Lovefuries: The Contracting Sea; The Hanging Judge; Bite or Suck (Intellect Books - Play Text)

Lovefuries The Contracting Sea / The Hanging Judge / Bite or Suck By David Ian Rabey Part of the Playtext Series

Rabey

Lovefuries offers a double bill of performance pieces that explode national and personal pressures to keep silent, and explore the surprising and shocking resurgences of life that break through grief. In The Contracting Sea, the fiancée of a just-shipwrecked sailor is challenged by a feminine elemental force of catastrophe to throw off the shackles of her common humanity. The second play, The Hanging Judge, explores from the inside an occurrence of sexual abuse in a contemporary Welsh context, and how one survivor finds the courage to discover defiance.

Lovefuries The Contracting Sea / The Hanging Judge / Bite or Suck

This second volume of dramatist-director Rabey’s plays for his own Lurking Truth/Gwir sy’n Llechu theatre company also includes the short two-hander Bite or Suck, completing a collection of innovative drama that restlessly explores what is possible at the extreme boundaries of human language and physicality. David Ian Rabey is Professor of Drama and Theatre Studies at Aberystwyth University, and Artistic Director of Lurking Truth/Gwir sy’n Llechu theatre company, which he co-founded in 1985.

‘Stylish and stylistically challenging work... a riveting and explosively physical performance’ – Irish Times

ISBN 978-1-84150-184-0

David Ian Rabey

00

9 781841 501840

intellect / www.intellectbooks.com

Lovefuries The Contracting Sea / The Hanging Judge / Bite or Suck

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Lovefuries: The Contracting Sea; The Hanging Judge; Bite or Suck

David Ian Rabey

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Lovefuries: The Contracting Sea; The Hanging Judge; Bite or Suck

David Ian Rabey

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First Published in the UK in 2008 by Intellect Books, PO Box 862, Bristol BS99 1DE, UK First published in the USA in 2008 by Intellect Books, The University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th Street, Chicago, IL 60637, USA Copyright © 2008 David Ian Rabey All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission. Anyone wishing to perform any of the plays published within this volume should contact David Ian Rabey for permission at the following address: David Ian Rabey Department of Theatre, Film and Television Studies Parry Williams Building University of Aberystwyth Penglais Campus Aberystwyth Ceredigion SY23 3AJ Wales, UK Series: Playtext Series Series Editor: Roberta Mock A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Cover Image: David Ian Rabey as Badger (photo: Keith Morris) Cover Design: Gabriel Solomons Copy Editor: Holly Spradling Typesetting: Mac Style, Nafferton, E. Yorkshire ISBN 978-1-84150-184-0/EISBN 978-1-84150-221-2 Printed and bound by Gutenberg Press, Malta.

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CONTENTS

On Rabey's First Volume, The Wye Plays

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Author’s Introduction: All the Rage David Ian Rabey

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Lovefuries: Production Details

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The Contracting Sea

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The Hanging Judge

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Shattering All Excuse: A Performer’s Perspective on The Hanging Judge Roger Owen

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Bite or Suck

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Afterword: The Lurking Truths of the Self Karoline Gritzner

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About the Author

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Lurking Truth/Gwir sy’n Llechu Theatre Company

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ON RABEY’S FIRST VOLUME, THE WYE PLAYS

‘Fierce, muscular texts in the spirit of Artaud and John Clare’ – Iain Sinclair ‘A writer who combines a ruthlessly exploring intellect with a superb, at times shocking, dramatic instinct…his characters are as memorable as those in early O’Casey’ – Brendan Kennelly ‘Relishing The Wye Plays as written texts has considerable rewards. Rabey crafts speeches of such literary meticulousness that the reader reads and rereads, analysing the formal texture and a content that can be humorously earthy and disturbingly vivacious. Rabey adores and celebrates the potential of language: at times his dialogue is deliciously colloquial, at other moments it is distinctly Shavian…The scripts are illustrated with a number of evocative photographs and the stage directions strive to capture a thrilling performance dynamic…The Wye Plays are also works of astonishing bricolage: signs and allusions are re-appropriated into new contexts of meaning. At times the plays feel pre-Shakespearian, ur-textual, a return to the storytelling of Holinshed. At other moments the plays splinter into a broader European expressionism or the unremittingly absurdist iconoclasm of the Shakespeare adaptations of the post-reunification Berline Volksbühne or the unnerving re-visioning of Jan Svankmajer’s Alice’ – Richard Hand (University of Glamorgan) in Cyfrwng: Media Wales Journal.

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AUTHOR’S INTRODUCTION: ALL THE RAGE David Ian Rabey

Lovefuries is a double bill of texts for performance. Its title was suggested by that of a Charles Mingus composition, ‘Love’s Fury’. On the train to Cardiff to negotiate the plays’ performance at the Wales Millennium Centre, I also read and discovered Gwyneth Lewis’s encouraging words: Poetry [is] not pastel colours, but blood-red and black. If you don’t obey it as a force in your life, it will tear you to pieces. This is because it’s a form of energy, which links the electricity of your truth to the world around you. Metre and rhythm help to earth that energy and find a safe way of embodying it in words…The Furies are the creative processes’ revenge if you refuse to embody them in your life…I imagine them as a psychic force, an interference of voices, cacophonous music, psychedelic delusions, an emotional tinnitus.1 Our performances of Lovefuries certainly aimed to draw on and represent these latter qualities, and I was very gratified that the author of the above words was present at that performance. The first text, The Contracting Sea, began life in 2001 with a promise to an actress, Antoinette Walsh, to write her a one-woman show. Our initial conversations in Dublin that summer triggered some ideas, which cohered into images, sounds and words through dreams. Firstly the title announced itself, suggesting a landscape, and I immediately heard the double bass of Paula Gardiner, my favourite Welsh jazz musician and a regular musical collaborator, surrounding Antoinette’s voice. In some respects, The Contracting Sea consciously subverts the premise of J. M. Synge’s classic Irish play Riders to the Sea, which has traditionally enshrined theatrical and cultural images of complicity in inevitable paralytic loss, and the thwarting of the feminine into tragic and maternal postures. In The Contracting Sea, a woman stands on a desolate coastline and struggles to come to terms with sudden absence of her shipwrecked lover. As she explores her own affliction, anger and isolation within the community, her wry and

1. Gwyneth Lewis, Sunbathing in the Rain (Flamingo: London, 2002), 50, 51–2.

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savagely comic reflections drive her to a point where a new voice tears out of her: the voice of a fiercely wilful embodiment of catastrophe, part seductress, part sea-witch, who challenges all familiar terms of social continuity and responses to human mortality; who questions the value of conventional sanity in the face of appalling loss and demeaning routine; and who discovers an unforgivable defiance in the surprising resurgences of sexuality and erotic initiative which break through grief. The first half of the piece emerged in 2001, but lay blocked and dormant until 2002, when I awoke at 6 a.m. one Sunday morning with the full reach of Morgana’s words and argument which comprise the second half insisting that I write them all down immediately. I complied, with secretarial haste, and subsequently made only minor amendments to assist clarity of some phrases and rhythms. The urgency, precision and structure of the words constituted a mysterious obligation such as I have never experienced before or since. The second text, The Hanging Judge, is not directly autobiographical, though was inevitably informed by my experience of being interviewed as a witness (considerately and very professionally) by Cardiff CID as part of an investigation. Its other roots lie in a conversation with a friend. After the conversation, I was shaken by a pitch-black nightmare dominated by the chant of an old novelty soul record (‘I Am The Judge’, identified by Gareth Potter, the first performer of The Hanging Judge, as being by Pigmeat Markham); also by a dramatic proposition that both terrified me and dared me to write it: an appalling ritual of confrontation, invocation, possession and casting out, shot through with the power of doggerel, childhood rhymes, and curses, mingling (in the spirit of Dr John’s musical gris-gris) the black and white magic of the spoken word in a growling prowling restless rhythm which turned things associated with religious ritual into a voodoo black mass. I think some lines in Laura Nyro’s song ‘Stoney End’ possibly suggested the name of the protagonist (‘Never mind the forecast / ’Cause the sky has lost control / And the fury and the broken thunder’s / Come to match my raging soul’).2 At the time of its premiere, in Aberystwyth in April 2004, I could make no further statement, for legal and ethical reasons, about the origins of the play; but I have since, and can now acknowledge that the police investigation and the conversation both related to the case of John Owen. John Owen was a respected and charismatic drama teacher and television dramatist who sexually abused his pupils for more than a decade. In the words of the Western Mail journalist Claire Hill, ‘He was not the stereotype of an ostracised paedophile, he was a pillar of the community’; criticisms of his conduct had been received but rebuffed, ‘But in May 2001, four young men walked into Pontypridd police station, and made further allegations against Owen relating to their time at Ysgol Rhydefelen [Rhydefelen school])’; ‘Facing five charges of sexual

2. Five months after the first performances of Lovefuries, and during the show’s September 2004 run in Dublin, I read the graphic novel Daredevil: Wake Up (Marvel; New York, 2002) by writer Brian Michael Bendis and artist David Mack. In this, an abused child, who is implicated in the death of his abuser, creates for himself an imaginary alternative persona, whom he names The Fury. Mr Bendis and I were evidently tapping into water from very similar wells, and Roger and I responded to his imagery as a confirmatory echo of our own. This constituted a strange circuit: I had originally learned of Lewis Carroll’s Fury poem, not from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, but from the Daredevil comic no. 71 (Dec. 1970).

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abuse, he committed suicide by taking a morphine overdose…on October 4, 2001, the day before he was due to stand trial. He never had to face those who suffered at his hands’.3 Parents, pupils and journalists such as Western Mail reporter Patrick Fletcher had been warned off from making accusations; ‘It was even claimed that an attack on John Owen was an attack on the very future of the Welsh language’.4 Hill again: ‘The Clywch Inquiry’, into the allegations of sexual abuse in a school setting, ‘not only revealed the abuse by one man, but the failings of an entire education authority’, whereby a ‘cover-up by Welsh officials’ repeatedly allowed Owen to continue in his activities unpunished.5 These separate discussions of both The Contracting Sea and The Hanging Judge may give some sense of the cumulative proposition of, and the contact points within, Lovefuries.6 The subtler but distinctly tidal rhythms of the first, more feminine, piece, contrasted with the more masculine jagged rampages of the second, as intended. Before, during and immediately after the writing of both texts, I heard the voices of the protagonists rather than knew what their movements should be; as a director-dramatist I knew that rehearsals would be the occasions for finding the movements which the language generated and evolving a physical choreographic score. However, both scripts are tightly orchestrated in their metrical, and indeed poetic, layout on the page (and the more recent scripts of Howard Barker and Sarah Kane were doubtless influential here): it seemed appropriate to guide the performer towards a different way of speaking and way of using their breath, by suggesting how many words a performer should say on a single breath (indicated by a separate line of text), where they might make gear changes and locate the breath and words differently in their body (this reflects my directorial debt to Kristin Linklater’s book Freeing Shakespeare’s Voice, New York: TCG, 1992, which challenges actors to discover where the emotions associated with different words might dwell, or where they tend to gravitate or seek expression, physically). The unconventional use of breath and speech was intended to suggest and generate larger patterns of physical movement, balance and offbalance. Thematically, both pieces are linked by the experience of grief at the loss of a lover, and by the voice and psyche of each protagonist splintering into two, a recurrent effect in my dramatic writing which I have previously identified as the ‘riven self’. In writing a one-person play, the dramatist is deprived of the usually multivocal formulae for generating conflict. I remember recalling the second half of Arnold Wesker’s 1981 play Caritas to inform my initial formal

3. 4. 5. 6.

Claire Hill, The Western Mail 2 July 2004, 5. Patrick Fletcher, ibid., 2. Hill, ibid., 1. As my assistant director, Emma Hayward, commented during a first night talkback, she and I ‘treated both plays as two separate pieces, taking them for what they were and discovering what each piece was about in and for itself, rather than consciously direct them as a pair. But as we went deeper into rehearsals we discovered how a line from one frequently resonates back into the other’. Not only were there echoes in the text but in the physical choreography; reprises, variations and deviations, ghostly patterns of repetition but also extensions or completion of a gesture from one piece to the next (as when Fury lay on, stood under, or jumped off, the scaffolding structure that had formerly been Elsiheba’s jetty).

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considerations of the challenges of a one-woman play: specifically, the way that Wesker dramatises a literally but willingly immured consciousness splintering into madness; and deciding that I wanted my character finally to kick down the walls of personally and culturally imposed enclosure and determinism – a trope which would occur in both Sea and Judge. I have often been haunted by Frank Miller’s pithily Nietzschean observation, ‘Life only makes sense when you force it to’ (The Dark Knight Returns, 1986); and by the sense of people who sense that they are at the beginning of the end. In The Contracting Sea, the character Elisheba is furious at the exhausted terms of life, at the indignity of the fragility of life and of her own emotions – and then she makes the discovery of surprising resurgence through an effort of will, expressed primarily in terms of a sexual quickening and a surge of passion for existence which is literally macabre, in that it mocks the ultimate dominion of Death. The siren voice that possesses her, Morgana, is the voice and activity of that will. In The Hanging Judge, the central character Fury often demonstrates an overgrown schoolboy’s energy, but also a rage at being trapped in the shape of an overgrown schoolboy; bewildered by the apparent closures in his own life, when he discovers and confronts within himself the internalised voice of his former teacher and sexual oppressor. This is a simple but resonant idea which has its antecedents in Dramatherapy techniques and Augusto Boal’s Rainbow of Desire programme; indeed, beyond the play’s outrageous scenario of abused trust, I think that there may be a Hanging Judge in us all – an internalised voice, perhaps in the tone of a formative authority, which mocks our achievements, dismisses our worth and is witheringly reductive of all our possibilities. Dramatically speaking, a large part of the challenge was to give the Devil his due. Both texts deal in the dynamics of reversibility and recoil, pressure and counter-pressure, with the protagonists involved in conscious and fragile performances for an imaginary (?) audience, which falters, and demands refinement. In Sea, Elisheba senses deterministic adversity, ‘There is always something’, against which she pits herself, with an almost Faustian commitment. However, she also discovers another presence, Morgana, who is actively compelling and oddly compassionate. Some of the main challenges discovered and gracefully negotiated by the performer were: maintaining the sense of Morgana trying to teach Elisheba commandingly, even through aggressive impatience; allowing Elisheba her own anger at her indignity during this process, whilst Morgana persists in commitment to the fundamental generosity of repudiating conventional generalisations through precise and specific distinction (Morgana is not smugly authoritarian, but perceives that Elisheba is worth the considerable effort and detail of her teaching); so that finally Elisheba is independently deductive and discovers determination and resolution to further life rather than conventional relief (in life or death), expressed by her discovery of the idea, and decision, to ‘dance up the dawn’. In writing this synopsis of The Contracting Sea, I discover – and, believe it or not, surprise myself with – the importance and prevalence of the teaching dynamic in its dramatic process. I realize, but not before now, how it explores the work of a strict, cruel but ultimately benign educator (possibly demonic, possibly divine, possibly both). This forms another contact point and contrast with The Hanging Judge, in which the internalised instructor is malignant, and Fury moves from self-diagnosis to attempted excision.

