MC: And Alice MacFaddyn had that nasty tussle with the bluebottle so she’s not up to singing ‘Vilia’ for us, so settle back, relax, kick off your shoes, as two of our fellow holiday-makers present a heart-warming drama they’ve knocked together themselves entitled The Stranger on the Shore. Okay, kids.

TOM appears before the curtain. He is wearing a sailor’s cap.

TOM: There was once this sailor who was watching the stars one night, a few miles off the Cape of Good Hope. He’d had too much rum that night and he lost his balance. ‘I’m falling, I’m falling. What is this cold wetness that envelopes me? It is the sea. I can see my life flashing past my eyes. I’m drowning, I’m drowning. Down I go. To the bottom.’ So he drowned. And when he got to heaven he was so piss… drunk, they wouldn’t let him in. He was turned away at the door. ‘Now I shall have to wander the high seas forever and forever roam the docks until I atone. Endless torture.’ One night as he was wandering around the port of Rotterdam…

CORAL makes ship noises on a bottle.

… he met this strange woman.

CORAL’s leg appears through the curtain, then her face.

CORAL: [with an American accent] ‘Good evening. What a beautiful night. You look lonely.’

JIM: When’s the punch line?

TOM: Do you mind? We’re trying to do a play.

JIM: Sorry.

TOM: Thanks. Go on.

CORAL: ‘You look lonely. Let’s take a walk together.’

TOM: ‘Let me buy you a drink, What’ll you have?’

CORAL: ‘Gin. No ice.’

TOM: So they fell in love almost at once.

They embrace passionately. She disappears behind the curtain.

CORAL: ‘See ya later.’

TOM: ‘But what shall I do? I am a ghost and she a mortal woman with a strange power over me. I shall leave this place. I will take a tramp steamer to Tierra del Fuego.’ But as the ship was leaving the dock…

CORAL’s face appears, grief stricken. She waves a handkerchief and wails.

‘Get back, get back.’

A splash.

She has thrown herself into the water and is swimming after the ship.

CORAL disappears.

‘She will surely perish.’ But just then the god of the sea took pity on her and turned her into…

The curtain opens to reveal CORAL with her legs concealed by a towel in the appropriate shape.

… a mermaid. So she wouldn’t drown.

CORAL: ‘Alas, alas, I have no legs; but at least I can follow my beloved whither he will sail. But it is so cold here on the silent bottom of the deep, and so lonely. I dwell with the denizens of the ocean, the whales, the stingrays, the giant clams and the slow-moving coelacanth.’

JIM: The which?