Caryl Churchill Plays: Four E-Book

Caryl Churchill

• Herausgeber: Nick Hern Books
• Kategorie: Poesie und Drama
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2014

Beschreibung

The fourth volume of the collected plays of one of the best playwrights alive. Written over a period of ten years and evincing an extraordinary range of topics and techniques, this fourth volume of Caryl Churchill's collected plays confirms her standing as a playwright who is 'amongst the best half-dozen now writing' (The Times). This volume includes: Hotel (Schauspielhaus, Hannover, 1997), an innovative theatre piece combining music, voices and dance, with a text by Caryl Churchill and music by Orlando Gough. This is a Chair (Royal Court Theatre, 1997), a short play about the surreal nature of modern life. Blue Heart (Out of Joint & Royal Court Theatre, 1997), two linked one-act plays, both startlingly innovative, exploring the underpinnings of family relationships. Far Away (Royal Court, 2000), a brilliantly unsettling play about conflict and its unsettling effect on our lives and humanity. A Number (Royal Court, 2002), a fascinating meditation on human cloning, personal identity and the conflicting claims of nature and nurture. Drunk Enough to Say I Love You? (Royal Court, 2006),examining US foreign policy and international power politics through the lens of an intense personal relationship. A Dream Play (National Theatre, London, 2005), a spare and resonant version of August Strindberg's 1901 masterpiece.

Leseprobe

Caryl Churchill

PLAYS: FOUR

introduced by the author

Hotel

This is a Chair

Blue Heart

Far Away

A Number

A Dream Play

(translated from Strindberg)

Drunk Enough to Say I Love You?

NICK HERN BOOKS

London

www.nickhernbooks.co.uk

Contents

Title Page

Introduction

Hotel

This is a Chair

Blue Heart

Far Away

A Number

A Dream Play

Drunk Enough to Say I Love You?

About the Author

Copyright and Performing Rights Information

Introduction

Hotel, This is a Chair and the two plays in Blue Heart all come from around the same time, 1994–5, and from a similar mindset. Hotel isn’t a play but an opera libretto. This is a Chair is a series of impressive subjects that a play might address and the scenes don’t address them. Heart’s Desire is a play that can’t happen, obsessively resetting itself back to the beginning every time it veers off-course. Blue Kettle is a play infected with a virus.

Hotel was written for Orlando Gough, and Ian Spink directed it for Second Stride with reckless generosity despite the large cast. I fear the large company and few performances may have been one of the reasons the Arts Council cut the grant of this great, innovative company.

The first piece, itself originally called Hotel, was written first. I’ve never liked too many words in an opera and don’t want to be reading while I listen or straining to extricate sentences from the music. So I went for few words and no sentences, just scraps of what the characters are thinking or saying, which can easily be picked up and can also just be heard as sound when they are repeated or combined. Occasionally people ask if it can be performed as a play, without music, but that seems to miss the point. The characters can sing together from their separate rooms as they sit together on the same bed watching the same TV.

We then decided to make a second piece, so we renamed Hotel as Eight Rooms and the new piece Two Nights. Here the dancers who played the silent couple in Eight Rooms played the central characters, and Ian choreographed their hotel-room stories, while the singers were more of a chorus. Their text is supposed to be fragments of a diary found in the hotel room of someone who has disappeared. I think it’s all right to perform either of the pieces separately.

Around this time I wrote a short scene of a quarrel, using just scraps of what is said and racing through a whole evening in five minutes. I can’t remember if this was before or after I wrote Hotel. I was looking at the same question – how little do we need to hear to understand what’s going on? – but from a different motive, not music but impatience. Soon after that I wrote This is a Chair, and later director Stephen Daldry and I decided to include the scene (as ‘Hong Kong’), partly to make the play a bit longer, I think, and partly because it looked as if it would be fun to work on. It was, though it took a disproportionate amount of rehearsal: if time passes between every line, should the gestures and position of the actors change? And the scene has to go fast, of course, with no gaps for the missing time. The scene sits a little oddly in This is a Chair because it’s written differently from the others but also I like it there, so it can be left in or out in performance. The titles should probably be updated for new productions, and I’m happy to have suggestions run by me. Nowadays ‘The War in Afghanistan’ would probably be a title, and ‘Climate Change’ would be there. Though not, of course, written about.

The Blue Heart plays, I realised afterwards, can be roughly linked in subject matter by being described as a family waiting for their daughter and a son looking for his mother. But the plays are McGuffins – my main intention was their destruction.

Some time after all this, 1999, I wrote Far Away, which feels to me quite different as the play isn’t being undermined. The three parts can seem disconnected, linked only by the girl who goes through them and widening hostilities, but I think they are also linked by the characters’ desire to be on the side of what’s right.

