If I Were You

If I Were You is a one-act play, and it is the drama unit of your Beehive book. It is credited to Douglas James. Before you study the story, spend a minute on the form, because the form explains almost everything about how this play behaves.

A play is written to be performed. That single fact changes how you read it. In a story, a narrator can tell you that a man was terrified but pretending to be calm. In a play there is nobody to tell you that. Everything must reach the audience through two channels only: what the characters say, and the stage directions that describe how they look, move and speak. So when a question asks how Gerrard felt, your evidence is his words and his actions — never a narrator's comment, because there is no narrator.

A one-act play is short and unbroken. There is no interval, no change of set and no jump forward in time. Here the whole play takes place in one room of a lonely cottage, over roughly the length of time it takes to perform it. That gives the play a tight, closed, airless feeling, which suits a story about a man who cannot walk out of the room he is standing in.

It is also a two-hander: only two people ever appear, Gerrard and the Intruder. With two characters and one set, a playwright has very little to work with, so the whole pressure falls on the dialogue. Every line has to do a job — reveal character, raise the danger, or move the plot forward. Notice how visible the balance of power is on stage: one man holds a revolver, the other holds nothing but words, and the entire play is the contest between them.

The opening is a small lesson in exposition, the art of telling an audience what it needs to know without delivering a lecture. The curtain rises on Gerrard alone, finishing a telephone call: he asks that somebody ring him back at once, and warns that he may not still be there much longer. He then crosses to a travelling bag and begins packing. In a few seconds we learn that he is alone, that he does his business by telephone, that he is about to leave, and that a packed bag is standing in the room. That bag becomes useful later. Notice also what the opening does not tell us: what Gerrard does for a living is held back until the very last speech of the play.

One rule of attribution matters more in drama than anywhere else: a play has no author's voice. Douglas James never speaks in the text. Every single sentence belongs to a character. So in your answers write Gerrard says or the Intruder says. Never write the author says about a line of dialogue. The writer's own view reaches us only through what he makes the characters do and through where he chooses to end the play.

The curtain rises on the inside of a small, lonely cottage. Gerrard is finishing a telephone call: he wants somebody rung up at once, says he expects to be there a little longer but that nobody should count on it, and rings off. He then crosses to a travelling bag and starts packing. He is busy, in a hurry, and completely alone.

1. The stranger arrives. A man comes in silently behind him with a revolver in his hand, gives himself away by knocking against the table, and orders Gerrard to put his hands up. The stage directions describe him as flashily dressed and as being of much the same build as Gerrard, and he speaks in rough, American-sounding slang. He is plainly enjoying himself.
2. He checks his facts. Instead of robbing the house, he questions Gerrard: his first names, whether he keeps a car, whether he lives alone, whether people ever come out to the cottage. Each answer confirms something the visitor already believes, and the one answer he thinks is a lie he simply refuses to accept until Gerrard corrects it.
3. He explains how he found his man. While dodging the police he saw Gerrard out in his car, overheard two strangers talking about him, and listened. What he heard was that Gerrard is a mystery man: unknown in the neighbourhood, never seen by the tradespeople, ordering what he needs by telephone, going away suddenly and coming back as though nothing had happened. To ordinary people that is merely strange. To this man it is a lucky break, and he calls it one.
4. The plan. He is wanted for murder. Running is exhausting and cannot last for ever. So he intends to shoot Gerrard, take his name, his clothes, his cottage and his habits, and live quietly as Gerrard while the police search for a man who has effectively ceased to exist. Since the law already wants him for one killing, he reasons, a second one cannot make his punishment any worse. He has even worked out that a pair of glasses and Gerrard's own clothes will be enough to carry the disguise off.
5. Gerrard refuses to panic. He does not beg, shout or grab at anything. He answers politely, makes jokes, asks to be allowed to sit somewhere more comfortable, calls the whole performance melodramatic and unoriginal, supplies the long word his visitor is fumbling for, and asks whether the American accent is genuine or an imitation. The Intruder is irritated and warns him that he will soon stop being smart.
6. The turn. Gerrard tells him the plan will not work, and offers to clear up the mystery of his own strange life. His explanation is that he too is a criminal — a wanted man whose odd hours and secrecy are simply the habits of somebody on the run — and that he is expecting trouble that very night, which is why his bag is already packed. He even shows the bag, and passes off the disguise material inside it as a criminal's equipment.
7. The consequence. Gerrard spells out what that means. Anyone who takes his name takes his police record along with it. The Intruder would not vanish into a safe new identity; he would walk straight into an arrest and a hanging for a crime he never committed.
8. Doubt. The Intruder has no way of checking a word of it. His certainty collapses, and the man holding the gun begins taking advice from the man who has none.
9. The offer. Gerrard says they must both leave immediately and invites the Intruder to come along in the car, telling him that a man like him can be useful. He also takes the risk out of accepting: if it turns out to be a trick, the Intruder will have Gerrard beside him in the car and will still be holding the gun.
10. The trap. He opens a door and presents it as the short way through to the garage. The Intruder leans forward to inspect the route, keeping the revolver ready, and as his head turns Gerrard pushes him into what is in fact a cupboard, knocking the revolver out of his hand, and locks the door on him.
11. The call. Gerrard picks up the fallen revolver, keeps it pointed at the locked door and goes to the telephone. Still amused, he apologises for not being able to supply some properties in time for a rehearsal, says the amusing bother he has just had will go into his next play, and asks the person on the line to send the police sergeant up at once. Only in this closing speech do we learn what Gerrard does for a living. Curtain.

