Angle of Incidence by Michael Sacha

Title: Angle of Incidence 

Author: Michael Sacha

Publisher: not known 

Source book: Artists in Crime by Ngaio Marsh (Inspector Alleyn #6)

Now, an online list of fictional books, which I notice includes plays (because this is a play), includes Angle of Incidence by Michael Sacha which features in Artists in Crime. I have mysteriously lost my copy of Artists in Crime, in fact I have mislaid both a hardback and a paperback copy, so I am relying on the online list to get the title of this avant garde play correct. 

If I remember the plot of Artists in Crime correctly, Agatha Troy (a successful artist) and her friend Katti Bostock (who paints large canvasses of welders and plumbers), drive up to London from Troy’s house in the country. They meet up with a selection of friends, visit art galleries and eat out in various restaurants. Two of the artists who have been studying at Troy’s house go to the Vortex Theatre to see this fairly ghastly sounding (my opinion) play about three county council labourers in a sewer. 

Now tell me honestly, is this the sort of play to get you out of the house on a Saturday evening? Perhaps if we lived in the 1930s? Perhaps not. I certainly can’t see my grandparents planning a night out with the sewer workers. Especially since my granny kept taking in extra children. As well as my mother and her older brother, there was a cousin from Ireland, and a boy and girl whose mother led a complicated life and never quite seemed to be married to the father of her next child.

Apparently also featured in the source book (I do hope I find one of my copies soon*), is Freud Without Tears.

I read that an Angle of Incidence is an optics thing. This is completely not my thing so don’t ask me.

*I found one of my copies of Artists in Crime. I thought my husband might enjoy reading it. He put it in a box to be recycled. Apparently I was wrong.

Oh dear… both images found on Instagram but I obviously forgot to save the info.