ENTER STAGE RIGHT
TERENCE RATTIGAN
tried the gritty new drama – only once, in French With Tears
A squat in the port area of Marseille. Monsieur, the landlord, and various young English exchange guests are finishing breakfast.
HUGO: Anyone for tennis?
MONSIEUR: What is the point of tennis? It is the definition of ennui. The pit of man’s despair.
SALLY: It’s jolly good exercise, Monsieur.
MONSIEUR: Get back on the street, salope. Like Madame my wife. That is her exercise.
HUGO: Last time I played tennis I was—
MONSIEUR: Say it in French. You are ’ere to learn.
HUGO: Golly, all right. La dernière fois, j’étais tout autour du magasin.
MONSIEUR: What does he say?
SALLY: He means last time he played he was all over the shop.
HUGO: I say, Monsieur, can I lend you my translation of John Buchan? It’s really awfully good.
MONSIEUR: No, I read only the Etoile du Matin. The Communist paper, how you call it, The Morning Star.
SALLY: Morning Star? I saw him run at Goodwood last year. A lovely frisky bay with a black tail.
MONSIEUR: I tell you a black tale, Mademoiselle. My son is in prison. He is awaiting trial for stealing a postal order.
HUGO: What awfully bad luck. But I’m training to be a barrister myself and I’d love to represent the poor boy.
MONSIEUR: It does not look good for him. He was selling drugs to the gang leader at the dock to pay for the abortion of his girlfriend. His house was condemned because of the rats and he needed money for medicine for his venereal disease.
HUGO: Gosh, that’s what we call a real drame d’évier de cuisine.
SALLY: He means a kitchen-sink drama, Monsieur.
MONSIEUR: Also the boy ’ave twelve previous conviction for soliciting, arson and ’ouse breaking.
HUGO: The boy is plainly innocent. I accept the brief.
MONSIEUR: No, you fool. He is guilty. I am his pimp. ’Ere is the money. Now let’s all get totalement pissés commes des tritons. [Pop] Salut!
HUGO: What’s he say, Sally?
SALLY: Never mind, Hugo.
TOM STOPPARD
writes an episode of The Archers
The public bar of the Bull. At the bar are Clarrie Grundy, Edvard Munch, Ruth Archer and Ludwig Wittgenstein, who has come for a job as cellarman. Behind the bar are Sid Perks and his wife Jolene. Other regulars sit about the room.
SID: Ludwig, meet my wife Jolene Perks.
WITTGENSTEIN: Mmm. Is she one of ze perks of ze job?
SID: No. But she’s got two of the nobs of the Perks.
WITTGENSTEIN: I had not known zat in philosophy you were such a dualist.
RUTH ARCHER: Whoah no, Ludwig, man. Don’t go puttin’ Descartes before the ’orse.
IAN CRAIG: Noy then, noy then. Just because I’m a gay Olsterman doesn’t mean I can’t be screamingly normal.
EDVARD MUNCH: Thank you, Ian. I am a Norwegian expressionist. I would like to paint your Scream.
WITTGENSTEIN: A scream? May I refer you to my Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus.
EDDIE GRUNDY: I don’t know about your tractatus, but Oi got a Massey Ferguson.
JOLENE: A massive what?
EDDIE GRUNDY: Ferguson.
CLARRIE: Oh, Eddie!
Enter Nigel Pargeter
NIGEL: Did the artist chappy say his name was Munch? My pater used to say that where there’s Munch there’s Braque.
Enter Georges Braque.
BRAQUE: Mr Perks, I zink you find ze answer in Schopenhauer.
JACK WOLLEY: Oh yes, Peggy. Ev’ry Wednesday five o’clock we have a shoppin’ hour at Grey Gables. Very popular with the ladies.
Enter Alistair, the vet.
ALISTAIR: Half of Shires, please, Sid. I’ve spent all morning trying to neuter Schrödinger’s Cat. Couldn’t tell if he was dead or alive by the end. Possibly both at once.
WITTGENSTEIN: I sink you should try ze vasectomy. A small part of ze vas deferens is excised and ze two loose ends tied off.
