The Spook Who Spoke by Marcus Didius Falco

Thanks to Wikipedia 

Title: The Spook Who Spoke

Author: Marcus Didius Falco

Publisher: hand written, only performed once; in Palmyra

Source book: Last Act in Palmyra by Lindsey Davis

Lindsey Davis’s Roman detective Marcus Didius Falco and his long suffering girlfriend Helena Justina travel to Nabatea in search of a runaway water organist. In Petra they stumble across a murdered playwright, make the mistake of reporting the death to the authorities and are run out of town for their pains and then accidentally join a troupe of travelling actors who have just lost their playwright. Falco is taken on as a temporary replacement.

As they travel through the Decapolis searching for the water organist, and investigating the murder, the actors perform a wide selection of Greek and Roman plays including The Girl from Andros, The Girl from Samos (or The Marriage Connection), The Girl from Perinthus, and The Arbitation all by Menander, The Rope and Amphitryon by Plautus, The Bacchae by Euripides, The Birds and Peace by Aristophanes. And then there’s The Pirate Brothers (by no known author), and The Revellers. But they don’t perform a creepy play called Laureolus where the audience expects to see a member of the cast crucified in the final act (usually a convicted  criminal).

By the time they reach Palmyra the company has worked its way through a lot of plays, and when they find themselves booked to perform in an army amphitheater, they decide on Falco’s new play The Spook Who Spoke (normally ghosts in plays don’t speak). Falco’s play features a slightly unsatisfactory youth called Moschion (traditional), a wedding feast for Moschion’s widowed mother who is remarrying, a Clever Cook routine and the ghost of Moschion’s father. Obviously the ghost accuses the new husband of having murdered him. Then there’s a funny foreign doctor and a mad scene for Moschion’s mother, and finally a Virtuous Maid to marry the hero.

In the middle of the play, Tranio as the Clever Cook, alerts Grumio, playing the Country Clown, that Falco knows he is the murderer. Grumio tries to make his escape but following an incident with a very large python called Zeno, there’s a fatal encounter with a cobra called Pharaoh and the audience gets the onstage death it really wanted.

Unfortunately, the first performance of The Spook Who Spoke is probably fated to be its last. And not only never finished, but lost to posterity. 

Thanks to Thought Co