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The Hanging Judge is also driven by a sense of process: as I observed in rehearsal, even before the first word is spoken, Fury should be visibly preparing himself for something ‘which starts now and we don’t get out of this room till it’s finished’. Throughout the performance, Fury needs to develop a sense of listening to himself, to the unforeseen formulations and deductions to which his adopted words, rhythms and rhymes bring him; he does not recite, he discovers, in the moment, what each word he utters and each phrase he invents will lead him towards. When he believes that his lover/mentor is consigned to the past by his suicide, his utterance ‘You’re out of reach now’ expresses the energy of attempted closure, as well as bitterness and grief. However, the new energy of the internalised voice of the Judge, his formative authority, emerges from within him, counteracting and more than overturning the sense of closure by insisting on its inescapability. Fury’s resistant comebacks to the Judge’s assertions are further instances of energetic counter-pressure, with the performer effectively playing out both sides of the conflict. It was particularly important in rehearsal and performance to maintain the sense of a thorough investment: to show the Judge’s pain (of desperateness, anger, disappointment), even in manipulation, as well as Fury’s. The final section – what I termed in rehearsal ‘the black mass’ – is particularly important. One of several pivots is when Fury part-quotes from Alice in Wonderland, ‘I’ll try the whole cause and condemn you to…’, in full awareness that the missing word, left ‘hanging’ in the air, so to speak, for imaginative completion by all involved, is ‘death’. At this point he acknowledges, to himself and to the Judge (and to the audience), that this now has to be a fight to the finish. Its sense of resolve must reflect that recalled and formulated by one of those who brought the decisive prosecution against John Owen: ‘You realise what this involves: at best we’ll destroy a man, at worst we’ll kill him’; along with the decision to persist (destroy and possibly kill), in that knowledge. Even when approaching the climax, the play’s second performer, Roger Owen, developed, and I increasingly favoured, a sense of ambivalence: one assertion, ‘I am the Judge’ reclaimed a sense of personal righteousness and usurped his lover/mentor’s claim to authority; its repetition, ‘I am the Judge’, betrayed an uneasy intimation that the Fury even now continued to replicate the lover/mentor’s tone and stance as an ideologue; the final part of the triplet, ‘Everybody know that I am the Judge’, needed to be a command to the audience, awful in its full knowledge of complexity and violent insistence upon fatal accomplishment. Adopting the rhythm but crucially subverting the familiar words of the Dr John song ‘Walk on Gilded Splinters’, Fury learns to call the Judge his ‘enemy’ and purposefully tears down the last symbolic vestige of his enemy’s ‘hope’, represented by the hanging rope which alluded scenographically to the Judge’s suicide. On quitting the space, Roger performed several double takes, checking each stage area where the Judge had formerly materialised within him for any lingering vestige of his presence: appropriately suggesting, even in apparent exorcism, a continued vigilance; and/or else, a last look at the sites of his presence, before a final turning of the back upon those sites. Our three separate rehearsal periods for the three different productions of Lovefuries (in Aberystwyth, Dublin and Cardiff) were enveloping and compulsive periods of grapplings, reluctant understandings and surprising grace. I won’t say it was easy for Antoinette, Paula, Gareth, Roger and the scenographers and crew to get to the root of my strange and unreasonable demands, but it proved essential to them to do so, and in their restless courage they settled for nothing less. I could ask for no more. As Brendan Kennelly observes:

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The sheer ‘madness’ of many dreams is quite haunting…I once made the mistake of trying to explain a dream but soon recognised the futility of this. The best one can hope to do when writing about dreams is to capture some of the thrilling reality of new feelings and images, that exciting lostness, that daft narrative which many people experience in dreams. It may well be that it is in dreams, even more than in poetry that we find the ultimate capacity for surrender.7 I would argue that theatre can prove a conduit between the two. I can now observe, in retrospect, that if the tone and situation of Elisheba is similar to that of the character in Kennelly’s poem (from the Irish) ‘The Hag of Beare’,8 then Morgana’s purpose, and her irreverent but generous sense of distinction, is at least occasionally comparable to Kennelly’s ‘The Man Made of Rain’,9 though her vision is feminine and defiantly worldly. Janice McLane has noted how Alphonso Lingis implies that: defining rationality as the basic commonality between human beings makes it almost impossible to recognize other people as human…He argues instead that connection most fundamentally takes place when human beings share laughter, grief and erotic feelings… Yet these sorts of sharing – laughter, grief, the erotic – are quite opposite from maintaining respect for another’s rational boundaries. In fact, they violate such boundaries, creating a ‘vortex’ of ‘surplus energy’…that passes around, through and between human beings. Human commonality…occurs when we join one another in such a vortex.10 This might offer a step towards definitions of this sort of theatre. The National Assembly of Wales commissioned a report on national guidelines to be issued to teachers of drama, in the wake of the Clywch Inquiry and the John Owen case. Whilst it is important that lessons be learnt from the educational authorities’ wilful permission of John Owen’s repeated abuse, I remain concerned that his disgrace to the profession of drama teaching might be used as the occasion for literally minded imaginative restrictions on what that profession might attempt, in terms of rehearsal techniques and texts and scenarios for practical exploration. Offensively but not inexplicably, John Owen exploited the imaginary situations and pretexts of sexually explicit drama texts and improvisation scenarios for literal personal opportunistic advantage and sexual authoritarianism. His methods and ends stand justly condemned. However, I share a concern with other drama teachers in Wales that the disrepute into which he has brought the profession might in future be the occasion or pretext for an uninformed, or even morally panicked, series of restrictively literal-minded and infantilising

7. Brendan Kennelly, Familiar Strangers: New and Selected Poems, 1960–2004 (Bloodaxe: Tarset, 2004), 19. 8. Ibid., 143–4. 9. Ibid., 159–226. 10. Janice McLane, in Encounters with Alphonso Lingis, eds. Alexander E. Hooke and Wolfgang W. Fuchs, (Lexington: Lanham, 2003), 57.

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guidelines as to what teachers might attempt. I have argued elsewhere11 that a responsible and imaginative drama teacher can and should attempt surprising things, including the broaching of emotions associated with sexual issues, provided that they do so with clear and responsible imaginative metaphorical frameworks for students’ self-expression, which respect their privacy and autonomy. As a practical drama teacher, I personally resent John Owen’s disgracing of my profession and my artistic medium through his exercise of power without responsibility; I leave you to imagine my feelings about what he did to the lives of some of my friends. It seemed appropriate to me to repossess the form of theatre and make a specifically theatrical riposte to his conduct. Bite or Suck was (again believe it or not) the expression of my sole impulse to write something predominantly comic, though again it approaches and aims to elevate poetically, and undercut bathetically, some of the contradictory elements of human sexuality, in words for a choreography which should take its cue from the boldest elements of contemporary dance. In the original 1997 programme notes, I recalled a line from a Joe Jackson song, ‘Life can be strange / Only love can be stranger than fiction’ and described the play as ‘a jukebox of unruly feelings designed to hit some surprising notes on top of some surprisingly recognizable chords, aiming to suggest, like good music and deep contact, that you’re capable of more things than you think you are, and have been told you can or should be’. Taken together, the plays in this volume testify to the important presences and audibility of voices – from the past, the present and the future – which urge the search. Beyonder. DIR

11. Rabey, ‘Staging Crash: The Sexualising of Language in Action’, in Studies in Theatre and Performance 23, 1 (2003), 41–54.

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LOVEFURIES: PRODUCTION DETAILS

LOVEFURIES: The Contracting Sea and The Hanging Judge Lovefuries was first performed by Lurking Truth/Gwir sy’n Llechu Theatre Company at the Emily Williams Studio, in the Department of Theatre, Film and Television Studies, University of Wales, Aberystwyth, 28 April-1 May 2004, with the following cast and crew: The Contracting Sea Elisheba ....................................................................................Antoinette Walsh Morgana ..................................................................................Antoinette Walsh Music composed and played by Paula Gardiner The Hanging Judge Fury ..........................................................................................Gareth Potter Sound design by Adam Clegg and David Ian Rabey Assistant Director......................................................................Emma Hayward DSM/Production Manager ....................................................Amy Walker Scenographer ..........................................................................Kaspar Wimberley Lighting and Sound Operator ................................................Adam Clegg Lighting Operator ....................................................................Nia Catrin Thomson Production Administration ......................................................Jenni Joy and Sian Thomas Poster image ............................................................................Meri Wells

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Scenography: Kaspar pitched a jetty, made of scaffolding, on a rolling landscape of soil and potatoes, which for Sea was covered with polythene sheets, such as one sees increasingly on agricultural fields. Stage lighting gave the landscape a varyingly turbulent oceanic appearance. Beneath the jetty, an arrangement of wooden boxes formed an enclosure which was illuminated from the inside when Morgana walked around it in indication of the Captain’s house. For Judge this structure was broken and opened up to encircle the playing area, effectively placing Fury within a partial enclosure, but the polythene sheets were removed, suggesting a mired rural space dotted with potatoes which, under the stage lighting during rehearsals, had extensively sprouted grotesque tubers. An illuminated rope dropped from the ceiling down into a hatch in the stage, and Fury addressed and touched the rope as the residual presence of the Judge, contemplating a drop from the edge of the hatch down into death, into which the Judge had ostensibly escaped. In this and subsequent productions, Fury discovered on the set two small scaffolding bars (of about ten inches length) and percussively hammered them together to establish a rhythm for his initial and climactic incantations, finally flinging them or letting them tumble into the Judge’s pit. Gareth also finally flung a fistful of the surrounding soil into the pit/drop/grave, consigning the Judge, before walking out of the playing space and theatre door. Lovefuries had its second production as part of the ESB Dublin Fringe Festival, playing at Ss Michael and St John, Temple Bar, 21–26 September 2004, with the following changes to cast and crew: Fury ..........................................................................................Roger Owen Stage Manager and Lighting Assistant ................................Nia Catrin Thomas Set and Lighting Design ..........................................................Duncan Gough Sound Operation and Lighting Assistant ..............................Will Hahn Scenography: This production shared an adaptable set with Lupa Theatre Company’s production of Gryfhead, in the same venue. Duncan’s design retained the central jetty, but the playing area was bordered by shattered wooden planking bolted to scaffolding, containing a grill (which performers could walk behind, lean against and hang off) and a doorway (which performers could hang off, stand in and finally exit through). A mooring rope was tethered to the jetty as a side rail (this would be redeployed as the hanging rope in Judge). The Captain’s house was suggested by a light thrown through one such shattered plank, into the central space, and Morgana kneeled at this aperture as if to glimpse the cramped conditions of the daughters. For Judge, a coffin-shaped black box was additionally placed centrally, its lid containing a square hole into which the rope dropped. At various times Roger knelt at the box, jumped onto it and stood on it (as for the opening and closing incantations). His climactic word in the last incantation, ‘Hope’, extinguished (as if “blowing out”) the light on the space formerly occupied by the rope. Both performances ended with a slow fade of lights on the protagonists, downlit in the doorway.

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Lovefuries had its third production at the Weston Studio at the Wales Millennium Centre, Cardiff, 26 March 2005, with the following cast and crew: The Contracting Sea Elisheba ....................................................................................Antoinette Walsh Morgana ..................................................................................Antoinette Walsh Music composed and played by Paula Gardiner The Hanging Judge Fury ..........................................................................................Roger Owen Sound design by Adam Clegg and David Ian Rabey Stage Manager and Lighting Assistant ................................Nia Catrin Thomas Set and Lighting Design ..........................................................Duncan Gough Sound Operation and Lighting Assistant ..............................Amy Walker Assistant Director and Sound and Lighting Assistant ..........Emma Hayward Scenography: The set retained the central ideas of the Dublin set – shattered boards, scaffolding and the rope dropping its pit in the “coffin” box – but was additionally surrounded by hanging skeins of fishing net, which when lit could also suggest veins and webs. The sound design for The Hanging Judge included samples from hymn singing by Welsh choirs, and from Public Image Ltd, and Lewis Taylor. Interval music: ‘Richard Pryor Addresses a Tearful Nation’ (and possibly some of ‘Nico Lost One Small Buddha’); then, finally and immediately prior to performance of Judge, ‘Stop’ – all by Joe Henry, from the CD Scar. All productions were directed by the dramatist. The choreography and texts of the show were revisited and refined in the rehearsal period for each production. The texts as published here should now be regarded as definitive. Diolch/Thanks: When someone is appointed to a university chair, it is traditional that they give an inaugural lecture on a topic of general interest, which nevertheless reflects and expresses their own explorations. In 2003, when I was interviewed for the Chair of Drama and Theatre Studies at the University of Wales, Aberystwyth, I spoke about my ideas for this show in response to a question, and this set me thinking on the bus home that if I were successful I would apply to the Department for the rehearsal and theatre space to stage Lovefuries as my inaugural production. I am grateful to Ioan Williams and the Aberystwyth Department of Theatre, Film and Television Studies for welcoming and permitting this proposition. I would also like to record my gratitude to the Arts and Humanities Research Council and to the Arts Council of Wales for their grant support of the Welsh productions, and to CCAT: their financial support, and the tireless efforts and support of their officer Rob Tiernan, permitted the show to transfer to Dublin. Mick Mangan,

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Roberta Mock, Lisa Lewis, Dic Edwards, Gill Ogden, John O’Brien, Susan Conley and Andrea Wilshire provided valuable encouragement and practical support, and Ceris Jones’s determined and patient administrative assistance was crucial to the show’s realisation. Many thanks to Rick Gough and Keith Morris for their kind permission to reproduce their production photographs, and to Sam King at Intellect Books for guidance on selection and general assistance in realising this volume. Thanks also to members of the Lurkers’ Cardiff Coven, particularly Lesley Jane Rooney (the electric landlady) and Zac McBreen, and to the Millennium Centre for hosting our final show in the twentieth anniversary year of my arrival in Wales, and providing me with the opportunity to say many things, but not least: rewrite the odds and damn the torpedoes, ‘cause I am still here. Lurking. DIR The Contracting Sea – a composer/musician’s thoughts Paula Gardiner On first reading of The Contracting Sea a creative experience I had not previously encountered in such strong terms happened to me. As I read the text I heard the music that I would eventually come to perform. I cannot put this experience into scientific language as my own language is that of music – one that is essentially abstract and this case interpretive and reactive. The pulse, emotions and subject materials jumped off the page. The elemental subject is, for me as composer, always an inspiration but here, again, in a new way. Here the sea is all powerful, the undercurrents creating struggle and interruption. The notion of pulse in music is a necessity in my book but within that is the concept of “time” as a wave – an irregularity within order. This was perhaps the most important factor that inspired my musical accompaniment. There is also disturbance of emotion and an unease juxtaposed with great beauty and strength. The sheer conviction of the language of the text empowered me to embark on a new musical endeavour – that of embracing contradiction and stating the facts as I heard them. In performance a true relationship developed – that of actor and musician, and it was a liberating experience to find two voices working as one. Essentially we were both realising someone else’s art but then interacting and contributing to a whole, i.e. the performance or communication of this work. I thank David for offering me the opportunity of working on this piece and sparking a revolution in my personal development as an artist – it is probably only now in hindsight that I realise the importance of this experience to my recent writings and performances. PG, September 2006

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THE CONTRACTING SEA David Ian Rabey

The sea I dreamed of closes like a vice Parading waves are frozen into place Their veils of vapour scattering like rice And far below, the ultimate disgrace, A mermaid crushed to death inside the ice It’s nothing Nothing but a frightened face – Clive James/Pete Atkin, ‘Nothing Left to Say’ Dance the dream awake – Kurt Elling, ‘Resolution’ For Antoinette Walsh

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Antoinette Walsh as Elisheba in the Wales Millennium Centre production (photo: Rick Gough).

