THE OSTRAKA PLAYS, VOLUME TWO
I T H A K A
By
FRANCIS HAGAN
Copyright 2011 Francis Hagan
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Cast and Staging
This piece received its premiere at the National Theatre of Scotland’s Five Minute Theatre Festival.
The website above holds all the 5-minute pieces that were staged and broadcast live over the 24 hour period of the Festival, June 21st 2011.
Director: Francis Hagan
Veteran: Paul Gillingwater
Old Woman: Carrie Westwater
The staging should be sparse and abstracted. This Crossroads is as much emblematic as it is actual and in some ways is a crucible of a European legacy now adrift and nameless. The characters of the Old Woman and the Veteran are typical of those lost souls encountered without let across the ravaged and war-torn landscapes of Central and Eastern Europe in the middle of the last century.
I T H A K A
(A desolate crossroads deep in a countryside which is abandoned and unkempt. The junction of the roads is rutted and in disrepair.)
(An old peasant woman is rooting around at the edge of the crossroads. By her side on the ground is an impossibly large bundle of twigs and branches. She is gathering up loose twigs and muttering to herself in a lost language as she does so. This woman is bent almost double by her age and the burdens she has carried.)
(A man enters along one of the roads. He is wearing an Army greatcoat with no particular markings. It is old and worn. His boots are covered in mud. One hand is bandaged and is caked with dried blood.)
(He stops as he sees her bent over her toil.)
(The woman freezes and crouches even deeper into the earth, muttering soundlessly. She averts her face from him. Her hands tremble over her twigs.)
(He scratches at the dried blood on his bandage. For a moment, he gazes out around the landscape as if seeing it for the first time – then he moves to stride past her.)
(She cowers away from him, revolving so that she does not look into his face.)
(He reaches the road out from the crossroads – then he pauses suddenly, as if reaching a decision.)
Veteran - There was a War – (He halts as if uncertain.)
Old Woman There always is – (She raises her hand as if to ward off a blow.) – No, that was facetious. I apologise. A war, you say? Don’t mind me. I babble, of course. A war? How nice.
Veteran (He turns as if to leave and remains staring out away from crossroads.) No, you are right.
Old Woman I am? You flatter me.
Veteran Always a War . . . (He hesitates.)
Old Woman It has been a while . . . (She begins to tentatively collect her twigs.) A while since anyone came down that road, I mean. Years, even.
Veteran (Gazing back down the road he has walked up.) I am the first?
Old Woman Oh, yes. Last month, a ragged crowd passed down that road there – passed on by like ghosts – and some years ago, a long trail of dying men went that way. Days, it took, days and days for them all to pass by – but, no, you are the first on this road in a long long while . . . (She adds the twigs to the huge bundle.)
Veteran It . . . has been a long War.
Old Woman I expect so, yes. How nice for you, eh?
Veteran (He takes out a flask and sips from it in an absent-minded fashion.) . . . We fought for home. For family. And so did they, of course. The battlefields were strewn with the dead – and always the photos of the loved ones fluttered across those corpses like leaves, like blossom. Sometimes we sat up at night and swopped those lost photos as gamblers exchange cards. Men fell in love then with women they had never seen. The women of the enemy. And we fought for sweethearts who had never known our faces.
Old Woman . . . What a War, eh? That lasted so long?
Veteran (He looks hard at her, frowning.) . . . Yes. Impossibly long. But it is over now.
(A pause.)
(He holds out the flask to her. She hesitates and then snatches it from him. She sups greedily. He ignores her.)
Veteran . . . I lost my wallet in the first year of the War – an air-raid, it was. And we scrambled for cover and I lost it in a ditch. I remembered her face, of course, but after a while it began to slip from me, like mist in the dawn. I found a photo – charred it was around the edges – but the face in it – well, it reminded me of her a little – seemed to echo her face, you see.
Old Woman Your sweetheart?
Veteran My wife, yes . . . That photo helped me – helped me hold onto her – but in the end it crumbled away. It was fragile, you see, like a flower . . . So I found another photo which reminded of the woman in the charred photo – and that I held onto, held close to my heart, until it too was worn away . . . I cannot remember now how many photos I have worn out . . .
Old Woman Such a long War, as you say. (The flask is empty and so she hands it back.)
Veteran Keep it. That was the last.
Old Woman (She slips it quickly from sight.) I didn’t mean to – I am a greedy bitch. I grab at succour where I can. No thought for the future now. That’s me. Old and stuck in the present. It’s all I have left, eh? This present. Did I mention I babble? Did I?