If you are asked to retell the play, keep to this spine: arrival, plan, counter-story, panic, cupboard, telephone. Everything else is decoration, and decoration is what makes retellings run out of time.

Gerrard is one of those characters who is revealed almost entirely by how he behaves in a single dangerous encounter. From the moment the revolver appears, he quietly refuses to give the Intruder the one thing the Intruder has come for, which is fear.

He is calm, and the calm is real. He does not scream, plead, bargain or make a rush at the gun. He asks a mild question, offers a remark, and treats the intrusion almost as an unexpected social call. This is not stupidity; he understands exactly how much danger he is in. It is control.

His politeness is a weapon. By staying courteous he refuses to accept that the man with the revolver is in charge. A frightened victim confirms a criminal's power; a relaxed host takes it away. Notice how often the Intruder demands that Gerrard stop talking and stop being clever. He has to keep demanding it because he can feel something slipping.

He talks for a reason. It is easy to conclude that Gerrard is simply a talkative man. He is not. Every minute of conversation was a minute in which he was still alive and still thinking. Talk was the only tool available to him, and he used it first to buy time and then to build a trap.

He listens harder than he speaks. This is the detail worth putting into an answer, because it is easy to read straight past it. The Intruder tells Gerrard exactly why he was chosen — the odd hours, the secrecy, the absence of visitors, the telephone orders. Gerrard takes that description, accepts every word of it, and simply supplies a different reason for it. His lie is built entirely out of material his enemy handed him.

His profession is part of his character. He works in the theatre — something the play keeps back until its final speech — and a theatre man spends his working life building plots, inventing motives and making improbable things sound convincing. He also knows every cliché of the stage thriller, which is why he can point out that the villain who talks instead of shooting always loses in the end — a joke that happens to be an exact description of the scene he is standing in.

He is not cruel. He has every reason to want this man dead, yet he never attacks him and never snatches at the revolver while it is pointed at him. One push puts the man in a cupboard and knocks the gun out of his hand; Gerrard then locks the door, picks the gun up and sends for the police. The ending is a victory of intelligence, not of violence, and that is part of why it is so satisfying.

Be fair about his limits too, because a balanced answer reads better than a worshipful one. Gerrard takes an enormous risk. Had the Intruder fired the moment he walked in, no amount of wit would have saved anybody. Gerrard survives partly because his opponent is vain enough to explain a clever plan before carrying it out.

The Intruder is never given a name. That is a small joke on the playwright's part: a man whose whole ambition is to own somebody else's name has none of his own in the cast list.

He is frightening first. If you write about him only as a fool, you have missed the play. He walks in armed, he gives orders, he intends to commit murder, and for the first half of the play he is completely in control of the room. The comedy works only because the threat behind it is real.