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ONE: ELISHEBA: So Here I am now On a cold spit of land Nothing left to say. Or left to lose. However: (Musical undertow) There is always Something That waits for you To meet it Out there Where it takes its time And then takes yours Pulls it in Eats it away Like a hostage moon. I pit myself Against it Hoping to make myself ultimately Human YOU CAN’T BLAME A GIRL FOR TRYING Or perhaps You Can. I’ll go where I’m welcome I keep saying to myself; Then back it comes And off I traipse. But right now I am Here Trying to find out where everything goes Starting with My turnip. I’d hugged and polished that damned vegetable Imagined roasting it, braising it, mashing it, gnawing it, pulping it and BARGAINING WITH IT. But not carefully enough. Evidently. Well: you learn

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At least you learn What it was you couldn’t stop. TWO: (Musical stroke) The boats that left last night Are wrecked upon the sea. (A surprising knell) They say that when you kill a man You take away Everything he has And Everything he will ever have But is that true? What happens to his stories What happens to his memories Can he take them anywhere with him? Or can he only leave them in the custody of other people? But they can only tell their versions So he loses possession. THREE: Hope is the killer Not true what they say Know yourself Know the enemy And know that fear is the one true enemy. Before fear, there’s hope If you hope to win, you fear to lose. You’re mesmerised by the prospect of Yourself Transfigured So preciously You can’t bear not to feel it You panic at your damage In the anticipated loss And so you lose it. Better to say Better to know ‘Nothing can ever make me that different’

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Then you might just surprise others, and yourself, For a while. (Chasm of sound) What did the sea want? What did it hope for? Why does it want our time When it has so much? (An attempted rhythm) Here I go Talking to the cliffs When they’ve seen and heard it all before (Sound of Neurotic Surge) NOT ALL OF IT NO THIS MAN WAS DIFFERENT THIS MAN MIGHT HAVE BEEN DIFFERENT I COULD HAVE MADE THIS MAN DIFFERENT THIS MAN WOULD HAVE BEEN DIFFERENT WITH ME FOUR: (Sound: taunting, metronymic) Serves me right Can you imagine Being fascinated by a man who piles up fish? For a LIVING? Nearly lost it there. I’m still alive. So the choices are limitless Apparently. Now the next trick Is to find something to do To keep me alive Till in the morning. That Surprising Light

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Antoinette Walsh as Elisheba in the Aberystwyth production (photo: Keith Morris).

Which prompts Dull repetition. Admire the cliffs. (The sound stretches outwards) The savagery in the rock The elevation The beauty which grows from being eaten away By an even more powerful element. Do they negotiate With the sea About what it takes? Have the cliffs and the sea arrived at A contract? Each to go only so far For the moment? Enthralled but defiant In the urge to submit. No, that’s an excuse.

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FIVE: I will curse the sea Its suspension of what life requires And I will curse the land Starting with that Round here (chattering rhythm) So full of people who justify themselves Not by what they’ve accomplished But by what they maintain. (Sound of the imagination arrested and provoked) When I met him I saw he had potential But he hadn’t thought it through. That’s what made him irritating And adorable. I wanted to force him to develop. IN MY STUPIDITY IN MY SUSCEPTIBILITY To his weakness I compounded my own ‘Let’s scurry off And find a hut And be self-defeating Together Hallelujah’. SIX: But we had lost our wariness Drawn into the headlong rush In some daft blindgrinning hurtle Which even I Decided Not to resist. Disconnecting for a while From my terrible judgement. Opting to alter my own reflection In trial by fire. Now landing up With trial by water.

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If everyone knew when they were going to die They’d make a much better job of Everything. They’d know what was important Outside of time. If the day of death Could be branded on the brow of every babe Then we’d know What to do With whom When to How to But that’s what makes us human Our ignorance SO WHO WANTS TO BE HUMAN Not me. SEVEN: HE WAS THE ONE MAN (The sound reaches for form) Whose smiles were like kisses Whose kisses were like wounds Flowering open in my sense of Possibility. The only one who (Sound begins a sexual duet) Forced me To consider And reflect upon What part of my body I would most Or FIRST Like kissed Caressed Or Licked Until I was driven To offer him My nakedness To invite his gaze To welcome his touch

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And say Let’s make our furthest reach into Each other. (The sound revoked) The trap The drivel The delusion Of destiny The hope Of an ending With another. Forgetting the last ditch when We all have to make the final crossing alone. EIGHT: (New sonic initiative) I’m beyond denial. I’m beyond acceptance. I’m fighting back. I refuse the pity The women of the village will have for themselves And Disgustingly For me. I’ll tell them: Severance seeks out Those strong enough to take it. Look at me: None stronger. But they will wail As if their unravelling of their pain Might flatter the vanity Of some power Some man or sea or god Which would claim their allegiance In exchange for relief. I spurn relief. I slip allegiance. What I feel is not grief but DISAPPOINTMENT At the predictability of it all Which I should have foreseen

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But now Discover How To. NINE: (A desolation) So, Right, then What detail did I miss? What failed to alert me? (Sound of a strange and terrible intimation) The previous night Out on the strand The early glow of Winter’s lights Pinpricks in the dark Stone shells for shivering lanterns Some never to be lit up again. Past them, the headland Yawning like a reptile Basking in blood In casual conspiracy Lulled adversity So fatally listless As to let something in YES (Sound of a ghastly revelation) I SENSED HER I SAW HER I REMEMBER HER White hands like scorpions Scuttling on a rock Then heaving up her head Bruising the sky Hair like a bush of wire shivered in the wind But her eyes didn’t move They were staring things empty And now I recall thinking how When people draw the curtains of their homes She’s what they want to keep out

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THE CONTRACTING SEA |

But they only manage it Because she lets them. (The sound evokes a suspended jeopardy) Abiding Letting things ripen Extending the time Before she pounces and plucks it. Ignorant land Letting her in Yes It wasn’t me It wasn’t his fault It wasn’t the boat She was the sea’s bargain with the cliffs And she looked back This staring havoc (The sound of Her look) And saw into me And that is why I HAVE TO WARN THE OTHERS SOMETHING IS LET LOOSE (But it is as if she runs into an invisible wall. The sound descends and strikes her like a lightning bolt.) TEN (Throughout this section, she develops a redramatisation of her face, clothes and body; at one point, she removes the scarf which has previously held in her hair. The Sound hereafter reflects the dialogue of her riven self, as she discovers a new voice in her; that of MORGANA:)

Too late I’m here inside you All along Waiting for you to let me in Well you did ask Not to be human any more WHAT ARE YOU?

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Don’t worry I don’t bite No, that’s a lie I’M THE SEA I draw back Even as I Crash forward. WHAT ARE YOU SAYING? I’m the freedom That scares you And them I tell wives What their husbands think of When they bring themselves off It’s me I tell men C’mon Let’s pretend this is REAL And I’ll be your UNDOING Men so deeply yearn to be undone It explains everything they do WHAT DO YOU MEAN? Their deepest obedience Is to their own disintegration Though they value themselves And each other By how hard they fight To ignore and forget it So easily led To trip up on their vanity Is this some joke? Don’t make me LAUGH

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And the women are worse For investing the men And the children And the land And the sea With all their FILTHY HOPES. Hopes of their own power Reflected As if the land As if the sea ELEVEN: So is that What you are trying To show me How I am the men’s Loss I am the women’s Loss I am my own Loss (She smiles terribly) Oh yes, and When you find you cannot swallow Your loss You can become it instead You can wear it like jewellery Or an enticing garment Which inflames Begs and Screams To be taken off Except that I’m Inside out WHAT YOU SEE IS Can’t wash me away I’m what lurks beyond The lies you tell yourself

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Antoinette Walsh as Morgana in the Wales Millennium Centre production (photo: Rick Gough).

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And I can smile at people as I tell them ‘I’ll be the death of you But I’m the best cause in which You could ever die’ (A spasm) I can’t let go of this life I mustn’t let my self die To let you in Until I have (MORGANA reasserts dominance:) What, dearie? ‘Lived happily ever after’? Is that the best you can do? Then give yourself a rest And let me in completely. We all swim amongst the driftwood Women should know this Because men work To tell themselves they don’t. Don’t you remember That Army Captain Who lived at the North Wind Wall He’d trudged through shattered house, tree and bone Traded in hate Assessed the weight of damage Judiciously And taken his fair wage For breaking and being broken in his turn. More honest than a merchant In his terms of competition He weighed cost against advance In all the ways You can make a man burst into rubbish With surprising ease. Then, do you remember how One day He found his medals weren’t enough, Resolved to marry: Went to a nearby farmer Who had three simple girls, penned up. The Captain’s tastes weren’t complicated, or refined.

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He’d view them each in turn And drive a bargain. But what he saw astounded him: The uncoiled length of hatred In which that man had Chained the girls Their scratched walls and faces Familiar defilements Routine of pain Appalled him speechless. He killed the farmer and the girls And then himself He’d seen enough He who had calibrated desecration to professional degree And proper dignity of all involved Had lost his faith In the balance of all things. TWELVE: And what do you know of all things? There are those who already know That the promise of balance Is as hollow as the promise of everything else. You damnable people You’re so full of your selves. (The voice of ELISHEBA struggles to resurface:) Not full No There’s a gap There’s a pit It’s his shape It’s where he was yesterday And isn’t today (MORGANA pushes her back down:) Stop being so blasted INCONSEQUENTIAL You blather on as if Things ended Or stopped happening Listen:

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Observe the sea Its restlessness Its separation of its self Its separation of everything alive And dead Its undertakings Its transactions Its contractions What do you think life is, MONEY? It doesn’t grow if you bank it up And try to Manage it Let me tell you What do you think love is, TREASURE? Gloating in solitude over Your smugly hoarded injuries? Spend it wildly And furiously In defiance of death That’s what death teaches us: How we have to defy it Surprisingly. Bereavement rips your skin off I know You writhe at the touch of the air around you But then With criminal rapidity It wakens A flayed desperation To wrap another round yourself Inviting the deeper scorch of their touch To plug but also probe the wound You’ll yearn to vault that yawning ache inside And you’ll demand more life To taste and touch Inside your mouth, between your fingers, Insisting that decorum is the only sin Its sour restriction to a living grave Look at that sea It persists Appallingly

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Insultingly And unforgivably And so must you THIRTEEN: (ELISHEBA fights once more for air, before a third and final descent:) NO I will spit My dying bile At the insulting Poverty Of a single Lifetime The demeaning Demands Of its Protection (MORGANA fights back) Unfix your grip For your own sake, My dear. You clutch at the weight Of your ‘lifetime’: Something inevitably shaped To sink. Release what’s past Or it’ll pull you under. And now follow my voice Into my lifeboat A bewildering slippage into Freezing discovery Don’t reduce time By dividing it into lives Time must be sculpted More slyly Just as you carve a lover’s Pleasure With your tongue Those who seek oblivion Can have it

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THE CONTRACTING SEA |

Antoinette Walsh as Morgana in the Dublin production (photo: Rick Gough).

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But you You’ve unleashed my voice Inside you Heresy Of persistence Unforgivable Dreamtongue Wanting Inviting and Taking More You’ll cultivate the ordeals of a sleepless night Like pearls in an oyster Restless fever compressed into diamonds To score the surface Of banal separations FOURTEEN: (She stands; then discovers ELISHEBA’s voice again: but with an estranged acceptance and new self-assurance:) Yes And I’ll suggest To those who’ll listen And to those who won’t How they might Run several lives In parallel At once Like a race In which you’ve Bet on Every Horse How they might Stop making Time into Loss Sandwiched between Longings The taste of Inevitable Disappointment

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The communion wafer Of Death. Instead: Watch how the carpenter planes the grain of wood Tumbling Shaven Waves Away To build a boat That’s fit To breast The sea Daunting opposition With its pride in beauty The only true safety is Death Don’t invest your life in that When You Can Expose yourself To the most delicious peril Wherever you find him And whenever you glimpse him In another’s eyes. The surprising glory Of your own wreckage On another’s rocks Exploding flame in water I will Observe the sea Its drawing in Its drawing together Its lessening Its enlarging Its betrothal of opposites (A wicked smile) Its cheerful sickness in addiction? Its Persistent

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Final Bid I can I will Learn to emulate THAT I am the sea Let flame explode In water And Dance Up The dawn (Sound of a music, without resolution. She begins a strange dance. Lights fade on her, slowly. The music continues. House lights up. Performer bows. Music ends. Musician bows.)

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THE HANGING JUDGE David Ian Rabey

Wrth rewi tân dreigiau’r dyfodol Gyda beichiogrwyrdd afiach, Cwmwl yw’r teimlad Ond mae glaw y bwerus Yn boddi dagrau’r Tystiolaeth: Plant!… Brathiadau o’r gorffennol Yn torri drwy’r creithiau, A thithau’n dy fedd cysurus yn pydru… – ‘Iddo Fe’, Isabel Morgana Rabey Yet the live quarry all the same Were changed to huntsmen in the game, And the wild furies of the past Tracked to their origins at last. – ‘New Year Letter’, W. H. Auden For RPL

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Roger Owen as Fury in the Wales Millennium Centre production (photo: Rick Gough).

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(Music: either the first two minutes of Solomon Burke’s ‘The Judgement’, from the CD Don’t Give Up On Me; or alternatively the opening of Pigmeat Markham’s recording, ‘Here Come the Judge’. A rope hangs. It occupies light. It drops into a pit, which may be full of soil, but is certainly dark. FURY enters. He eyes up the rope, and chants, in the rhythm, and initially in the vocal manner, of Pigmeat Markham’s ‘Here Come the Judge’.) FURY: You are the Judge You are the Judge Everybody knows that You are the Judge You are the Judge You are the Judge Everybody knows that You are the Judge (Then in his own voice:) You are the Judge You are the Judge Everybody knows that You are the Judge (He resolves upon another initiative. He begins to recite Lewis Carroll’s poem from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland:) ‘Fury said to a mouse, That he met in the house, “Let us both go to law: I will prosecute you. – Come, I’ll take no denial: We must have the trial For really this morning I’ve nothing to do’ I have nothing to do I have nothing To do With you Any more Except this:

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‘Said the mouse to the cur, “Such a trial, dear Sir, With no jury Or judge Would be wasting Our breath”’ Wasting our breath Wasting our breath Yours and mine and All the others My others. My mother. Dragged backwards Through the house By the hair By others Who taught me how to turn tricks For them When she was blind drunk. She’d tell me: ‘Sort out the other kids for us, and let’s get to bed’ But when she falls asleep You stay down for a while; Down with the men For a bit of a chat ‘Cos you want them to like you Some form of attachment But you know what they’re there for. I learnt how to enjoy being looked at And how to make them enjoy being looked at And how to move From the look to the touch. And what would she have said If she admitted she knew? ‘I’m sorry you’re hurtin’, But so the fuck am I’. There were so many My Mam sought them out With her blind drunken radar For stumbling trickery To find out who’s gonna fit the bill

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THE HANGING JUDGE |

Roger Owen as Fury in the Wales Millennium Centre production (photo: Rick Gough).

