The Lodge

**The Lodge** is a horror play performed by Cornley Drama Society. It is the fourth installment in The Goes Wrong Show, and was first aired on 17th January 2020 in the UK.

## Synopsis

*Note: This synopsis describes the "Goes Right" version; not everything in the synopsis happens in the "Goes Wrong" version.*

Emma and her husband David, along with their daughter Alice, are shown around the Lodge by Tony, an estate agent. They try to leave, but their car won't start, so the owner, Albert Fortenoy, suggests they stay the night. Emma finds perfectly catalogued newspaper cuttings about people who have vanished, which they find strange, and Emma looks through the door to see Albert doing a weird ritual.

They go to sleep, but Emma wakes up in the night and goes to investigate a strange noise. Alice says she saw another little girl, who told her that Tony needed help. They go over to Tony, and discover he is dead. David tries to phone the police, but Albert cuts the line. Tony disappears from under the sheet, and Albert reveals that with every life lost at the Lodge, his deceased wife Vera is closer to returning. He tries to shoot them, but David wrestles him onto a chair. When he escapes, the family hide in the kitchen, but Albert finds them. Vera begins to merge with Emma, and she stabs David. David revives enough to kill Albert with an axe, and they both die. Emma and Vera turn towards Alice, but the police arrive and shoot Emma, rescuing Alice from the Lodge.

## Cornley Cast

* Emma - Vanessa Wilcock-Wynn-Carroway
* David - Chris Bean
* Tony - Max Bennett
* Alice - Annie Twilloil
* Deer Head - Dennis Tyde
* Albert Fortenoy - Robert Grove
* Vera Fortenoy - Sandra Wilkinson
* Policeman - Jonathan Harris

## Trivia

* The cleaner who walks in on Albert doing the ritual is the series' director, Martin Dennis.
* The book that Sandra is reading behind the painting is Robert Grove's "Anything You Can Act, I Can Act Louder", which plays a major role in "The Spirit of Christmas".
* The joke about the adjectives is based in fact; the play ran too short in a rehearsal, so they added that joke in. However, in the end it was four minutes too long, and some parts had to be cut.
* Actual mistakes, rather than planned ones, that appear in this episode:
	+ When Albert tries to shoot David and Emma, the gun was not supposed to break in half, but it worked so well that they kept it in. Jonathan Sayer can be seen trying not to laugh when this occurs.
	+ When Max throws the bottle at the window, it hits the frame and bounces back into the room, rather than going straight through. This was an actual mistake that was left in the episode.
* The longest time Robert laughs is 120 seconds.
* The vase that Max breaks on the table was made of wax.
* In one run-through, when Chris said "The door's locked" it actually was locked, and stayed shut instead of swinging open as it was meant to.
* At one point, Henry Shields (Chris Bean) fell asleep while pretending to be asleep, while Emma is wandering around The Lodge at night.
* The stairlift was actually operated by 2 men, as an electric stairlift would not have been able to speed up so quickly.
* When Max says "Shall we take a look in the kitchen?", they had to re-record the dialogue on the word "kitchen" as Dave Hearn had said it in a strange way.
* This is the fourth time Sandra does not have the lead female role.
* In this play Vanessa and Annie are cast as mother and daughter respectively - in "Spirit of Christmas", their roles are reversed.
* Behind the scenes footage from this episode reveals a cut bit where Max's "Tony" character is shown pushing through a cloth section of the wall as Emma and David watch. The section of the wall where this would have occurred is visible behind the two characters during the gun scene.