Alas, Poor Fred

Alas, Poor Fred begins with a peaceful armchair conversation between Ernest Pringle and his wife Ethel, who are chatting about how funny it must be to get cut in half, as Fred was. Instead of treating the subject of violent death as it would be treated in a conventional thriller, Saunders places the murder in the distant past and shows us two conventional people talking about it as if it didn't interest them all that much. The fact that it was Ernest who killed him comes into the conversation just as casually as the fact that he lived in a semi-detached house. And we don't find out till the end of the play that Fred was Ethel's husband. Ernest seems to have forgotten that the house they are living in used to be Fred's, and Ethel has to remind him about the fatal afternoon thirty years ago when he was found by Fred hiding in the wardrobe while she was in bed.