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Is it Boyfriend Two or Boyfriend Four? After the formalities You were the men in the house Together. Then they all merge Together: One big faceless grub. So now am I sentenced To do what she did? Then You came along You had your others You said you hadn’t But I knew you did The boys in whom you glimpsed You were good Your power to distinguish Your precision Your encouragement Your sense of calling Your impossible integrity You chose disciples Carefully selected For development of all their Possibilities All My Possibilities Right now I want to kill my girlfriend Get pissed for twenty years Come back And cry for another twenty Your judgment on me I WANT MY COCK BACK You took it into your mouth You weren’t the first But you made it feel like a blessing Not a bargain

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You performed it well I miss it And I miss you I WANT YOUR COCK BACK To feel your arousal Up inside me My power as well as yours ‘“I’ll be judge. I’ll be jury.” Said cunning old Fury: “I’ll try The whole cause And Condemn You To Death.”’ You were both judge and jury You took away my freedom To set the limits As love always does So, then I’ve no limits Thank you And damn you Taking away freedom? Two can play at that game They usually do You’ve made me what I am What made you what you were? Powerful Decisive And Enveloping Offering to be everything And be There For Me If I’d be There For You But you’re out of reach Now (FURY discovers a voice inside him, that of the JUDGE. It is a form of possession.)

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Not out of reach Always inside you Right up inside you For ever more EVER MORE? You needed me I saw it in your eyes Don’t try to deny it I didn’t know what I wanted Do you know now? You never do You never will But I showed you What you want Thank you And Damn you I was never cruel Just strictly precise I was teaching you I taught you The best things I knew Do you remember Me teaching you How to MAKE PIZZA? And how you made me watch you do it Over and over again Do you remember Me teaching you How to Play SQUASH? Until I started to win

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We enjoyed music together You played Cor Meibion Llanelli And Dafydd Iwan at me Until I began to wonder if you liked anyone Who was actually alive I bought you presents Clarks shoes and flake bars And I still loved you I’d come to be grateful For what I’d found out And I wanted to teach you So you’d come to be grateful For what you were taught I do I come to be grateful To you That’s the blessingcurse You’ve laid upon me And now I have to scrape it off If it takes My skin and all Because I need to find Another way (The swelling up of distorted Welsh voice choir music.) There is no other way For you You’re like me You always will be You must learn to be grateful Again and again

IF YOU’RE SO FUCKING GRATEFUL WHY AREN’T YOU HERE?

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I’m out of your reach Because of you You tried to stop me From teaching The others I found; Didn’t you realise The GOOD I could do For other people? You of all people I builded you up So that you would work well But you just didn’t want to The very best teaching For master and pupil Is the search without end And you just want to stop No, I don’t want to stop Don’t imply that I should (The music drops out) I OBJECT Objection overruled You wanted me to stop So you made me stop Are you happy now? I know you’re not. You left me no choice But You’re the one who Should have STOPPED (The voice of the JUDGE brings FURY to a contemplation of the pit.) Why don’t you try it? NO It’s strangely easy Once you jump Your face fights free

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Tongue and eyes push life out Till they scare it away And it leaves you a mask Which the one who discovers you Never forgets And the ones who don’t see you Go mad to imagine You control what they see And you have the last laugh Or two Or three Forever and Ever So you knew what you did In that act You inflicted Your unforgivable mask On those who were left You wanted to be unforgivable Oh let me tell you How you damn well managed it I’ll admit this I’ll never be free of you

Gareth Potter as Fury in the Aberystwyth production (photo: Keith Morris).

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I’ll never get over you But YOU DIDN’T GIVE ME LIFE NOT EVEN MY MOTHER GAVE ME LIFE EXCEPT FOR LIFE LIKE YOURS And any other sort of life YOU TRIED TO TAKE AWAY TO MAKE ME IN YOUR IMAGE You’re still doing it now But I can dig down And hack out a tunnel And wear through the rockface With fingers and spit I’ve nothing to do For the rest of my life Except try to get some CONTROL OF TIME You won’t get that CONTROL OF TIME? No one can or ever does Did you never learn? THEN I’LL FIND OUT THE TRUTH AND I’LL KNOW WHAT I AM IF I CAN’T DO THAT I CAN’T SEE ANY FUTURE WITH ANY DAMNED WOMAN OR ANY DAMNED MAN I appeal to you Your Honour I know I do And I lodge plea of intent To conduct my own defence And my own prosecution In contempt of your court You’ve gone mad in a way That is almost pathetic For you can prove nothing. Now I have made certain I am out of your reach Ah, BUT: What cannot be proven Can still be true

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I say there are limits To your jurisdiction Now you’ve “stepped Over the line”; I’ll be judge I’ll be jury You’re the Mouse I’m the Fury Now the rules We shall play by Are mine. (N.B. FURY’s incantations never come out pat. He racks himself to work them out in the moment, and is sometimes shocked by the consequences of formulation that their rhythm dictates, with apparent inevitability. They oscillate between soliloquies of discovery and voodoo chantings.) I’ve been scared of my rage And my guilt and my age And my urge to cause pain in another Now the court is in session It can hear my confession And I call, as a witness, My mother Who taught me: To be hurt And held down by the shirt Was still less to be feared Than rejection We were desperately used Pain for safety confused As we neither were Worth The protection And what are you worth now? You can’t win love By ranting, you know Any more than By silence. (Long Pause. This utterance plummets into FURY, in its full soundings.) So, then. You never really loved me. So I’ve nothing to fear

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Or to hope for From you. We propped up the whole sham You AND me AND my Mam Hid our fears by inflicting another But compliance and threat, Like the laugh, like the debt, Can’t entirely deny what they smother And this is how you show your gratitude I MADE YOU WHAT YOU ARE Oh yes Oh yes you made me what I am But you won’t make me What I will change into All the silence and shame And concealing the blame Was how three of us tried to belong But your lies just aren’t working ‘Cause I AM STILL HERE LURKING And I’m part of what proves you were wrong I’m out of your reach now We’ll see about that (A further of the Welsh choir music – distorted and distorting – associated with the voice of the JUDGE. FURY spits into and rubs his hands; he starts up a rhythm to shut it out and counter it.) If I blame my mother and I blame my dad They’ll just blame their mother and blame their dad If I understand you then I might forgive If I look for reasons then I’ll let you live And you dare to tell me that you know me well Stacking up your solitudes to build my cell Then you weave your weaknesses to plait my noose But I’ve something left in me to still turn loose ‘Cause it’s not enough for me to still be here I have to cut myself apart from all your fear Understanding harbours a forgiveness truce What I want to tell you shatters all excuse

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THE HANGING JUDGE |

Roger Owen as Fury in the Wales Millennium Centre production (photo: Rick Gough).

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WHEN MY BODY’S LIKE A COFFIN YOU’RE THE CENTRE OF MY MALICE SPIT YOU OUT OF ALL MY WHISPERS AND PREPARE THIS POISON CHALICE I’ll be judge I’ll be jury You’re the mouse I’m the Fury I’ll try the whole cause And Condemn You… (The unspoken words ‘To Death’ hang in the air) I AM THE JUDGE I AM THE JUDGE EVERYBODY KNOW THAT I AM THE JUDGE I AM THE JUDGE I AM THE JUDGE EVERYBODY KNOW THAT I AM THE JUDGE I AM THE JUDGE I AM THE JUDGE EVERYBODY KNOW THAT I AM THE JUDGE And I walk through the fire And I fly through the smoke And I see my enemy At The End Of His (FURY grasps the rope decisively, and pulls it down. It drops into the pit.) Hope (FURY steps away from the pit. He walks out of the space. Blackout. House lights up for curtain call.)

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SHATTERING ALL EXCUSE: A PERFORMER’S PERSPECTIVE ON THE HANGING JUDGE Roger Owen

I sat at the back of the stage, at the base of the scaffolding set, facing away from the audience as they arrived. Dreading it. Waiting for Sound Cue #1, Pigmeat Markham: ‘Hear ye, Hear ye, This Court is now in session…’ Never-long-enough time of murmuring and shuffling as seats were chosen and settled into. Almost silence. And then, the driving 1970s rhythm ‘n’ blues beat, powering Markham’s rap: ‘Hear ye / Hear ye / The Court of Swing / Is just about ready to do their thing / I don’t want no secrets, don’t want no lies / I don’t wanna hear no alibis…’ No alibis. Get up. Go. At my point of entry into The Hanging Judge, I tried not to foresee what might be about to occur, tried to forget what I had to do. As far as possible, I wanted to let the piece work on me, in order to get the taste of each moment in full when they came round. But I was always uneasy. About faking it, missing the beat of the text, falling down the stairs, failing to make sense of it for the audience. For a play about the futile torment of self-interrogation, I was miles ahead. But, in some ways, this was all within the ambit of The Hanging Judge itself. Rabey talked about the way in which it occurred to him not as a play, but as a voice, which challenged him darkly to write it: here I was, trying to find that voice which demanded to be spoken. Trying not to let the voice become settled into representation, but to make it rattle through me as it emerged. Though The Hanging Judge was a new work, I was not first to play the role of Fury. It had been initially performed, albeit in closed workshop only, by the individual for whom the play was originally conceived and written; thereafter, it had been publicly performed for the first time by a close colleague and formerly fellow pupil of this individual. Both had attended the school at which John Owen – ostensibly the model for the Judge – had taught, and both had been taught by him: I had not. Accordingly, although the power of the play seduced me into taking the role when offered, I felt a certain unease about dissipating that power – even of causing offence –

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by my ‘inauthenticity’ as a performer. One of my abiding memories of the first stage version was the sense of danger created by the performer’s real rage at the Judge’s oppression, a rage which melted the fictional division between stage and audience, and which projected the play out of its dramatic proposition and into our world. This was not a projection which I could achieve, and the last thing I wanted to do was to pretend that I could. So my take on Fury had to be radically different; significantly more inflected into character. I wasn’t sure at first whether this would be an appropriate way to treat the material, but, if the play had any power or merit at all – and I knew that it had – then it was surely worth trusting in it. Of course, I wasn’t entirely devoid of personal reference points for Fury. My own personal friendships with former pupils of John Owen notwithstanding, the central focus of The Hanging Judge was on the power relationships at play in education, love and sexual relationships, and its performance reconstituted the disastrous conflation of the three. The notion of education – more specifically, the performance of teaching – is regularly imbued with a sexual aspect. ‘Teaching’ is often a direct metaphor for sex in the corrupted parlance of the Judge: the ‘very best’ processes of teaching ‘for both master and pupil’ – ‘the search without end’ – is thus not only an expression of a shared experience, but also the manifestation of a potentially predatory sexual drive, the slaking of which cannot or will not be imagined this side of its satisfaction. Having worked as a lecturer for more than a decade, I could not deny that this equation of questing educationalism with sexual urges had obvious and troubling resonance. I was also aware of a kind of parallel sense of the power relationship between Fury and the Judge in my own psychological relationship with Rabey as a director. There was, needless to say, nothing inappropriate here: but the trust which I, sometimes grudgingly, afforded him, his status as auteur in relation to this piece and his previous reputation (in my mind) for ‘directness’ in the face of thespian moral weakness, made for a pervasive underlying tension. In the event, he was extremely patient, respectful of the vagaries of what could laughably be called ‘my process’ and tactful – without being indirect – when it came to criticism (and yes, I have accepted his editorial adjustments to this extract). But twenty years of being occasionally directed by David had left their mark: throughout rehearsal, I always carried the irrational fear that I was going to be attacked for being a bad person just because I misplaced a comma, or couldn’t emote a semi-colon. In that sense, imagining Rabey as Judge became a way in to this material. Fury said to a Mouse / That he met in the House / Let us both go to Law / I will prosecute you… Spoken as if arising unbidden into Fury’s imagination, these lines were the other, and most literal, way in to the material. They were taken from chapter 3 of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, and are related by the Mouse to Alice (who, as the text notes, is ‘not attending’). Fury’s assimilation of this passage has many of the qualities of the original, therefore: it is largely an ‘involuntary’ text, and is delivered as if overheard by one who may well be preoccupied. The quality of the listening is heightened but randomised; and in performance, I couldn’t achieve the desired effect of spontaneous subconscious digression without first stopping everything and listening to the words. Alice also mirrors The Hanging Judge in that it has been criticised as a work which celebrates the implicit manipulation of a child by a hungrily curious narrative agent.

