going on.

The trouble begins when a welfare agent shows up to have Rupert Thompson and his landlord, Eric Swan, sign a form. The two men are one and the same, of course, which means Eric has to find someone to pretend to be him, since he's already pretending to be Rupert Thompson. His slightly dim real-life tenant, Norman McDonald whom the government believes to be dead (Eric told them that in an effort to stop the flow of dirty money), is wrangled into the ruse, as is Eric's Uncle George.

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