A Number has cloning at the centre of its story but I never quite feel it’s a play about cloning. The cloning’s not quite a McGuffin but it does let me look at a lot of things that interest me. I realised after I’d written it that I’d thought about some of the same things in Identical Twins more than twenty-five years earlier. I’m reluctant to give advice rather than let the play stand on its own feet now, but I will point out that Michael isn’t a fool. It’s easy to make him a laughing stock to the audience, because he fails to come up with something that satisfies Salter, but his answers seem to me good ones and a serious answer to Salter’s search for some essence of a person. That doesn’t mean there aren’t laughs in the scene.

I came up with a text of Strindberg’s Dream Play for Katie Mitchell, who was planning to direct it at the National Theatre in London. I didn’t go to the Swedish – which I don’t know, but looking at it would have told me something – but worked from a translation by Charlotte Barslund, given to me by the National. Katie had some cuts in mind and I made a few as well. I slightly regret losing the first scene where the daughter comes down to earth, which balances her departure at the end, but apparently that was an afterthought of Strindberg’s in any case, and the focus of the production was not the daughter’s story but a dreamer’s. There were more cuts in rehearsal, and dance and more dreams, so this text isn’t an account of the production, but what I gave Katie as a starting point. I feel wary of cuts and ‘versions’, as opposed to complete and skilful translations by someone who knows both languages but perhaps there’s a place for both, for writers lucky enough to still be performed when they’re dead.

Drunk Enough to Say I Love You? was originally called in my head ‘The Man Who Fell in Love with America’. But that seemed to tell too much. A lot of people all over the world have a kind of romance with America or its culture or the idea of it, even if they also increasingly and simultaneously dislike it. Sam was always Sam, as in Uncle, as in political cartoons where he stands for America. The other character didn’t have a name while I was writing the play, and when I had to come up with one I thought of Jack as an everyday name – Jack of all trades, Jack the lad. What I didn’t think, stupidly, was Union Jack, which was the quite sensible conclusion some people jumped to. That made the man in love with America be seen as Britain, as Sam was America. It was hard enough anyway to understand that Sam was a country while the person in love with him was just a man, like someone in the audience, and now I’d shot myself in the foot. I tried to get the play away from the misconceptions for the New York production by changing the man’s name to Guy (a guy, ha ha, far too obvious but I was past caring) and in Germany he was German. I’d always imagined he would just be someone from whatever country the play was done in. He could even be an American citizen in an American production, patriotically in love with his country and increasingly disillusioned. Another misconception was that the characters stood for Bush and Blair, specially as they began to be portrayed in cartoons as lovers. But the play looks at America’s foreign policy from far further back, any time since the Second World War. Some people seemed surprised by the Iraq War as if it was an aberration caused by Bush and the neocons, but though it’s an extreme example it’s not so different from the general thrust of American policy for most of its history, and part of my point in writing the play was precisely that this was not just something that had come with Bush and would go away after him. I read a number of books to learn more details and found William Blum’s Rogue State and Killing Hope particularly useful.

The love story is chronological and that is the story the actors play. The actions they are taking are divided into subjects – elections, bombing, trade – and in each scene they can be taken from any time but are happening now, in the moment, for the characters, who are fixing an election, bombing a country, as they speak. The problem of how to get in all those facts without being clunky, how to get the characters from one activity to the next, was solved, I hope, by using that same technique as in the little quarrel scene ten or so years earlier: moving swiftly on, giving just a few words and leaping forward to another part of the conversation. Again there’s a problem of how to perform it, and the potential jerkiness of demonstrating the time gaps is probably too much for a longer piece. The challenge is for the emotional story between the lovers to stay continuous while the subject matter hurtles on and is a new moment in each line.

Caryl Churchill, 2008

HOTEL

Words

Caryl Churchill

Music

Orlando Gough

Direction/Choreography

Ian Spink

Introductions

CARYL CHURCHILL

Eight Rooms

I kept thinking about a lot of different stories all happening on stage at once. How to cope with all those people talking at the same time? Easily of course if they’re not talking but singing, and in any case I wanted to write an opera for Orlando. At some point I had the idea of a hotel where we’d see all the identical rooms superimposed as one room, all the people in the same space. And what sort of words should they sing? When I’m listening to sung words I like taking their meaning in without any effort, and I’m also happy to hear them just as sound. What I don’t like is feeling I may be missing something important if I don’t follow every word. What do I want from words in an opera? A situation, an emotion, an image. Some of the sections that had stayed with me most from Lives of the Great Poisoners (a 1991 piece with Orlando and Ian) had very simple words that could be taken in quickly and repeated. The little opera scene in The Skriker (1994, music by Judith Weir) had words without the usual structure of sentences (welcome homesick drink drank drunk) but it was easy to understand what was happening. So in Hotel, how little need the characters say to let us know enough about them? I decided there would be no complete sentences, just little chunks of what was said or thought, that could be absorbed first time round or in a repeat or even never.