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In psychological terms, Alice has been described as an exploitative ‘journey without end’ in which the subject of the narrative is entirely passive and which ends with the deflationary denial of authorial control: ‘Wake up, Alice dear…Why, what a long sleep you’ve had’. In Fury’s case, the same is true, at least up to a point. The Judge’s voice attempts to suggest to him that his feelings of worthlessness, fear and grief are entirely prescribed, and that his suicide will also fulfil the rightful demands of the life narrative which none but the Judge can identify. It is from this sense of the Judge as author that Fury attempts to break free in the second half of the play. However, it would be untrue to suggest that Fury isn’t also complicit in the act of authorship. Unlike Alice, he is certainly not passive. His struggle against the Judge takes place within his own body, manifested as a series of possessions which are instigated by Fury himself via the word association device which snakes a trail through some of the debris and detritus of his past life. His physical invasion by the Judge, itself a powerful evocation of the experience of molestation, constitutes an acceptance of the distressing fact that this is the only kind of encounter which he and the Judge can understand. This terrain of mutually self-destructive physical (and vocal) invasion and occupation is the only ground upon which they can meet. But what is this meeting? Who meets what? This was where my disposition towards this role had to differ radically from those who had played it before me. Their searing and real anger as performers who really had been there, and done that, gave theatrical substance to their interpretations. Their retribution against the Judge could not be contained within defined codes of representation: it was cathartic, a very private public reckoning. The only advantage which my distance from such events could give me (apart from a life free of such trauma) was the capacity to take a more ambivalent view of Fury’s relationship with the Judge than my predecessors. I understood the Judge as a neurosis, a kind of metamorphic virus within Fury’s memory and imagination, whose destruction at the end of the play did not present the closure of the issue. He was summoned by Fury’s continuing passion for him, latent in all his knowledge of physical pleasure and artistic stimulation, and would thus be ready to return throughout Fury’s life. This was not to be a utilitarian demonstration of ‘how to excise a phantom’, then: no answers were going to be offered here, and no helpline number given out at the end. Accordingly, the way in which the Judge was presented vocally and physically would be crucial in order to try and suggest the pervasive relationship between him and Fury. I represented the Judge’s voice as a stage whisper, which, while rather conventional in its suggestion of a malign and intimate presence, also possessed the same essential characteristics as Fury’s own voice. It was also, and importantly for me, substantially different from the previous performer’s fullthroated, roaring evocation of the Judge’s voice: this voice, whilst again superficially conventional in its representation of the Judge as a monster, had powerfully transcended its inherent simplicity and released that Artaudian terror which one only feels in the theatre when one sees a performer making a sudden, deeply affecting and previously unimaginable emotional investment in the abjectly preposterous. I was transfixed by it; but it also suggested that the Judge and Fury were not one and the same, were readily separable, and that, once defeated at the end of the play, the Judge would disappear for ever. It did not accord with my interpretation of the Judge, and with that which I felt capable of producing on stage. Similarly, I tried to present the Judge as a physical variation on Fury’s own body, rather than a

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departure from it. The Judge’s first line was delivered arced backwards off the scaffolding set, my head inverted in an initial physical gesture of possession which, it was hoped, would carry the same suggestion throughout. The audience’s first – and hopefully, guiding – image of the Judge was as Fury, inverted. This gesture could not, of course, be repeated consistently throughout (the frequency of the shifts from Fury to Judge would have made this tedious in the extreme), but it was reiterated at certain moments – when, for example, Fury begins to gain the momentum and moral courage required to deny the Judge’s authority and begin the process leading to his erasure: ‘I have nothing to do / Except try to get / control of Time / You won’t get that / Control of Time? / No one can / Or ever will / Did I teach you nothing?’ The only physical gesture which was used consistently to distinguish Fury from the Judge was the closing of my eyes, which, again, suggested the physical proximity of Fury and Judge, and which also implied the Judge as an internal, imagined and memorised, aspect of Fury himself. In all this, the power of the piece accrued from the audience’s capacity to make up the deficit between the Judge’s largely benign – occasionally even comic (‘I taught you / how to make / Pizza…’) – presence and his monstrous effect on Fury’s imagination. As such, the Judge did not and could never exist in a single dimension in this play – the very contemplation of what the Judge might be made the audience complicit in the action. Imagining the Judge, for both Fury and the audience, always meant conceiving of a figure that did not respect boundaries. Just as the Judge threatens to overwhelm Fury, I felt that The Hanging Judge as a play constantly threatened to devastate the audience’s belief in the work of the performer, by creating a powerful disequilibrium in his stage presence, overstressing the plasticity of the theatre event. The feeling of vocalising and imaging the experience of abuse, so commonly celebrated as and reduced to silence in media discourse, was redolent of the presence of the Judge, who questions the subject’s right to speak, who consistently describes the subject as a product of his teaching. So, as performer of The Hanging Judge, I had to live with the uncertainty of playing a role which decorum might – in its own inimitably ‘judicious’ fashion – regard as overarticulated. This was a fact which came back to me some time after having performed the role, when I was given a video copy of the show. This was a disquieting experience, but one which reinforced the power of the play’s proposition of a malign presence, highly adaptable, and fundamentally theatrical, infecting the subject. As a performer, I had been consumed by the process of creating Fury, trying to devise a viable stage action for his almost wholly internalised conflict with the Judge. Accordingly, I’d taken it on trust that what I’d been doing with the text, with my voice, my hands, my spine, and so on was actually creating a sense of dramatic continuity and a theatrical rationale for the whole endeavour. But I’d never seen any of it for myself. Looking at the video of the final performance, I was surprised to see that there was often no correlation between what I thought I had produced and that which was in fact happening. Rather than the somatic puppet show I had been expecting, this was like looking at – and listening to – a stranger, whose manner of physical movement and gesturing barely correlated with what I thought I was doing on stage. I simply couldn’t feel in my body all the things ‘he’ was doing on screen. Like many other members of the audience, quite possibly, I was looking at the action and trying to sense what it must be like to inhabit that body on stage. But the alienation didn’t stop there. I also felt whilst looking at the Hanging Judge video that I

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had misjudged – or rather mis-sensed – the most basic theatrical device in the piece, that of Fury’s transformation into the Judge and back again. As a performer, I had imagined, and had wanted, the transformations to affect the audience as if they were actually happening: but what I saw on the video weren’t transformations in that literal or physical sense, rather they were rhetorical transformations. The action proposed the idea of transformation: it didn’t require the audience to believe that Fury had been taken over by something else. Rather, there was a definite sense that Fury himself was creating the demon he wished to slay, but that, once created, the thing had a will of its own. In that sense, the Judge was not so much a presence as a possibility. Although summoned from within the bounds of rhetoric, he could not necessarily be restrained. The fact that he was demotic rather than demonic didn’t matter; he was free, and feeding. Any possible site of weakness, such as my (disappointed) Narcissistic view of myself as both subject and object, produced a conflict in which, troublingly, the Judge himself was an implicit presence. After all, the Judge’s success in seducing Fury arises partly from Fury’s own alienation and self-loathing, and partly from his sense of the Judge as a kindred spirit, poised between self-fulfilment and self-destruction. The plasticity of the stage, then, wasn’t confined merely to a conflation of figures – the actor’s for the Judge’s; it produced a conflation of modes – rhetorical suggestions for active possibility. Like Fury, the audience were invited to be witnesses to an event which, at any point, they could stop seeing. His and their sense of ‘real’ visual world was troubled by images and associations in the imagination which could fundamentally displace the sight before them: looking outwards was always to be accompanied by looking inwards. The theatrical point of focus would never still. Conversely, the camera, and the Judge, could never fail, nor forget, to look. As I’ve noted so far, I felt caught between two sets of perspectives and (pre)conceptions about the action: firstly, my own as a performer, by means of which I arrived at a performance of the role at all; and secondly, my own as an audience member, watching an apparent stranger (of whose identity I had to remind myself constantly during the video). These two perspectives confounded each other to a certain extent, and, more importantly, they felt like a full account of the performance from my point of view. But, of course, they were not. Another experience interceded between them – my experience of seeing the action from what I imagined to be the common viewpoint, that of the uninitiated audience member seeing the action for the first (and probably the only) time. Again, this was a fiction on my part: there was no such thing as ‘what the audience saw’ except in the most fractured, subjective and thence ‘plasticised’ way. However, as a performer and viewer, I could not help but create for myself the phantom of the audience’s response, constructed empirically, ideologically, psychologically. In other words, I could not help but to construct the work, and my performance in it, as more real through the eyes of an invisible, and in some senses, impossible, interlocutor – the Judge, again – than it was through my own. Even when watching the document of performance, then, Fury’s repeated line at the end of the play, as he prepares to dispatch his enemy – ‘I am the Judge / I am the Judge / Everybody know that / I am the Judge’ – speaks across boundaries of time, space and mediation. The Judge could always present himself anew, and in multiple form: in my dramatic character’s attempt to prevent the undermining of his own presence through the agency of a malign, albeit

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intensely seductive, force; through that force’s influence as an insistent and persuasive presence in the mind of the audience; and, finally, through the fracture of my own presence as a performer, wherein I was challenged to present these antithetical ‘personages’ to their furthest degree, while maintaining whatever integrity I could muster in each moment on stage. As such, I can only thank David for allowing me to have a shot at this brilliantly intense and multilayered piece of theatre. Roger Owen is Lecturer in Theatre and Performance Studies at Aberystwyth University. He has worked as a performer with Brith Gof and Eddie Ladd. He is a nucleus member of Lurking Truth Theatre Company / Cwmni’r Gwir Sy’n Llechu and has collaborated over a number of years with David Ian Rabey on such productions as Victory: Choices in Reaction, The Castle and The Early Hours of a Reviled Man by Howard Barker, The Sons of Light by David Rudkin, That Slidey Dark by Nigel Wells, and played the role of Edgar in Rabey’s The Back of Beyond.

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BITE OR SUCK David Ian Rabey

The princes of Mercia were badger and raven. Thrall to their freedom, I dug and hoarded. Orchards fruited above clefts. I drank from honeycombs of chill sandstone. ‘A boy at odds in the house, lonely among brothers.’ But I, who had none, fostered a strangeness: gave myself to unattainable toys. – Geoffrey Hill, ‘Mercian Hymns’ I’ll hurt you till you need me – Richard Thompson, ‘Calvary Cross’ To Ryan Jack Rabey, wishing him good luck in this sort of thing. Bite or Suck was first performed by Lurking Truth/Gwir sy’n Llechu Theatre Company at Machynlleth Tabernacle on 29 August 1997, with the following cast: Jade ..........................................................................................Claire Houlding Badger ......................................................................................David Ian Rabey It then ran 21–24 September 1997 at Theatr y Castell, Aberystwyth, with the following cast change: Jade ..........................................................................................Sally Bartholomew-Biggs Director ....................................................................................Andy Cornforth Designer....................................................................................Rhodri Rhys Deputy Stage Manager ..........................................................Chris Howells Sound Operator ......................................................................Gary Owen Lighting Assistant ......................................................................Naomi Jalil Set Construction ......................................................................Howie Wright, Gary, Rhodri, Andy

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Scenography: the set was a simple plinth, a raked wooden wedge to elevate the performers, and scaffolding bars arranged in the form of a large ‘H’ at the back. The performers were able to lean and climb on, and swing and hang from, these bars. The sound cues in the text record the choices made for this initial production. They are, however, convertible to the frequencies of susequent practitioners. Influential reading: Postmodern Sexualities by William Simon; The Book of Judas by Brendan Kennelly. ONE (Pre-show: Al Green, ‘Tired of Being Alone’) (Performers enter playing space: ‘Surrender’ by Diana Ross begins playing very loud. During this, BADGER unbuttons and throws off his shirt and begins “cutting” his wrists and arms with slashes of black Leichner; and continues savagely over his chest and face. JADE checks out her own posing ability, with grotesque exaggeration: attempting the sexy, intercut with amplified expressions of her own sensed ugliness: the effect should be alternately striking and comically hideous.) B: I looked in the mirror and didn’t like what I saw. So I CUT MYSELF BLACK to let out the shapelessness from under my skin, slicing through the outside, badging myself with the pitch of my dark. Well, every man should have a HOBBY! J: Eyes too big, mouth too tense, nose too long, neck too stooped, tits too small, shoulders too slumped, bum too tight. No, hang on: eyes too MEAN, mouth too slack, nose like a rodent, neck too imperious, tits ballooning, shoulders too rigid, HANDS FLAPPY, hair too scatty, ears that wince, legs which gangle, release that arse and let it bounce. Wait: eyes too HOOVERISH, nose like a Stanley Knife, shoulders sloppy, mad teeth, luminous tongue, brutal cheeks, arched neck simpering for the punch, backward circling shoulders, hey those aren’t tits they’re CONICAL THRUSTINGS, shove ‘em back! Hunched back, concave chest, hair that drags, legs like gardening shears, swivelly feet, hands like jellyfish but INTELLIGENT EYEBROWS. Jumpy knees, whoops, claws for fingers, patrician neck, beckoning throat, biting eyes but a FANNY THAT CAN WINK THROUGH FABRIC, STONE AND METAL. Clipped feet, thirsty lickable wrists, tailored arms, armpits that can drip honey! Cat o’nine tails hair, piercing chin, scouring nipples, serpentine legs, warm velvet haunches, A MIND THAT RINGS LIKE CRYSTAL, a cunt through which I can turn my ENTIRE BODY AND ANY ATTACHMENTS INSIDE OUT AND BACK AGAIN, bellybutton shot with diamond, an arse commanding kisses, arms like a hawk’s, shoulders like bevelled mountains, breasts that burst shirts, hearts and trousers, and a head that speaks REGALITY. THAT’S IT, I THINK I’VE GOT THE FACE ON: NOW I CAN GO TO WORK! B: You’re inside my dark.

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BITE OR SUCK |

J: Yes. I dig things up. And this is where I’ve come to do it. B: I DON’T BELIEVE YOU. J: Try it. (Pause) B: I’ve been out there, where you come from. Loping around. Some parched range. A jangling stretch of spirals over my head. Holding on to something that used to be mine, until I got burgled. Then I couldn’t put anything back. Stopped trying to. Stood watching it, prickling apart. J: So what? B: I’m just counting myself in. J: Count me out. B: I will. (Pause) J: And I remember everything. I wish I couldn’t. So I remember you. Though I’ve never seen you before. Out of my way. B: Why? J: You make the air around my head sore, the way you look out. Through it all. You leave nothing. B: And why should I? (Pause. He laughs.) I could be the one it’s all here for. J: (Out) Another one who thinks he’s in a one-man show. B: Listen: I’ve just had this dream. I’m sentenced to death, for something minor and understandable like inadvertant tax evasion or jumping on a chihuahua, and I’m sentenced to death again for some point of principle, defending someone I know is more vulnerable than me. I have the choice of which death sentence I can submit to: I can be electrocuted or hanged. And it dawns on me how much tidier, easier and more of a relief it would be for everyone who knows me if I did submit to one or the other. And I’ve always associated electrocution with men and hanging with women. (JADE gleefully enacts what he speaks from this point.) So I opt for the hanging. And I’m on the way to the trapdoor, but I can’t decide whether to jump ship and break out of the situation with MAXIMUM PHYSICAL VIOLENCE; or to go along with it, to see if they will, and to refuse a hood so that the executioner and guards have to stare me in the face while I pelt them with the most ferocious harangues and curses I can muster. J: So what do you decide?

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David Ian Rabey as Badger (photo: Keith Morris).

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B: I never find out. I wake up when I’m on the point of deciding what to do. J: Silly twisted boy. B: Possibly.(He mimes being hanged.) J: I think you like to be unhappy. Do you want my help? B: I don’t need it. J: But do you want it? B: First misery: not having what you want. Second misery: having what you want. J: Third misery: people who say things to excuse their own prolonged adolescence and to excite erotic pity in others. B: Fourth misery: people who are so ironic they won’t play. J: Agreed. B: I like to watch what I don’t understand. J: I like to dig it up. B: Sometimes I have to find out if I can think and feel differently to the way I think and feel, or else I can’t think or feel at all. J: The important thing is not what you think or feel, but HOW. B: Who writes your script? You shouldn’t be in here with me. J: But I am. B: And if you are, what else is out there? J: The rest. B: D’you find the reasons other people can stomach you aren’t good enough for you to stomach yourself? J: No. B: Oh. I do. J: D’you think it always has to be like that?

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B: I don’t know. Any more. J: I do. B: What? J: Know how it has to be. B: You must get very bored. By knowing how it has to be. J: No. I find ways of liking it. B: How do you manage that? J: I find ways of liking myself. B: What sort of ‘yourself’ do you want to be? J: I find out when I feel it’s being satisfied. B: But how do you know where to look? J: I see what happens and follow its direction. B: The direction of what? Everything? J: All that I need. B: Or all that you WANT to need? J: It becomes the same thing. B: No it doesn’t. (Pause.) J: You can’t tell. What I can do and what I can’t. B: No. Why should I want to? J: So how do you know? B: What? J: Anything. About me. B: I don’t.