BRIAN ALDRIDGE: Oh yes, Jennie insisted I have that op once. But I can’t say it made a vas’ difference to me . . . Or Siobhan!
Enter Rob Titchener
ROB (darkly): Anyone seen Helen?
LINDA SNELL: She was hiding in my Resurgam Garden.
TONY ARCHER: What do you want Helen for anyway, Titch?
WITTGENSTEIN: Careful, Tony! Whereof one cannot speak, thereof –
Enter Walter Gabriel.
WALTER GABRIEL (for it is he): Hello me old beauty, me old darling!
WITTGENSTEIN: Walter! I thought you were dead!
WALTER GABRIEL: No more than that cat you was on about. How’s the old Tractatus?
WITTGENSTEIN: Mustn’t grumble, Walter. Bert Fry’s fixed her up a treat.
WALTER GABRIEL: Good show. I don’t know why we are here, Ludwig, but I’m pretty sure that it is not in order to enjoy ourselves!
Dum, di dum, di dum, di dum, dum, di dum, di dum, dum . . .
SOPHOCLES
never dramatised really minor disasters – until now
CHORUS
Oh what unhappy youth approaches
Tearing at his clothes in grief?
Who turns his face to heaven
Where the implacable Fates
Prepare his grievous end?
He strikes first this side with
His hand and then the left
As one whose body burns
Within a covering of fire.
OEDIPUS
I have lost the keys to this my home.
I curse the day that first my
Father let me have a spare.
Now all the wrath of Heaven
Awaits my entry to this hearth.
Begone, foul townsmen!
Mock not my tears’ libation
At the family step! Must now
I wake the terror of the monstrous
Dog by ringing at the bell?
What awful grief my murderous
Mother now portends with
Evil omens where the gods
Demand a sacrifice of blood.
Oh heavy load that I should so
Disgrace this sacred house.
What further woe, what shame
Can I unleash within these
Cursed doors? Surely now
This is my fated end at last.
CHORUS
Be not so sure, young man.
The worst is yet to come if
We can say this is the worst.
Strike not at the crossroads.
Take not the widow of your king.
Best turn away to Corinth,
While your parents are annoyed.
Above all, young man, don’t make
Yourself a whipping boy for Freud.
TENNESSE WILLIAMS
is at home in the deep south . . . of England
PENELOPE: Oh, baby, I glimpsed you from the fire escape. Did you hear the jazz band playing in the street? Did you hear them? Did you take the streetcar like Ah told you?
GERALD: No. Briggs dropped me off.
PENELOPE: Ah do believe a lady is allowed a cocktail at this hour. Some bourbon over ice is what Ah take.
GERALD: I could offer you a glass of Pimm’s.
PENELOPE: It sounds . . . aromatic. All those herbs with brilliant colours, purple, midnight indigo . . . In the drink they carry all the swamp and festerin’ o’ Mississippi.
GERALD: I think it’s made in Norfolk.
PENELOPE: Oh baby, you remember that summer with the houseboat on the Delta of the Ouse?
GERALD: The Norfolk Broads, you mean?
PENELOPE: The Norfolk broads are what came between us, baby. Those ladies from Thet-ford. And those belles from Swaff-ham.
She slumps down on a small stuffed stool.
GERALD: I was not the only one, Penelope.
PENELOPE: You refe
rrin’ to my gentlemen callers? Pour me another Pimm’s, baby. I had mah admirers, it’s true. But all I want . . . is you to make love to me now, Gerald. Am Ah not pretty enough? And what we gonna tell Big Daddy?
GERALD: You know I’m not a wrestling fan, Penelope. And you’re drunk. I could tell by the way you sat down on that stool.
PENELOPE: And how’d I sit down, Mr Know-it-All Englishman?
GERALD: Like a . . . like a twat on a squat thin pouffe.
PENELOPE: Oh, baby, I welcome your kind words o’ warnin’. All my life Ah have pretended to a blindness of dangers.
PLAYING TO THE CROWD
KARL OVE KNAUSGAARD
took his title, My Struggle, from an earlier Mein Kampf
I had a phone call from Josef in the morning. ‘Why don’t you come to Wannsee for this thing at the weekend? It’ll be fun.’
