Alan Plater
I Thought I Heard a Rustling

I Thought I Heard a Rustling is a comedy – about a very serious topical dilemma: would you rather live in a town with twenty-seven supermarkets and one library, or a town with twenty-eight supermarkets and no library? With passing swipes at Professional Northerners and pompous local councillors, Alan Plater’s play is a Celebration of the Written Word, suggesting as a basis for negotiation that Books are a Good Idea. First seen at the Theatre Royal, Stratford East, in January 1991 starring Annette Crosbie and Paul Copley. (Cast 3m, 2f)

“I Thought I Heard a Rustling has warmth, affection, humour and whatever it is that makes some plays live while other plays are still-born.”
~ John Gross, Sunday Telegraph

“[Plater’s latest comedy] once again strikes an anachronistic note, set, as it is, in an underused branch library, in a politically hung borough. Once again Plater reveals himself through the gentle eccentricity of his characters the central pair of whom are a fastidious middle-aged librarian and a fraudulent young poet-in-residence.”
~ Claire Armitstead, Financial Times

“[The play displays] a fine ear for quirky dialogue, a sharp eye for the absurd, and, above all, a generosity of spirit ... Plater has created a most engaging study of the sort of professional Northerner who preys so easily on the gullibility of Southerners with talk of hard times down t’pit and pubs called The Limping Whippet.”
~ Charles Spencer, Daily Telegraph