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J: Good. WHAT D’YOU THINK I AM, A ROAD MAP? B: No. That thought never occurred to me. What d’you think I am? J: Someone who thinks of himself as being the centre of his whole world. B: Thanks. Aren’t we all? J: What about other people? B: I watch them, I act, and I see how they respond. J: Snob. B: So you reckon that every body’s the same? J: Oh shut up. I’d rather see what you look like when you can’t speak. B: Or breathe? J: Don’t be so ugly. There’s no need. B: Isn’t there. J: No. We can be grown up. We can be civilized. We can be careful. We can keep a distance. We can hope for the best. We can relax. We can maintain a sense of proportion. We can enjoy ourselves. We can recognize ourselves in others. We can avoid greed and jealousy. We can lighten up. We can preserve our dignity. We can take things one step at a time. We can keep in touch with all our friends. We can discover a beauty in every thing. We can keep things simple. We can slow down. We can stop for a moment. B: No you can’t. You’ve just met me. (Interlude: ‘Tear Your Playhouse Down’ by Graham Parker and The Rumour.) TWO J: So what are you so petulant about? B: I have feelings I don’t know what to do with. J: And you think that makes you special, how naïve. I’d say you’re just trying to get back at your mother about something. Evidently I remind you of her on some level. B: Quite the opposite.

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J: Yes, that’s what men always start by saying. Later on, the differences and the similarities just become other things to throw. B: And you know all about this. J: I do. B: Great. Then what are you so scared of? J: I don’t get scared. I find ways to stay in control. B: What’s so splendid about control? I’d say it can be a fancy name for half-heartedness, blotting out fear by avoiding confrontation. J: What’s so splendid about confrontation? B: It demands courage, to tackle and deal with the fear. And courage is the only splendour. J: According to you. B: It works for me. J: But it leaves you with feelings you don’t know what to do with. B: Good. At least they’re mine, so I won’t refuse them. Have you noticed how no one asks questions to which they don’t already know the answer? J: Is that a rhetorical question? B: It shows how they half-do everything, hate themselves for it, but they persist because it keeps them in control. J: I find self-possession very admirable. B: So do I, if it’s something worth possessing. The way we live makes it difficult to possess anything more than a half-self, which you can hoard and polish up alone, like a little gem. But all you can do with it is pinch it to feel it harder than the skin of your fingertips. They don’t tell you that it begins to crawl in THROUGH the skin, invading the veins, crawling slowly to the heart to shrivel it with the occupational disease of PREDICTABILITY. J: Predictability? B: Yes, predictability. J: I’m not predictable.

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B: Good. Because it’s what helps most people to cling on to the viability of half- heartedness. They build little restraining fences which they label “Happiness”, meaning that anyone who might want to trespass beyond them is dangerous to other people’s peace of mind or some other form of laziness; and then there’s a moat, labelled “Maturity”, meaning obedience in knowing how to refuse everything. They glorify maturity as a skill you cultivate in order to progress along your deadening journey of non-exploration and non-discovery towards the ultimate goal of SUCCESS, which is something you invent to make you enviable and to accept yourself on account of everything you’ve refused. Including your own difference, and everyone else’s. J: I have the feeling you’ve been waiting to say this for some time. I suspect you’ve been rehearsing. B: What if I have? Better than rehearsing the rules of refusal, which make things “SURE”: things like half-feeling, half-thinking, half-speaking – J: Half-listening – B: Half-looking – J: Half-touching – B: Half-giving – J: Half-taking – B: Half-offering – J: Half-accepting – B: Half-loving – J: You talk nonsense. But you’re entertaining. B: What are you? J: I’ll show you. (Interlude: ‘Move Over Darling’ by Doris Day. Yes, it’s the first fuck.) THREE (Unshared reality: BADGER is alone, JADE a visible but “absent presence”.) B: Where’ve you – gone? Stupid question, ‘cos you could only answer it if you were here, and the point of it is to ask you why you’re not. So I’m eased out of the limits of my own shape.

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But I’m then thrown down a shaft, whose sides bristle with razors: whenever I move, or even breathe, I’m cutting myself differently: on the absolute gap of how you’ve broken me away from all the regrets and hopes that I used to bundle together and toss to someone to explain ‘That’s ME’. And the next devastation is that you’re not within my reach, either. C’mon, Badge, get a grip. What you are dealing with here, is a woman you had sex with. And you just don’t know exactly where she’s gone at the moment. This immediately prompts two questions. Number one: what is she off doing that is more important to her than the chance to be having sex with you again, right now even as we speak? Number two: what if she’s off screwing someone else? Is she THAT GOOD AT IT with THEM TOO? Or has she done it MORE OFTEN? Or does she PLAN TO? Now hang on, let’s not start getting POSSESSIVE here. You’ve only just met her, she can do what she likes and no doubt she will and it might not be you, she might prefer someone who is in many ways similar but ultimately SIGNIFICANTLY DIFFERENT. And there’s nothing you can do about that. Well, you could change to be more like them I suppose, NO I mean you could just – do whatever you have to – in order to overtake them in the being fascinating and compulsively irresistible stakes. What if you can’t? We’ll leave that question to one side, for the moment. Don’t forget, it works both ways. For all SHE knows, YOU could be off screwing some other woman. Problem is, you don’t want to. Hey, Badgerboy, failure of imagination or what, she may have trumped the memorybanks but surely you can whip up some vision of hope of who, and how, and where, and in what order, and at what angle – not working, is it? The gaze of your blood is fixed on exploring all the other possibilities you might explore with HER, and you can’t drum up any excitement at the prospect of exploring them with anyone else. This can only mean one thing. DAMNATION. No, come on, look on the bright side. (Pause.) Well, that didn’t take long. NO, REALLY MAKE AN EFFORT, NOW, look, she’s nowhere in sight but you’re MANAGING, aren’t you? I mean, your breathing patterns are – fairly regular, and you’re free to do whatever you want for a while – which is give yourself a good talking to like this, to reassure yourself that even while you are – thinking about her all of the time as you’re doing now – there is still SOME PROCESS OF YOUR OWN WHICH YOU ARE WORKING OUT, or struggling to, or trying to discover, which is after all the first step. So that’s alright, then. Quite normal, in fact. NORMAL, OH GOD, IS IT THAT BAD ALREADY? WHY DON’T I KILL MYSELF RIGHT NOW? Now, stop being MELODRAMATIC!! Look at the other side of the situation, which is (Pause) the really awful one. You find yourself wishing that the most brainblinding soulblistering subjugatingly wonderful intimacy that you’ve ever experienced had never actually occurred. In fact, you curse your eyes and touch and taste for remembering her. Because you can’t see how you’re going to cope with knowing that there is such a transfixing GLORYBURST of a woman out there, but you can’t have her every day and night or, come to that, ever again.

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Now, this is daft. She’s got crooked teeth, with a touch of decay in one up at the back, I found this out when I licked around inside her smile, I caught this slyly poisonous tang which was actually quite succulent in a musky, fatal sort of way – no, this really isn’t helping, is it? Eyes ahead. Suck your own tongue. Fingers’ wingspan to the air, the same air that is somewhere pillowing and caressing her body, hair and face, but we’ll ignore that. I’ll have a snout around, and find some new channels. J: I enjoy temptation, but I refuse to be consumed. Pleasure is being embedded in a realized ideality. Pleasure may be the consequence of experience. What, then, is the consequence of pleasure? The hatching of a hungrier future: to eat, and by which to be eaten. B: I could go for a walk. J: What would happen if an orgasm NEVER STOPPED? B: Make myself a drink. J: Desire is not the experience of a lack. Desire is when the lack reveals her face. B: Read a book. J: What you want, however, is not the face or body. It is the experience of that face and body taking pleasure in showing you the full pitch of life to which you have brought it. B: Decide how I want to look. J: What you want is not an image, but a sequence, with consequences. B: Consider what I want to look at. J: Consideration is itself the beginning of experience, which inevitably requires decision. B: Work out where I want to go. J: The only specific thing is touch. And the defenceless infinities within it. And the recollections that do not blink like eyelashes at a kiss, but stay unhealing. The whisper of textures, the murmur of taste. B: Figure out what to do next. J: You will only stand forever at the brink of an end which never comes. B: Find out what happens. J: You feel yourself becoming a mime artist in the charade of my sensuality.

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B: Wonder what I might be. J: Who are you when you’re fucking? Who were you when you were fucking me? Which version of you was fucking which version of me?What were we trying to do? Were we trying to do the same thing? Unlikely, probably impossible. B: Send a message? But how? J: I was merely the opportunity for you to find out about youself. B: Write down something, hold on to something. J: Don’t try to tell me the truth. Invent wickednesses and confess to them unforgivably. Much more truthful than trying to hold on to the truth. B: GET AWAY FROM ME. (She vanishes.) I mean, come back. (Interlude: ‘It’s A Shame’ by The Detroit Spinners) FOUR J: Of course I was off sleeping with another man. Because YOU only want me for my BODY. B: (Silent riot of emotion. Then:) Great. How clever of me to set that chain of events in motion. J: Of course, I only slept with him to find out how different it was to sleeping with you. B: I’ll bear that in mind. J: I had to prove to myself how different it might be. B: Glad to hear it. J: So now I’m back. B: Outstanding. (Pause) So tell me about it. J: TELL you about it? B: Yeh. How different was it? J: Just – different. B: I see. That explains everything. (Pause) Plenty to think about, there. (Pause) Of course I want your body. In order to reach all the rest of you.

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J: Do you find that women usually fall for that argument? B: No. J: I think I need some space, to myself, now. B: Strangely enough, I’m desperate for company. Yours. I have this craving to be as close to you as I can. Preferably right inside. J: The Male Species. They always want to rush things. And jump to conclusions. B: Just trying to work out how different things might be. For you. J: I need some time alone. To let things happen. B: Or stop them happening. J: Perhaps. I’m sure you’ve plenty to do. B: Stacks. J: Carry on, then. B: It doesn’t work. Any more. J: That’s your problem. B: Exactly. So I have to make it yours too. J: Jesus on a stick! You are so irritating. B: Good. One way or another, I need to get under your skin. J: Things don’t mean what you think they do. B: Right. I’ll think about that one. In the meantime – (He kisses her. She pushes him away.) J: Grow up. B: Grow up what? Any suggestions? J: You go too far. Too fast. B: Yes, it’s what I do best. Give it a try. What do you want, to find someone who’s COMPELLINGLY INERT?

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J: Someone who respects my wishes. B: I respect your ARSE too much to respect your wishes. How do you know all of your wishes? You might discover some new ones. Let’s discover you. (He attempts, or succeeds in, the exposure of one, or both, of her breasts.) J: (She repairs the disarray of her clothing) I’m not a parcel for you to unwrap, and play with. B: Pity. There might be ways you enjoy being played with. At this rate, you won’t find out. J: I’ve found you out. B: How do you know? J: I know. B: Congratulations. Now can I please tear off all of your clothes, or would you rather do it yourself? J: Stop it. B: I think your clothes should be BURNT, to make you naked forever. J: Typical. B: It’s how you look best. J: You just want to see what you can take away from me. B: I want to see what I can give to you. J: Yes, mainly the full five and a half inches, over and over, till it chokes. B: WHADDYA MEAN “FIVE AND A HALF”? Listen. I’M IN LOVE WITH YOU, WILDLY AND FEROCIOUSLY, YOU MINDWRENCHING GUTBLASTING BITCH! J: No, You just think you are. B: OF COURSE I THINK I AM. THAT’S HOW I KNOW I AM. It’s called recognizing your own feelings, you should try it sometime. J: I do recognize my own feelings. They are telling me I can’t stand you anymore. Go away and infuriate someone else. B: All right. (Vanishes)

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David Ian Rabey as Badger and Sally Bartholomew-Biggs as Jade (photo: Keith Morris).

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J: What if he does? Well, good riddance. But I think he’s deceiving himself to such a point that he’s becoming quite truthful. Risking real disappointment. Pain suits him. Yes, he’s wounded rather beautifully. Broken open. I could make it better. Or I could make it worse. Delicious hiatus. However I respond – what does that make me? What would I reveal to myself about myself? Even doing nothing is a choice, and would have effects. If I hold on to his gaze, develop it, extend it, might I become fixated within it? He becomes partly my creation. I become partly his. Think of the clothes we could un-wear. Stop! Anyone would think that something inside me had been lying in wait for him. What if: our disguises lead us into finding each other? B: They make us into both more and less than we are. We become each other’s subjects. We become our own objects. This is unusual, and exciting. J: When I touch his cock, it springs to life as if his whole being is suddenly focussed into it. As if I really can hold him entirely in my hand, and kindle his – ESSENSUALITY: growing it, exploring it, exploding it out. Making him burst out of himself, through his body. B: This is the moment when you feel confirmed that you can be like this. The moment your capacity unfolds. Who’d have thought it, until now? Not you. But it turns out to hold more pleasures, being not-you. And strangely, it’s lonelier. J: When his tongue dances on my nipple, it’s as if my whole past, present and future go rushing into its peak, to shine with pride. B: You become a version of yourself which you can’t find anywhere else. J: When he licks around my labia, my whole body’s in my cunt. B: With my help, you challenge your own limits. J: And the really sickening thing is that nobody else makes me feel quite like that. So much. B: Have you noticed how we use the verb “to come”, rather than “to go”? Emphasising what we arrive at, rather than what we depart from. J: This is what I didn’t want to admit. The looking, the holding, the touching, the kissing, the stroking, the licking, the biting, the sucking, the thrusting, the mingling. None of it felt as good with the other man as it did with Badger. However much I wished it did. I resent him for showing me how I want to be. I hate him. Why should he be the only one capable of making me feel like this? Where’s the justice in it? B: Justice, in love as in war, is grey, unattractive and fundamentally hypocritical. Only the pang of unique cruelty can draw blood. You cry for it to pierce you again, and suck out your soul to blazing point. J: I’ll make myself forget him. There’ll be others.