‘Maybe,’ I said. ‘I was just going to hang out. And I won’t be able to bring any beers. I haven’t got any ID.’
I looked out of the window. The weather was grey. There was a building, some bricks, and a car.
‘Reinhard’s got some great ideas,’ said Josef. ‘Do you remember Albie Speer from the fifth year? He’s coming.’
‘My mum’s moved north with her new boyfriend,’ I said. ‘I can’t use her car any more.’
I’d met this girl called Eva in the seventh year. She had a stripy top and trainers. She wasn’t really pretty like Marlene, but she was nice. I thought there was a chance if I could get some beers with my dad’s credit card that I’d get to kiss her. What I really hoped was I’d get to first base with Eva without for once, just this once, please God, coming in my Lederhosen.
I went to the supermarket and put a bottle of salad cream and some margarine in my basket. Then I bought some tissues and some tinned peas. I looked at the smoked Wurst, but remembered I’d gone vegetarian. I went outside and it was cloudy. Next to the supermarket there was a car, and a building.
Back home I listened to some Wagner and played along, imagining I was the conductor. Then I read a book about this kid called Young Werther. He just wanted to be different from the other kids, but he could never really connect to anything much.
Josef rang again the next day about this Wannsee party. ‘Otto’s definitely coming,’ he said. ‘And do you remember that crazy guy Adolf Whatsit?’
‘Eichmann? The one who stuck his dick in the beer bottle at Heinrich’s birthday party?’
‘Sure. Big Adsie. He’s borrowed a tank, so you can have a lift.’
‘Maybe. I was thinking of going into Russia, actually.’
‘Russia? What for, man?’
‘I think if I borrow my dad’s car I can probably get some beers there.’
I looked out of the window and there was a building and a tree, and some bricks, and no car.
It was a shit weekend. I couldn’t decide whether to go the Wannsee thing or invade Russia. I heated a tin of soup.
JAVIER MARIAS
gets into the swing, we see him at it
José went into the library to read a book, the professor followed, he was a very important and learned professor of intelligence, this was a highly significant activity, Javier took a cigar from the box on the table, intelligence could mean spying, that was the thing where you pretended to be someone else and had Significant exchanges, the professor was not listening, he was reading a book, it was Proust, José knew Proust had very long sentences with the architecture of a great cathedral with its stress equations and proportions in a golden harmony, but that’s utter cojones, thought José, I know better, I was once a fellow at All Souls don’t you know, he took a lighter for his cigar, there was no point in going to that trouble, he poured himself a drink, all you have to do is change your full stops and semi-colons into commas, the professor smiled at his guest, this is fun, thought José, here comes another clause, it’s like the trucks on a goods train, chuff, chuff, went the professor, puff, puff, went José, the door opened, a mouse ran up the clock, José jumped over the moon . . .
DAN BROWN
visits the cash dispenser
The world-renowned author stabbed his dagger-like debit card into the slot. ‘Welcome to NatWest,’ barked the blushing grey light of the screen to the forty-two-year-old man. He had only two thoughts.
NatWest is a perfect heptogram.
Scratching his aquiline head, frantically trying to remember a number, the sun came up at last and rained its orange beams on Dan Brown. ‘What do you want to do?’ asserted the blinking screen. His options were stark for Brown, more than ever now. ‘Get Mini Statement’. ‘Withdraw Cash’. ‘Change PIN’. For what seemed an eternity, trying to remember his PIN, the screen mocked the famous writer.
Someone somewhere knows my four-figure PIN.
Whatever my PIN was once is still my PIN and in some remote safe someone somewhere still knows it.
In Paddington Station, an iconic railway terminal with a glass roof like the bastard offspring of a greenhouse and a railway station, a line of fellow travellers was waiting on Brown. Brown frowned down at his brown shoes and for the hundredth time that morning wondered what destiny may have in store for the Exeter, New Hampshire graduate.
