Plunder (play)

Travers made a film adaptation, which Walls directed in 1933, with most of the leading members of the stage cast reprising their roles.

Walls assembled a regular company of actors to fill the supporting roles, including Robertson Hare, who played a figure of put-upon respectability; Mary Brough in eccentric old lady roles; Ethel Coleridge as the severe voice of authority; Winifred Shotter as the sprightly young female lead; and the saturnine Gordon James.

D'Arcy Tuck has returned to England from Australia with his fiancée, Joan Hewlett, thinking that she has inherited a large country house and even larger fortune from her late grandfather.

Malone has a female accomplice, masquerading as his sister Prudence, with whom Mrs Hewlett's hapless son, Oswald Veal, is in love.

Malone was already planning to rob Mrs Hewlett of her jewellery, and agrees to cut Tuck in on the crime, thus, as they see it, redressing the wrong she has done in contriving Joan's disinheritance.

The players are Freddy's house guests, Mrs Hewlett, Oswald, Sir George and Lady Chudleigh, Harry Kenward and Ruth Bennett.

Owing to the carelessness of his manservant, Joan has discovered that Tuck is at The Gables, along with the despised Mrs Hewlett and Oswald Veal.

Malone explains privately to Tuck that though Veal's fall was accidental, their part in it, during the course of a robbery, renders them liable to the capital charge of murder.

They have discovered that Prudence is not Malone's sister, that he has no obvious means to support his lavish life-style, and that he has been in situ at the time of several notable country house robberies.

[3] The Observer critic wrote of his "grateful laughter", found the entire cast "in tip-top form" and predicted "A year's hard labour" for them all.

Travers wrote the screenplay, and Walls, Lynn, Hare, Brough, Shotter and James reprised their old stage roles.

[8] The first full-scale professional stage revival of Plunder was at the Bristol Old Vic in 1973, directed by Nat Brenner, with Edward Hardwicke and Peter O'Toole in the Walls and Lynn roles.

The two main roles were played by Frank Finlay and Dinsdale Landen, with a supporting cast including Diana Quick, Polly Adams and Dandy Nichols.