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B: Always somewhat similar, always somewhat different. Which will be more disappointing, the similarity or the difference? J: I have this sudden, terrible feeling I’m preparing for my future. And for the knowledge, that he’s always going to be part of it. Next thing you know, I’ll be admitting I have no control over the way he makes me feel. Oh God, I think I’ve just admitted I have no control over the way he makes me feel! I REFUSE TO GIVE IN TO HIM. Wait a minute: is this the way he feels about me? Confronting his greatest fears, and glimpsing his greatest hopes amongst them That’s very courageous. Even admirable. YOU UTTER FUCKER, I’VE CAUGHT MYSELF LOVING YOU ALREADY! B: I beg your pardon? J: Whatever I say, don’t do it. Put your hands on me. COME ON, PUT YOUR HANDS ON ME. DO IT! (He complies.) Don’t look into my eyes. (He does.) NOW IF YOU LOOK AWAY, I’LL KILL YOU. Now let me go. Let me go. Come and be encompassed within my body, and let me go. (Interlude: ‘You Really Got a Hold on Me’ by Laura Nyro & Labelle. During this, the contact between them moves through resistance, resentment and passion to compulsion, in a sequence that is possibly the heart of the whole damned play.) FIVE B: So I say to myself, this is how you go: entwining a woman inside you just for the ache and blaze of it, then all of a sudden it ceases to end. Everything echoes with the whooppee of suicidal murder and the smell of your own sweat is changed forever. Count the seven colours of hell in everything that isn’t her eyes being spectacular and timid. This is everything you wanted the most, and in the disaster of the infinite MEANWHILE that comes with it, trawling through the splits in your life, you do your best. J: Doing your BEST? You’re the one whose zenith of sexual direction is to shout ‘Quick, Jade, quick, stay right there!’. B: Why d’you think it is, that it’s supposed to be impressive for women to come quickly but for men to come slowly? J: You’re the one who leaks endearments that make me feel like my ears are being syringed with brandy and marzipan. I tell myself he’s just slipping inbetween his own sadness, like men do. He’s met someone else, namely himself, and may be forever incapable of recovery. Come on, tell me, if you’re drawn into me, where are you? How do you separate, and function? I want the unshared history of intimacy, and the intimacy that history brings. Tell me how you resist possession. B: And if I do, I don’t. Now you’ve found me, I feel lost. It’s not just that I’m in love with you. I am evidently COMPLETELY in love with you. Oh fuck. What am I?

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J: Enveloped. B: Separate. J: Resistant. B: Intimate. J: Unsharing. B: Unsharable. J: Fucking crazy. B: Fucking mopless. J: Helpless. B: Yes. Helpless. Unless. J: I don’t disappear when you shut your eyes. B: Shutting my eyes doesn’t shut you out. You’re partly my invention, colliding with your own. J: Oh, get over yourself, willya? I love you stretching yourself inside me. You make me want to stretch too. But when you go outside in like this, I feel I might as well contract too. Press on, scan for a trace, look out for the next move, stumble across my own surprising generosity, some amplification that was lying in wait until – now. D’you want to be part of my past, or part of my NOW? B: I can’t imagine you loving a man who found himself rendered subservient by his feelings for you. J: Yes you can, you just did, admit it. B: Alright, I mean I wouldn’t respect a woman who enjoyed that. J: Why not? They might find ways to make it enjoyable, mutually so. B: But not surprising. How are you going to maintain your self-respect if you’re in love with a man who’s sacrificed his self-respect in order to love you as completely and enragingly as he does? J: How are you going to love a woman who loves watching you change? Surprisingly, I hope. B: Damn. At the moment, I can’t work out an answer to that one that doesn’t sound cowardly.

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J: You haven’t sacrificed your self-respect altogether, then. What’s so brave about control? B: Nothing. But it’s how we survive. J: What do you want to survive to do, apart from me? B: I don’t know. But I’ll find out. J: Let’s find out together. You can help me dig this place up, for starters. B: NO. Look, I’ve built this place up very carefully. It makes me feel connected. J: To what? B: I don’t know, exactly. J: So let’s find out. B: No, I – Oh God – look. There’s something I haven’t told you. Nor anyone else. Because I’ve never felt able to talk about it. Scared of what might happen, or how people might react. J: So tell me about it. B: I’M TRYING TO. I think that, by staying here, I might be the one who keeps it all in place. J: What? B: Everything. J: What d’you mean? B: This is a unique place. The centre of all possible tunnels. But it needed me to find it, and suspect that possibility. To spend the nights, lying here, receptive to the sounds from all directions. They’re trying to tell me something, but I’m still learning the language. J: Still learning – well, how much of these “sounds” can you understand? B: Well, nothing, yet. But one day, I will. And in the meantime, I’m safeguarding its secrets which I’m convinced will have some central significance not just for this place but for everywhere beyond it. J: Why do you think so? B: Promise you won’t laugh? (JADE nods) BECAUSE PART OF ME CAN SING BACK TO IT, BUT IN A LANGUAGE THAT THE REST OF ME DOESN’T UNDERSTAND! (JADE laughs)

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J: You’re a loony. B: You see, you’re saying that because you can’t hear it. J: I wouldn’t understand it if I did! B: It just takes time, and I’m not giving up now. J: You’ve been here too long and it’s made you slightly addled but also quite intriguing, okay? Now after a certain amount of sunlight and fresh air, we could do a bit of excavating together, and probably find out what’s making those sounds – B: I DON’T WANT TO FIND OUT WHAT’S MAKING THEM. I WANT TO LISTEN TO THEM. IF I FIND OUT WHAT’S MAKING THEM, THEY’LL STOP. J: Not necessarily. B: I don’t want to take the risk. I love those sounds, right? J: Right. But how intelligently are you actually proceeding with this situation, do you think? B: Do you think love and intelligence are ultimately incompatible? THAT IS NOT A RHETORICAL QUESTION. J: IF IT INVOLVES LOVING YOU, IT MUST BE! THAT IS NOT A RHETORICAL ANSWER! B: I knew I shouldn’t have told you. J: It’s all right, you’re just wrapping up your delusions in the tatters of your own self-importance, that’s what all men do, quite normally. Listen: I’m the only thing here that’s stupid enough to speak to you. And I’m the one who makes you UP, literally. Your own flesh does what I make it. I don’t need or want phantoms for company, I only need a teaspoon full of spunk from any man, and I can reproduce myself in other shapes, ones that are real. B: Off you go, then. J: You suck. B: I bite. (Lunges at her, then vanishes.) J: Bastard. Actually, I can’t imagine anything as tedious as reproducing myself, apart from reproducing some man, of course. I can’t tell him I love him for what he is, that’ll make me sound like his mother. Perhaps I should tell him, I love him for what he might be; no, hang on, that also makes me sound like his mother. And saying I love him for what I thought he was, DEFINITELY makes me sound like his mother. So: how can I tell him I love him, even if he is barmy?

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Wait a minute. What am I DOING? I’m wanting to run after him and enfold him in my reach, WRETCHED FUCKER that – we both are. CRAVING’S SPLENDOUR is the gift of yourself, with another, so lustrous that you find yourself lovable. CRAVING’S CURSE, the knowledge that the light depends on its reflection FROM another. So he’s drawn into me – where am I then? Around him. Not where I was. BUT THAT’S THE POINT. And if he can’t see that, then I’ll find someone else who can. (Vanishes) B: So away I go, proving I don’t begin or end with her. She wouldn’t want me if I did. Perhaps. I wouldn’t want her to, anyway. But I’m not doing this to make her want me more, QUITE THE OPPOSITE. Perhaps. If I find the right tunnel, I can start Calling Up The Ex. A time- honoured panhadling for traces of presence. Yours and hers. You arrange a rendezvous at what you thought was the fork in the path. When you get there, it’s a sort of tamed wilderness, that is, neither properly tamed nor properly a wilderness, calling into question your hopes that were. And are. Well, eroticism is supposed to be what can arouse you independently of its former context, or its current one. The longing both within and beyond fulfilment, well, let’s face it, satisfaction is no substitute for pleasure. Who wouldn’t exchange their present happiness for the infinite promise of possible futures? Exchange what they do for what they might make happen? The value of denial is merely in the display of its power, and that can get pretty tedious when you’re the only one watching yourself, or listening. See how I can not surprise myself, wow. The problem with Calling Up The Ex is the same as the problem of Sticking With The Present. Nothing important about sex is permanently true. Just as nothing that you can find to love in yourself or what you know or what you do is permanently true. What you know, what you do, who you’ve fucked, these are your stories: but not your metaphors. It turns out you don’t long for stories, or even other bodies, but for her Infinitely Significant Body, enlivened by your effect into her own surprise. Thus, your infinity of possibilities, in their infinite wisdom, unanimously decide that they want to be a constellation encircling and illuminating one woman. Bloody marvellous. Oysters don’t have this problem. Instead, they watch you, launching yourself towards the lure of cohesive incoherence, wrapping yourself in bright silks of pain, suddenly dwarfed by life and trying to be angry at your own lack of anger. Everything has burst. So stand as tall as you can, in the cascade. (Lewis Taylor’s ‘Bittersweet’, starting from the bridge, during which he stands at the centre of his own torrent of emotions. Then as the bridge resolves, he then flips into manic wry laughter, staggering round an impassive projection of JADE that is staked into the full depth of his imagination. When she departs with the music’s fade:) I’ll just have to make sure she never finds out that I can’t stay angry with her. SIX J: (Appearing, to audience) I think the problem here is ROMANCE, which celebrates the loss of difference until neither of us is supposed to be able to be complete without reference to the other.

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B: Right. So, instead, let’s appreciate our differences, even when they appall us. Let’s chuck predictability, objectivity and logic. Let’s make love the relishing of each other’s wickedness and wonderful criminality. J: So long as we have enough sleep, time, money,and health to be properly, regularly, wicked, of course. B: Perhaps: the performance of public actions. Can have private and secret effects. Don’t do that. J: What? B: Make yourself into part of the walls around everything. Rather than what’s on the other side of them. J: You’re the one who wants to feel at the centre. In control. B: Well, I’m not. Not any more. And I don’t want to be. J: It’s too late. Look, it’s time I moved on. I won’t dig up your precious sett. But then I have to go somewhere else. Find things out. I must. B: And the only thing you’ve found out here is me. J: Yes. And that’s been – informative. But I’m still curious. About other things. Places. B: People. J: People. Aren’t you? B: Yes. How much anybody else could be like you, for example. J: Yes. Or like you. B: Yes. Mind you, I think I’ve stopped wanting to be like people who are like me. J: Is that possible? B: I don’t know. J: Well. At least let’s hang on to our self-respect. B: Our pride? J: Our dignity.

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B: Because we can be grown up. J: We can hope for the best. B: We can be civilized. J: We can keep a sense of proportion. B: We can enjoy ourselves. J: We can enjoy discovering others. B: We can avoid greed and jealousy. J: We can take a step back. B: We can keep things simple. J: We can be on our way. B: Don’t you mean ‘ways’? J: Ways, yes. B: So why did you say ‘way’? J: I don’t know – B: Never mind. So. We can let each other carry on, then. J: Yes. (An awkward but courteous, even affectionate farewell is attempted. Fade up Dionne Warwick’s ‘Walk On By’. JADE begins moving off. BADGER interrupts the music, which cuts dead.) B: No we can’t. Can we? Wait a minute. If it’s that easy for you to walk that far in that direction. Then it’s no more impossible for you to walk that far in this direction. I’ve found that out. (He concentrates briefly, then snaps fingers, which cues Paul Carrack’s ‘Love Me as Hard as You’ve Hurt Me’ instead. Hold gaze for part of this, then fade music.) J: How did you do that? B: What? J: I don’t know.

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B: Neither do I. Aren’t you curious? J: Let’s find out. (Unbidden, sound cue of The Stranglers’ ‘Walk On By’ thumps in. They react with surprise, and move off together, wondering what has happened, and will happen.)

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AFTERWORD: THE LURKING TRUTHS OF THE SELF Karoline Gritzner

In Greek and Roman mythology the furies are goddesses of vengeance and punishment that haunt those who have committed crimes. This sense of mythical return of forgotten or repressed energy is present in David Ian Rabey’s Lovefuries – his second collection of plays – whose characters are challenged by the destabilising, irrational forces which they invite into their own lives. Their own ‘perverse’ complicity in allowing the Other access to the self – be it in the shape of the transformative energy of natural elements in The Contracting Sea, the internalised voice of the abuser in The Hanging Judge, or the erotic attraction of the lovers in Bite or Suck – creates a dynamic of seduction in the form of a precarious interplay of attraction and repulsion. The shaping power of imagination Octavio Paz’s description of poetry as the ‘eroticisation of language’ (Paz 1995, 53) can usefully be applied to Rabey’s poetic drama in which language functions as a tool for various performative strategies of seduction. Seductive language, and its impact, depends on the creative work of the imagination. The importance of the imagination as a vehicle for selftransformation and (political, ideological) resistance is a key concern and interest for Rabey, due to theatre’s power to liberate us from factual reality (which he talks about in his article ‘Liberations from the Literal’). His dramatic work, especially The Back of Beyond and The Battle of the Crows, is infused with a sense of magic which acts as the main catalyst for transformation. The morphing of time and space so characteristic of his earlier work is to some extent also noticeable in the plays of this present collection, despite their comparatively minimalist misesen-scène. The two monologue plays, The Contracting Sea and The Hanging Judge, emphasise the seductive power of the single voice and body in a liminal landscape, while the two-hander Bite or Suck presents lovers who are engaged in a passionate dance of contradictory emotions. It is the imagination that quite literally shapes all the speakers’ worlds. They change from being passive and accepting observers to active and defiant creators of their possibilities in radically altered psychological and physical circumstances.

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Rhythms of change One starting point for The Contracting Sea is Riders to the Sea (1905) by Irish dramatist John Millington Synge, but Rabey subverts Synge’s conclusions, namely the solitude and suffering of the female protagonist who is confronted with the devastating power of nature and her subordination to paternal rule. Whereas in Synge’s play the main character, Maurya, fatalistically submits to what is presented as an unchangeable course of events, Rabey makes his female protagonist rage both at the loss of her lover at sea and at the debilitating prescriptions of conventional morality. Nevertheless, the power of nature is still a principal – albeit no longer absolute – force in Rabey’s play. The sea does not remain an external, uncontrollable threat but literally enters the body and mind of the character, thus transforming her from a conventionally grief-stricken widow into an unpredictable fury. Rabey’s preferred theme of reversibility, which in his book English Drama Since 1940 he identifies as a distinguishing characteristic of drama’s ability to interrogate ‘the conventional notions of social consensus […] and determinism’ (Rabey 2003, 1), is pertinently dramatised in this play. Elisheba’s mimetic process of ‘becoming like the other’ extends to the point of embodying the wrath of nature, resulting in a reversal of the power relationship between the woman and the sea. Rabey’s characters discover a will and imagination which enable them to look beyond the repressive (physical and emotional) landscapes in which they seem trapped at the beginning of their journeys toward self-discovery. Rabey’s own dramatic imagination is inspired by the work of contemporary dramatists David Rudkin and Howard Barker, but it also harks back to the great tradition of British Romantic writers for whom the ‘shaping spirit of Imagination’ (Coleridge, Dejection Ode) is credited with the power to suffuse the inadequacy of the world and fundamentally reshape our position within it. According to Rabey ‘theatre is a site not of information but of transformation’ (‘Liberations from the Literal’) and these plays demonstrate the performative and transformative nature of language (‘language is action’) which allows characters to dramatically re-orient themselves and discover new, yet unexplored aspects of their selves. Elisheba literally talks herself out of her despondent, passive position of griefstricken widow into someone who gradually becomes ready to face the challenges and storms of the future. Rabey’s poetic drama uses the power of speech to express contradictory, powerful emotions which give electrifying shape to the playing space and the imagination of actors and audience. Elisheba’s awareness of her physical presence (‘But right now / I am / Here’) is simultaneously an expression of self-consciousness: her subjectivity is grounded in a particular place – ‘a cold spit of land’ open, like a bleeding wound, to the unpredictable power of the sea. Throughout the piece the woman remains in a delicate, contradictory relationship with the powers of nature. At first, her solitary positioning at the edge of the coast, far away from the community, is filled with a longing to come to terms with her sudden loss, and her sense of self is based on her difference from nature (the sea, the land, the rock). She pits herself against forces that she cannot understand; her relationship to her surroundings is characterised by differentiation. However, the emerging self-doubt and questions about the stability of her environment lead to a questioning of the boundaries between herself and the other. Difference was, after all, a quality that she sought in her relationship with her lover, whose sudden departure has catapulted her into an enormous existential crisis – a crisis that is deepened by her recognition

