Thark (play)
Travers made a film adaptation, which Walls directed in 1932, with most of the leading members of the stage cast reprising their roles.
The actor-manager Tom Walls produced the series of Aldwych farces, nearly all written by Ben Travers, and starring himself and Ralph Lynn, who specialised in playing "silly ass" characters.
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.
On her behalf he has negotiated the sale of her large country house, Thark, to the nouveau riche Mrs Frush.
One is with Mrs Frush, who is now unhappy about buying the house; the other is with Cherry Buck, a young woman on whom Benbow's roving eye has lighted.
They are both taken aback by Mrs Frush's butler, whom she calls "Jones", but whose real name is Death; his looks and manner are sinister in the extreme.
Uncle and nephew are interrupted by the entrance of Whittle, an investigative journalist eager to pursue the story of the haunted house.
He was making up the bed in Benbow's room when the door opened and shut mysteriously and he thought he saw a flitting figure.
To show she is wrong Benbow and Ronnie – the former with a false air of bravado, and the latter frankly terrified – agree to sleep in the haunted room.
As he opens the curtains there is an enormous clap of thunder, pictures are blown off the walls, and a huge branch of a tree falls through the window-panes.
The Times praised the performances but thought the play too unsubstantial to be wholly satisfactory, although it found it "full of entertaining fragments".
[4] Ivor Brown of The Manchester Guardian also praised the actors, and judged that "Thark provides them with good enough territory for their latest skirmish.
"[5] The Daily Express said that the scene in the haunted bedroom had "mirth-provoking qualities [that] can rarely been equalled in the West End" and "made even a sophisticated audience laugh until it cried.
[10] In August 2013, Snapdragon Productions presented a revival at The Park Theatre in a new adaptation, by the actor and writer Clive Francis, who starred in the Tom Walls role alongside James Dutton as Ronny Gamble.
[13] A third television version of the play was filmed by the BBC in 1968, directed by Donald McWhinnie, with Ronald Hines and Jimmy Thompson in the Walls and Lynn roles.
