See How They Run
See How They Run is a classic English comedy by Philip King. Its title is a line from the nursery rhyme Three Blind Mice. It is considered a farce for its tense comic situations and headlong humour, heavily playing on mistaken identity, doors, and vicars.

The play is set in 1943 in the living room of the Vicarage at the fictitious village of Merton-cum-Middlewick (merging various actual village names, such as Merton and Middlewick, both in Oxfordshire, along with the old British usage of 'cum', meaning 'alongside' in the middle of a village name, as in Chorlton-cum-Hardy).

The lead character is Penelope Toop, former actress and now wife of the local vicar, The Rev. Lionel Toop. The Toops employ Ida, a Cockney maid. Miss Skillon, a churchgoer of the parish and a scold, arrives on bicycle to gossip with the vicar and to complain about the latest 'outrages' that Penelope has caused. The vicar then leaves for the night, and an old friend of Penelope's, Lance-Corporal Clive Winton, stops by on a quick visit. In order to dodge army regulations, he changes from his uniform into Lionel's second-best suit, complete with a clerical 'dog-collar' in order to see a production of "Private Lives" (a Noël Coward play in which they had appeared together in their acting days), while pretending to be the visiting vicar Arthur Humphrey who is due to preach the Sunday sermon the next day.

Just before they set out, Penelope and Clive re-enact one of their scenes from "Private Lives" and manage to knock Miss Skillon (who has come back unannounced) unconscious. Miss Skillon, wrongly thinking she has seen Lionel fighting with Penelope, gets drunk on a bottle of cooking sherry and Ida hides her in the broom cupboard. Then Toop, arriving back, is taken prisoner by an escaping German prisoner-of-war from a nearby camp, who takes his clothes as a disguise. To add to the confusion, both the real Humphrey, as well as Penelope's uncle, The Bishop of Lax, unexpectedly show up early. Chaos quickly ensues, culminating in a cycle of running figures, most of them dressed as clergy, plus a well-trained dog.