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of the intertwining of life and death which her contemplation of nature teaches her. Passive contemplation turns into active defiance of notions of fate and normativity – she refuses the pity that she is conventionally offered. The sudden loss of her lover triggers her sense of isolation from the community and nature who she perceives as an enemy but whose power and mystery enter her body and profoundly transform her. Recollections of her sexual relations with her lover are filled with metaphors of entering the other, reaching into the unknown – by doing this she invites the other (the unknown, the sea) into herself. Language in this play no longer functions as a means of describing or repeating the world and one’s given place in it – it becomes a tool for self-affirmation in the face of adversity. Rabey’s dramatic and poetic imagination explores the compulsive transformations of self in extreme situations; he articulates what David Rudkin describes as the ‘continual process of re-authoring ourselves.’ (Rudkin quoted in Rabey 2003, 133) This is also powerfully illustrated in The Hanging Judge where impassioned speech is used to exorcise the demons of the past and to create liberating avenues for personal change. The reversibility of power The notion of subjectivity as a construct which is in conflict with contradictory external and internal forces is a key concern of The Hanging Judge. The main (and only) character also undergoes a dramatic process of change, transformation of identity, which creates in him a deeper awareness of his past and a sense that his future is full of self-affirming possibilities. The temporal nexus of past (pain), present (anger) and future (re-authoring of self without the acceptance of reconciliation) is, if anything, more strictly defined in this play. This is partly to do with the fact that the play was written as the author’s response to the alarming revelations of child abuse by a respected schoolteacher in 1980s Wales. However, attempts at reading the play as a dramatisation of “real” events will prove unsatisfactory because its formal complexity resists reduction to social realism, allegorical interpretation or political statement. Instead it is a poetic, expressionistic and no doubt provocative engagement with the disturbing subject of personal revelation of experience in very recent history. Beyond the specifics of this history, the play stands on its own and speaks with a captivating rhythmic force and thematic provocations concerning the complicity of victim and abuser, which challenge our sense of moral complacency. The fury of this piece is the tormented victim of abuse who struggles to overcome the corruption of his identity (‘You took away my freedom / To set the limits’) and create a future for himself in which the tables are turned and the sufferer regains at least symbolic control over his enemy. The reversal of power is, however, complicated by Fury’s admission of pleasure at his subjection (‘You performed it well / I miss it / And I miss you’). It is the longing for absolute power and control over another body and consciousness which possesses Fury and releases a voice inside him whose authoritarian insistence on determination and limitation (‘There is no other way / For you’) is challenged and objected to in a frenzied distortion of courtroom terms. Fury wrestles with the continuing resonance of the other’s but by violently confronting the demon of the past as someone who originates inside him he acknowledges his conflicting emotions of guilt and defiance. He undergoes a (theatrical) process of transformation in which he boldly casts himself as the judge and jury of his imaginary ‘trial of the mind’ which condemns his abuser to death. Having visited the darkest corners of his memory, the victim gains strength and courage to face

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the consequences of the dreadful journey of his life. The play resembles a process of awakening, a coming-to-self which enables the recovery of positive energy in a context of negativity. The shape of fury Both plays dramatise the process of subjectivity as a performance which is ‘staged’ as a series of energetic and precarious dialogues with an abject voice inside. The results are willed creations of subjective identity which redefine the ideological definitions of human freedom. The conventional opposition between external and internal is overturned in both plays to the effect that the characters realise that what they have learnt to fear as an external threat (the sea as a figuration of death in The Contracting Sea, and the perpetrator of sexual abuse in The Hanging Judge) has actually transformed into an internal threat. The protagonists of both plays painfully discover the ‘other within’ and this exposure of internal horror takes a particular form, namely the alternating shape of contraction and expansion. In his study of Gothic literature, Fred Botting argues that ‘if terror leads to imaginative expansion of one’s sense of self, horror describes the moment of contraction and recoil’ (Botting 1996, 10). Such a dynamic of contraction and expansion, as symbolised by the rhythmic movement of the sea, dominates Elisheba’s psychological landscape of terror and horror. Fury, too, is overwhelmed by contradictory emotions of love and disgust, respect and rage, guilt and defiance. In both cases it is the violent confrontation with the abject (that which is in the process of being excluded from consciousness) which, despite its potentially disintegrating power, leads to an ‘imaginative expansion of one’s sense of self’. Rabey’s dramatisations of abjection involve the characters’ confrontations with painful past events to the point at which their negative, traumatic memories threaten to overshadow their present lives and possibilities. According to Kristeva, abjection embodies the process and effort of separation – a process which is painful and incomplete, but both necessary and problematic for the creation of subjectivity. The abject is that which is cast out, rejected in disgust, but neither totally nor successfully. The abject has a habit of returning to consciousness and, like a fury, of haunting and tormenting the self. ‘Neither subject nor object’ (Kristeva 1982, 1), the abject destabilises psychological and social order. Rabey’s characters seem to be at the mercy of unknown, uncontrollable external powers, which throughout the play are gradually and seductively revealed as internal by nature – excluded forces, the menacing yet seductive re-emergence of which has to be contended with. They open their minds to the alien, threatening ‘other’, which consciousness has presumably rejected in fear and as a means of self-preservation. Resistance is unavoidable, open struggles ensue but eventually (and as a result of the narrative logic of these plays) the ‘other’ voice (the abject) is identified as being part of one’s ‘own’ voice and it seems that this recognition is necessary for the process of self-determination to succeed. Having reached the abyss of self-destruction by exposing themselves ‘to the most delicious peril’ (Elisheba) and ‘walk[ing] through the fire’ (Fury), the characters are now capable of becoming the creators of their own destiny. Definitions of LOVE Rabey’s dramatic evocations of the concept of abjection also provide a framework for understanding his presentation of eros as painful love, anguishing ecstasy and threatening love.

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This corresponds to the Greek poet Sappho’s definition of eros – the god of love – as ‘bittersweet’ because it offers ‘at once an experience of pleasure and pain’ (Carson 1998, 3). Erotic love in Rabey’s Bite or Suck is a tormenting force and like the furies or the abject it has a habit of persecuting its victims. Eroticism also has a rhythm or, as Octavio Paz asserts, it is a rhythm: ‘one of its chords is separation, the other is return’ (Paz 1995, 26). The dynamic of separation and return echoes the movement of expansion and contraction of the two monologue plays. The staging of the erotic encounter involves the contradictory emotions of attraction and resentment, exposure and withdrawal, but in Bite or Suck the dynamic is at once more intense and physical. In the performance of this play the actors were engaged in an erotic dance of attraction and resentment, which included the tender and violent clashes of half-naked bodies, involving actions of stroking, kissing and tickling which alternated with the pinching, stretching and scratching of skin which on occasions drew blood. In performance, much of Rabey’s work includes moments of action which may be compared to ‘explicit body performances’ not only for their overt sexually violent nature but also for the effects of these actions on the audience. These effects might be a sense of an invasion of the audience’s private space and an unsettling of their expectations and understandings of what private feelings the performers might be investing in their public performances. This in turn raises questions about what might be deemed either morally correct or transgressive. For the lovers, the experience of sexual pleasure results in feelings of self-doubt, insecurity and suspicion – the brief ecstasy of love is answered by their separation from each other and their solitary existence in an ‘unshared reality’. Yet the separation is incomplete because the work of desire and imagination cannot be arrested. As Andy Cornforth suggests, ‘[t]he form which mimics the action of desire may close, but desire itself is a continuous opening which eludes the contracting form which threatens it’ (Cornforth 1999, 35). This transformative power of erotic desire, which transfigures the body and the mind, is principally captured as ‘a thirst for otherness’ (Paz 1995, 15) which coincides with a hunger for self-exploration (‘With my help, you challenge your own limits’). The invasion of eros has a destabilising effect on body and consciousness, and it moves the lovers through ‘resistance, resentment and passion to compulsion’ while simultaneously generating a mode of social resistance to the preoccupations of mundane existence which is corrupted by the ‘occupational disease of PREDICTABILITY.’ The dramatisation of eros in this play exposes the lovers to the danger of losing themselves in ecstatic encounters but at the same time they are encouraged to discover new versions of themselves on the threshold of potentially catastrophic change. The poetic articulations of erotic desire hold the ‘infinite promise of possible futures’ for the lovers and, like The Contracting Sea and The Hanging Judge, Bite or Suck presents subjectivity as a process of daring improvisations which are the unique products of the creative imagination. By allowing themselves to meet the challenges of the unknown, Rabey’s characters discover the lurking truths of their own selves – the hidden, dark, unpredictable yet gloriously and unashamedly contradictory aspects of subjective identity. They are unrelenting and seductive in their desire to know, to discover, to confront, and to experience.

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Bibliography Botting, Fred, Gothic, Routledge, 1996. Carson, Anne, Eros the Bittersweet, Dalkey Archive Press, 1998. Cornforth, Andy, and Rabey, David Ian, “Kissing Holes for the Bullets: Consciousness in Directing and Playing Barker’s Uncle Vanya” in Performing Arts International, vol. 1, 1999. Kristeva, Julia, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, trans. Leon S. Roudiez, Columbia University Press, 1982. Paz, Octavio, The Double Flame: Love and Eroticism, trans. Helen Lane, Harcourt, 1995. Rabey, David Ian, “Liberations from the Literal” in New Welsh Review 43, 1998. —— English Drama Since 1940, Longman, 2003. —— The Wye Plays (The Battle of Beyond and The Battle of the Crows), Intellect Books, 2004. Karoline Gritzner is lecturer in Drama and Theatre Studies at Aberystwyth University, co-editor of Theatre of Catastrophe: New Essays on Howard Barker (Oberon Books, London, 2006) and author of The Drama of The Damaged Self: Adorno and British Theatre (forthcoming, Edwin Mellen Press, 2008).

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR DAVID IAN RABEY is Professor of Drama and Theatre Studies at Aberystwyth University. He was born in the English Black Country, and lived in America and Dublin, and now lives in Machynlleth in Wales, where he has resided since 1985. He is a graduate of the Universities of Birmingham and California, Berkeley. He is Artistic Director of Lurking Truth/Gwir sy’n Llechu Theatre Company, which he co-founded in 1986, and for which he wrote and directed the plays The Back of Beyond (written 1994–5, staged twice in 1996), The Battle of the Crows (written 1996, staged 1998), published by Intellect in a single volume, The Wye Plays, in 2004; also Bite or Suck (written 1996, staged 1997 in a production by Andy Cornforth), a theatrical exploration of J. G. Ballard’s Crash (Aberystwyth University Department of Theatre, Film and Television Studies, 2001), and Lovefuries (The Contracting Sea and The Hanging Judge (written 2002, staged 2004–5). He is an Associate of Howard Barker’s theatre company, The Wrestling School. His roles as a performer include The Exaggerator and Vanya in Howard Barker’s Don’t Exaggerate and (Uncle) Vanya; Sleen in The Early Hours of a Reviled Man, and Isonzo in Barker’s own English-language premiere production of his play The Twelfth Battle of Isonzo for Lurking Truth (Dublin and Ireland/Wales tour, 2001/2); also for Lurking Truth, Carlos in Barnes’s The Bewitched, Perowne in Williams’s AC/DC and Badger in Bite or Suck. His critical writings include Howard Barker: Politics and Desire (1989), David Rudkin: Sacred Disobedience (1997), English Drama Since 1940 (2003), Theatre of Catastrophe (as co-editor, with Karoline Gritzner, 2006) and Howard Barker: Ecstasy and Death (forthcoming for Palgrave Press, 2008/9).

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LURKING TRUTH/GWIR SY’N LLECHU THEATRE COMPANY Artistic policy: ■ To arrest, fascinate and seduce audiences beyond the current fear of art which is not defined in terms of tourism, utilitarianism and celebration (of what, for whom, at whose behest?). ■ To demonstrate the immediacy of theatrical performance in which language is a promise written in the air and physicality is the choreography of manifested courage. ■ To achieve a production style which is appropriate to the uniqueness of the theatrical event rather than to the reassuring familiarities of theatrical convention. ■ To show how complexity can, in theatre as in other matters, actually be more enjoyable and exciting than predictability, and how theatre can be a living triumph of the artificial, which is what human beings do best. ■ To present new work by the Artistic Director or exhilarating re-evaluations of major works by modern dramatists neglected in a climate of theatrical cowardice. Besides the plays in this volume, Lurking Truth has staged David Ian Rabey’s The Back of Beyond (1996) and The Battle of the Crows (1998), the world premiere of Arnold Wesker's play Letter to Myself (2004), Howard Barker’s plays Victory (1986), Don’t Exaggerate and The Castle (1986), The Early Hours of a Reviled Man (1990) and the English-language premiere of The Twelfth Battle of Isonzo (in a production directed by the dramatist, on tour in Ireland and Wales 2001/2), Peter Barnes’s The Bewitched (1987) and Heathcote Williams’s AC/DC (1997). Management Board: Ken Rabey (Chair), Alison Coleman, Karoline Gritzner, David Ian Rabey (Secretary); Company Direction Nucleus: Roger Owen, David Ian Rabey (Artistic Director), Charmian Savill. Associate Artists: Paula Gardiner, Eric Schneider.

Lovefuries The Contracting Sea / The Hanging Judge / Bite or Suck By David Ian Rabey Part of the Playtext Series

Rabey

Lovefuries offers a double bill of performance pieces that explode national and personal pressures to keep silent, and explore the surprising and shocking resurgences of life that break through grief. In The Contracting Sea, the fiancée of a just-shipwrecked sailor is challenged by a feminine elemental force of catastrophe to throw off the shackles of her common humanity. The second play, The Hanging Judge, explores from the inside an occurrence of sexual abuse in a contemporary Welsh context, and how one survivor finds the courage to discover defiance.

Lovefuries The Contracting Sea / The Hanging Judge / Bite or Suck

This second volume of dramatist-director Rabey’s plays for his own Lurking Truth/Gwir sy’n Llechu theatre company also includes the short two-hander Bite or Suck, completing a collection of innovative drama that restlessly explores what is possible at the extreme boundaries of human language and physicality. David Ian Rabey is Professor of Drama and Theatre Studies at Aberystwyth University, and Artistic Director of Lurking Truth/Gwir sy’n Llechu theatre company, which he co-founded in 1985.

‘Stylish and stylistically challenging work... a riveting and explosively physical performance’ – Irish Times

ISBN 978-1-84150-184-0

David Ian Rabey

00

9 781841 501840

intellect / www.intellectbooks.com

Lovefuries The Contracting Sea / The Hanging Judge / Bite or Suck