The sandy-haired former plagiarism defendant felt his receding temples pounding in his guts. Four figures. Four figures, you halfwit, he almost found himself murmuring in Brown’s ear, close at hand.
Tentatively his fingers pounded their remorseless melody upon the NatWest keyboard, numerically. He watched his fingers work with sallow eyes.
He typed in anything, literally anything, desperately. He didn’t know what affect it may have.
The headquarters of the Royal Bank of Scotland resides in a hydraulically sealed ninety-eight-storey building guarded by hair-trigger sensitive nuclear firedogs at 4918, 274th Street in Manhattan, America, whose security protocol is known to only six elves whose tongues have been cut out for security by the Cyrenian Knights of Albania, the capital of Greece.
In an instant, the famous writer remembered their bleeding skin from barbed wire.
Of course. They must pass on the secret PIN. An unbroken chain whose links are not forged (not in that sense).
9 . . . 8 . . . 7 . . . 6. His fingers pronounced the Sigma number. The Sigma number was almost impossible to fake, whereby the Liberace Sequence was quite easy to forge for prominent author Dan Brown.
The cash machine cleared its throat and breathed in with a rasping exhalation that seemed to shake its very belly. Then finally it expectorated wheezily up twenty-eight million dollars into the fingers pregnant with expectation of the forty-two-year-old man.
‘Take your cash now please,’ pleaded the mocking screen, no longer mocking.
It’s like giving candy to a baby, it occurred to the universecelebrated prose stylist.
It’s like shelling eggs.
P. G. WODEHOUSE
writes the Diary of Sir Walter Raleigh
Having just returned from two years in the New World, where I had acquired a sackful of seed potatoes and a hundred weight of tobacco, I was surfacing from a restorative ten hours, when my varlet, Grieves, oozed into my tower with a disapproving cough.
‘I found this item of attire outside the bedchamber last night, Sir Walter. I presumed you had attended an entertainment of a theatrical nature and inadvertently brought home the costume worn by the jester.’
‘That item,’ I replied, and I meant it to sting, ‘is a velveteen pelisse, or cloak. I wore it on the Spanish main all summer. It drew many admiring glances from the ladies.’
‘Perhaps they thought you were a matador, Sir Walter.’
‘Dash it, Grieves, I shall wear it at court this evening when I go to introduce my potatoes to her Majesty.’
‘As you wish, sir. The feculent tuber is not something I feel her majesty, conscious as she is of the royal figure, will be desirous of consuming.’
I pushed an anxious hand across the b. ‘Perhaps. But I’m pretty sure she’ll go for th
e tobacco. Everyone in the New World was smoking it.’
‘It is somewhat difficult to envisage her majesty with a branch of brier in her mouth emitting clouds of smoke, Sir Walter. I fear the royal bodyguard may fear she has inadvertently caught fire and take measures to douse her person.’
Well I saw what the fellow meant, of course, and it was a pensive WR who strolled beside her majesty at Hampton Court that evening. Between the parterres was a large and stagnant puddle at which she hesitated, letting I dare not wait upon . . . something about a cat. I heard a discreet cough at my shoulder and the next thing I knew I found the velveteen pelisse in my hand. Well, it was with me the work of an instant to lay it down and so secure a dry passage for the royal slipper.
When I asked Grieves to return the garment that night, an evasive expression appeared on the blighter’s face. ‘I fear, sir, that the cloak’s unforeseen immersion has rendered it unwearable. I have . . . er disposed of it accordingly. It is the poet Shakespeare who—’
‘No one’s heard of this bally poet Shakespeare,’ I said sharply.
‘As you wish, Sir Walter. Will that be all for tonight?’
T. S. ELIOT
reflects that it might have come out better in limericks
THE WASTE LAND
Said a Lloyd’s clerk with mettlesome glands:
‘To Margate – I’ll lie on the sands.
The Renaissance and Dante,
Dardanelles and now – Shanti!
God, it’s all come apart in my hands.’
ASH WEDNESDAY
The weight of the past makes me pine
For a language that’s English, but mine.
No more hog’s-head and Stilton,
And to prove I’m not Milton,
I’ll compose with four beats to a line.