His plan is genuinely clever. Most hunted criminals do the obvious thing and run. This one has understood that running has no end, and that the safest hiding place is inside another person's life. Chance gave him the victim — he happened to see Gerrard and to overhear talk about him — but he saw at once what could be done with it. Gerrard is of much his own build, lives alone, is unknown to his neighbours and has no regular visitors, so a substitution could work; the man even works out that a pair of glasses and Gerrard's clothes would finish the disguise. As a piece of thinking it is far better than anything you would expect from an ordinary burglar.

His flaws destroy it. They are worth listing, because a fair character sketch of him has to cover them.

• Vanity. He cannot simply act; he needs to be admired. He explains his brilliant plan in detail to the one person on earth who must not hear it, and the explanation costs him everything.
• Delay. He came to kill, and he does not kill. Every minute he spends enjoying his own cleverness is a minute that Gerrard puts to use.
• He cannot check anything. His whole plan rests on Gerrard being an ordinary, respectable man. The moment that assumption is questioned he has no way on earth to test it, and no time in which to try.
• He trusts appearances. This is the deepest irony in him. He believes that a name, a coat and an address are enough to make him into another person — and he is then destroyed by a man who invents an identity on the spot.

His speech gives him away. He talks in borrowed slang, the language of gangster films, and Gerrard notices it at once. Underneath the swagger he sounds like a man playing a part he has watched on a screen, and he cannot bear being laughed at. That thin skin keeps him arguing at exactly the moment when he should be acting.

He is a coward at the centre. He is bold while he holds all the information and all the advantages. The instant the rope becomes a real possibility for him personally, his nerve goes, and the man with the revolver starts obeying the man without one. It is fair to argue that his courage was never really his own; it belonged to the gun.

The middle of the play is the part worth slowing down over, because it shows how Gerrard's lie is actually built. It is not a wild story blurted out in panic. It is constructed, piece by piece, and every piece has a job.

1. It explains evidence the Intruder gathered himself. The Intruder has already decided that Gerrard's life is suspicious — the odd hours, the secrecy, the lack of callers. Gerrard does not argue with any of it. He agrees, and then offers a reason: a man on the run lives exactly like that. A lie that neatly explains what the listener has already noticed for himself is almost impossible to reject, because it does not feel like a story being told to him. It feels like a discovery he is making.

2. It attacks the plan, not the crime. Gerrard never says that murder is wrong. That argument would have been useless, and he knows it. Instead he attacks the only thing his visitor actually cares about: whether the plan will make him safe. He turns the prize into a punishment. The name the Intruder wants is shown to be the very thing that would hang him.

3. It manufactures urgency. Trouble expected tonight, a bag already packed, a car round the corner, no time to lose. He has also said that a man of his is watching the road and will ring if the police appear, so when the telephone happens to ring he can treat the ring itself as the warning. Urgency may be the most useful part of the whole invention, because a man in a hurry cannot check facts, cannot sit down and think, and cannot simply shoot and search the house at leisure.

4. It offers a way out that requires obedience. This is the cleverest step of all. A cornered man is dangerous, so Gerrard is careful not to corner him. He makes himself necessary instead. Come along in the car, he suggests; a man like you can be useful to me. He even shows that accepting costs nothing: the Intruder would still be holding the gun and would have Gerrard sitting beside him. A frightened person naturally follows the one person who seems to have a solution — and following means moving where he is told to move.

5. It finishes with a door, not an argument. Gerrard never needs the Intruder to believe him completely. He only needs him to walk a few steps in a particular direction. The cupboard is presented as the way out, the Intruder comes forward to inspect his escape route, and a single push ends the play's danger.

Look closely at what makes that last move work. The Intruder is still armed and still believes he is in charge, so it feels perfectly natural to him to go and look at the route himself. The very confidence that made him dangerous is what walks him into a locked box.

Notice too what the closing speech does to everything before it. Only at the very end do we learn that Gerrard works in the theatre, supplying properties and writing plays. Look back with that in mind and the whole invention is in character — and so is the bag he offers as proof, since the disguise material in it is stage equipment being passed off as a criminal's kit.

And note the irony, which has a name worth using in answers: poetic justice. A man whose plan was to wear a false identity is defeated by a false identity. Gerrard invents a criminal self on the spot, and it works better than everything the Intruder had found out about him.

This is a thriller that keeps making you laugh, and that mixture is the reason it is still performed. Working out where the humour comes from is a good way of checking how carefully you have read.

