Dead Ringer must surely be the first play where the leading character is written out and carried of the stage dead within ten minutes of curtain up. Set in 10 Downing Street, the Prime Minister dies from a heart attack just 36 hours before the polling booths open for a general election. The Home Secretary and Leader of the House witness his demise and, realising that they will almost certainly lose the election without him, call in an actor with a remarkable resemblance to the deceased. The resemblance is indeed more than remarkable as it represents a reprieve for the leading man. The election is duly won but when the expediency of the situation has been satisfied the plot thickens into a tangled web of intrigue.

William Franklyn relished the plum actor/PM part and gave a truly superb performance. Patricia Lawrence (Leader of the House) and Sylvia Syms (PM's wife) reacted to the situations with splendid actlng.  Basil Moss (Home Secretary), Adrian King (Private Secretary), Ray Turnbull (Foreign Secretary) and Geoffrey Colvile (Security) all created magnificent characters in this very funny but wittily serious play. Direction by Roger Clissold was superb.

Producer Bill Kenwright's well-known instinct for timing has served him well again with Dead Ringer written by his co-producer Charles Ross under the name James Francis but based on a novel by Logan Gourlay. The plot is, would you believe, about a General Election, though it is to be hoped that it is not too prophetic, as the Prime Minister in this instance, a figure so charismatic that his party could not survive without him, drops dead only hours before the nation goes to the polls. What to do? Fortunately, the Leader of the House, who doubles as Minister for the Arts (an opportunity to include some good theatrical in-jokes) knows an actor who looks just like the late Randolph Bolton and he, being unemployed at the time, is available to stand in. Not only that, but he makes a pretty good job of being PM and certainly a better job of being Mrs Bolton's husband, the real Bolton being both a closet homosexual and a nasty schemer. But then the plot thickens, with the discovery that Bolton did not die of a heart attack, as was assumed, but was poisoned with the result that the whole Cabinet and household comes under suspicion.

A far-fetched tale? Certainly, but as the author reminds us that the Queen woke up one morning to find a strange man sitting on her bed, assassination attempts have been made on the American President and the Pope and spies have been unearthed in very high places - to which he might have added that an actor is now President of the USA - it is not as far-fetched as it might once have been. And it is undeniably entertaining, amusing and not a little exciting, with Wil1iam Franklyn giving an excellent performance as Bolton and his doppelganger.

If he gives the impression of being an indisputably Tory figure, party balance is maintained by making Patricia Lawrence, as the Leader of the House, look something like Shirley Williams, and McDonald Hobley, as the Foreign Secretary, sounds like James Callaghan. Sylvia Syms, looking her own charming self, is the wife who feels her luck has changed, and Basil Moss is the other prime mover in the Prime Minister mystery.