Veteran (Suddenly.) I am returning. You understand?
Old Woman Yes, I do –
Veteran Returning home. Returning to a land, a love . . .
Old Woman (Gently.) . . . You cannot remember?
(A pause.)
Veteran I have memories but they are not mine. We talked at night around the fires, our weapons close at hand, and we whispered of our homes, the woods, the villages, the golden stream, the windmill with its red and white sails . . . And as each man fell in this War, we would carry on his memory of home to keep him with us . . . So many men fell, we forgot our own land, our own home, and talked always of those other lands as if we missed them.
Old Woman In keeping the dead alive, you became a ghost.
(A pause.)
Veteran . . . Well, the dead outnumbered us in the end. Who is to say who is the ghost and who the living now?
Old Woman - I had a husband once –
Veteran A hag like you?
Old Woman I know! Imagine, eh! Look at me now, all cracked and gummy, eh! But I was not always so. Once I was regal. Land, I had. Power, too. Suitors vied from across the sea for my hand. No, they did. Don’t laugh. I tell you. Then he came with a dozen ships of white wood. The sails were purple silk. He came – and I knew I loved him as I would love no other. My heart fluttered in my chest like a little bird when I first saw him – but in his eyes lay a restless glint, a spark of adventure I knew no love would ever dim.
Veteran But you married him anyway?
Old Woman It was love, soldier – (She shrugs in fatalism.) – He was born to roam, to war in distant lands, and I was born to endure his absence . . .
Veteran My sweetheart promised to wait for me and she has. Of that I am certain. Certain . . . Now, I cannot remember how to walk back to her . . . (He gazes about him at the crossroads, lost.) . . . I cannot remember . . .
Old Woman . . . He ca
me back. Once. A long time ago. My house was besieged by other suitors. Marry us, they all shouted, he is dead so forget him and marry us instead. The hearth fires were high that night as they all shouted and got drunk – oh, soldier, I was regal once and commanded men as a queen stood over her subjects!
Veteran A long time ago, eh?
Old Woman Very! To look at me now! – And the fires smouldered down. The dogs slumbered like babes. The mead grew cold over the hearth – and then he was among them. A god among mortals. A wolf among the sheep . . . He found War then even in the hearth of his home and I swear, soldier he laughed at the unexpected joy of it . . .
Veteran (He scratches slowly at his hand again.) You must have been proud to have him home again?
Old Woman (She begins to shoulder up the huge bundle with an effort.) - Ach, was I? He swept me up in arms lathered in blood – and his eyes kissed mine as if he had never seen my face before . . . and I knew then it was not him. Not him at all . . .
Veteran (He helps her shoulder the bundle.) Not him? Of course, it was –
Old Woman It was the myth of him, soldier. Nothing more. A myth came home that night not a man. Not the cold flesh of someone slowly dying in this world, slowly growing old . . . In returning, he finally left me, you see?
(A pause.)
Veteran . . . Let me . . . (He gestures to the twigs upon her crooked back.)
(A pause.)
Old Woman It is a heavy burden, soldier.
Veteran . . . I have carried worse.
Old Woman It is all I have left now.
Veteran Better that than other people’s memories –
Old Woman Or the photo of loved ones you have never seen?
Veteran (He laughs.) Your face alone encompasses a thousand photos, my love.
Old Woman No one will write stories about this.
(A pause.)
Veteran Then I have finally come home?
Old Woman Yes, my love.
Veteran . . . It was a long War, Penelope.
Old Woman Shhh, you are home now . . . Home . . .
E N D
About the Author
I have been writing on and off since I was a shy lad hiding under the bed and scribbling in
an out of date diary (I think it was about my space travels). Most of my works have been
either plays populated with grotesques who stumble around ruins and those odd places we
forget about or epic tales of those last Roman legionaries as they falter and fall at the end
of Empire.
Over the last three years, I have embarked on a series of plays which I have entitled 'The
Ostraka Plays' and in which I am exploring that space where the irrational and the
seductive collide. I remain fascinated by a poetics which allows an imagination to
populate a forgotten nook in history outside our conventions and expectations. In these
plays, the audience is invited into worlds which remain provisional and insecure - and
where freedom is that release from convention.
The other side of my writings could not be more opposite - in these stories, the dying light
of Rome flutters one last desperate time as I seek to follow the last of the Eagles down
into their fates. Here, archaeological record, literary fragments, and my own invention
intertwine to set a stage ripe for heroics and betrayal.
Contact with Me Online
The Skinmaker
https://www.facebook.com/francis.d.hagan