A collision of two Englishes. The Intruder speaks in rough, borrowed gangster slang. Gerrard replies in polished, faintly amused, rather formal English. Almost every exchange is a small collision between these two registers, and the mismatch is funny in itself. Gerrard even asks, very politely, whether that American accent is genuine or merely a clever imitation, and hands his visitor the long word he cannot find for himself. Both are insults delivered in the tone of a helpful suggestion.

Understatement. Gerrard consistently treats a loaded revolver as an inconvenience rather than a catastrophe. Saying much less than a situation deserves is one of the oldest ways of being funny in English, and it also tells us something serious about the man: he refuses to give a threat the size it is demanding.

Jokes about the theatre. Gerrard keeps describing the scene he is trapped inside as though he were watching it from a seat in the audience. He compares his visitor to a stage villain and observes that in plays of that kind the villain talks so long that he loses. This is comic, and it is simultaneously a warning that the Intruder is far too pleased with himself to hear.

Reversal. The strongest comedy in the play is structural rather than verbal. The hunter becomes the hunted. The trapper is trapped. The man who came to shut somebody out of life for ever ends the evening shut in a cupboard. Audiences laugh at a reversal like this because it feels like justice arriving exactly on time.

Dramatic irony. Once Gerrard stops answering and starts steering, the audience begins to suspect that he has something in mind while the Intruder still believes he is winning. By the end we are watching a man walk cheerfully towards a door that is not a way out at all. The gap between what we suspect and what he believes is what creates the tension in the final minutes, and it is the reason the ending feels earned rather than lucky.

Why the humour matters. Comedy and suspense are doing the same job here. Fear builds while the revolver is pointed; laughter releases it; then the play tightens again. Because the two keep alternating, neither the terror nor the jokes ever wear out, and the ending manages to be funny and satisfying at once.

Useful words for answers on this section: irony, dramatic irony, understatement, sarcasm, repartee and reversal of situation. Always attach an example to the term. A technical word with no example attached to it shows nothing.

Presence of mind. This is the play's central idea. Gerrard has no weapon, no help, no chance of reaching the telephone while a gun is on him, and no hope at all of overpowering an armed man. What he has is attention and speech, and he uses them so well that he ends the evening unhurt while his attacker is locked up waiting for the police. The play argues, quietly and entertainingly, that thinking clearly under pressure is a genuine skill, and that panic is usually what does the killing.

Wit as a weapon. Words here do precisely what a bullet does: they change what the other man believes, and belief decides what he does next. It is worth saying in an answer that Gerrard never defeats the revolver, and never even tries to reach for it while it is pointed at him. He defeats the mind holding it.

Appearance and reality. Almost nothing in the play is what it appears to be. The quiet cottage contains a murderer. The mild, harmless-looking host turns out to be the more dangerous man. The confessed criminal is an invention. The way out is a cupboard. The audience is shown again and again that confident conclusions drawn from appearances are unsafe.

What identity really is. The Intruder believes that a person is a name, a coat, an address and a set of habits, and that these can be taken over like a rented house. The play answers him. An identity comes attached to a past you did not choose, and the past is the part nobody can copy. He wanted Gerrard's name, and he was told that the rope came with it.

Crime does not pay. The ending is a tidy piece of poetic justice, and it is achieved without a fight, which makes it more pleasing than a struggle would have been.

The title. If I Were You is an everyday English phrase, the polite opening that people use when they are about to give advice. The play makes the phrase do three things at once. The Intruder means it literally: he intends to be Gerrard. It also fits the way Gerrard talks to him, since much of what Gerrard says in the second half is advice about what the man ought to do next, even though the phrase itself is never spoken on stage. And underneath both lies the question the play puts to the audience — what would you do if you were in that room? A title that is a joke, a summary and a question at the same time is a good one, and that is what to write if you are asked to justify it.

Writing your answers. Name the speaker every single time; this is a play, so nothing belongs to the author. Use stage directions as evidence where they help. Describe what is said rather than trying to reproduce the dialogue, because a clear paraphrase shows understanding while a half-remembered quotation shows the opposite. For a short answer, put the point in the first line and add two supporting details. For a longer one, plan three or four paragraphs — the situation, what the character does, why it works, and what it reveals — and finish with a sentence that answers the question that was asked instead of summarising the play all over again.