Two Nights

In Eight Rooms each of the thirteen singers is a different character; in Two Nights they all sing a diary that has been left in a hotel room. The silent performers in Eight Rooms now play two people who spend different nights in the same room. We want this piece to start from ideas about the choreography and Ian maps out the two stories, though the first thing to be set is the words, then the music, and the details of the choreography are to be worked out in rehearsal. Both the characters disappear in different ways, and the diary is written by someone who becomes invisible. What might be in a diary apart from how the body begins to vanish? Notes about other kinds of disappearance. On the internet I found worry about cities disappearing in smog, a magician making a building disappear, a Canadian legal judgement about objects that go missing, an anarchist using disappearance rather than confrontation as a ‘logical radical option’, and a spell for becoming invisible translated from Greek magical documents. Again I used few words, glimpses as we flick through someone else’s diary.

ORLANDO GOUGH

Eight Rooms

Caryl says What do you like about opera? I say The bits when everyone sings at once.

So what about this? Caryl says: one night in a hotel; eight rooms are seen simultaneously. Excellent! Off we go.

People sing duets, trios, quartets with people they never meet. Their lives intersect in the realm of shared emotion, in the realm of counterpoint and polyphony.

The action is everyday, consciously undramatic.

Is it possible to write an opera of everyday life? Isn’t there an inherent contradiction? Isn’t the function of opera to deal with extremes of emotion? Should not action resolve character?

A fragmentary libretto. Already a move away from naturalism. Allows me to compose the music, i.e. make the text into music, rather than being dragged along by the words.

A cyclic structure. The piece ends almost as it began. A sense that the next night would be similar. We are interested in these people only while they are in the hotel. A crowd looked at from afar (with occasional help of a pair of binoculars).

Opera singers. NO!

Working with jazz singers. Should I give opportunities to improvise? Surely I am wasting their talent if I don’t? However, I am not sure about this idea ‘opportunities to improvise’. If the music after the improvised passage is not affected by the improvisation, then surely the improviser is just filling in time? . . . I get very excited by the idea of a completely improvised opera, and then funk it. Six months’ rehearsal would be barely enough.

A lean, functional band: piano duet and double bass. Almost like a jazz rhythm section. A modest but utterly crucial role. However, the emotional energy must come from the singers. Thirteen singers and three players! – almost the mirror image of many modern chamber operas, where complex texture is created with an important role for the band and the singers are treated almost like instrumentalists.

Two Nights

A companion for Eight Rooms – not necessarily a friend. Same cast. What else happens in hotels? says Ian. A hotel is where you might go, for privacy, to do something lonely, radical, extreme, life changing, terminal. Sid Vicious.

I want the music to be very different from Eight Rooms: the singers will be a choir.

A diary has been left in the room. The singers will sing the contents of the diary.

A kind of song cycle. Harmony rather than counterpoint. (Yikes, not my strong point.) Drama! Risk! A linear structure – a sense of not being able to retrace one’s steps. Though one might want to. A much darker piece than Eight Rooms.

The dancers, who have had a peripheral role in Eight Rooms, are now centre stage. The singers… sing, and occasionally take part in the action.

The subject matter of Two Nights is definitely ‘operatic’. But we haven’t written an opera…

Should the dancing mimic the text? NO! Should it ignore the text? Not quite – it should connect, but on an emotional rather than literal level.

The old problem again: the text and the music are written in advance; the choreography can’t exist until rehearsals start. How can the choreographer be expected to work with such an unbending structure? We consider scrapping the text and the music and making a devised piece (on the same theme) in rehearsal. An exhilarating and alarming idea. The singers’ ability to improvise is a catalyst. We funk it. Cowards! Two months’ rehearsals needed, minimum.

‘You put so much emotion into singing your love songs, spend the evening pouring your heart out, but then go back to your hotel alone.’ k.d. lang (speaking in The Independent)

‘To be inside that music, to be drawn into the circle of its repetitions: perhaps that is a place where one could finally disappear.’ Paul Auster, City of Glass (Faber and Faber)

IAN SPINK

Eight Rooms

. . . began as a challenge. How do you fit fourteen hotel guests into one room? What happens when they all eventually go to bed? The potential for enormous traffic jams in such an intimate space seemed huge and fascinating. In rehearsal we were to discover that the simplest of acts, the cleaning of teeth, the hanging up of a dress, the reading of a magazine, demanded a relaxed yet rigorous precision when taking into account the thirteen other occupants of the space.

The hotel room channels many threads of action into a single stream of human experience covering a period of perhaps sixteen hours. Guests arrive, tiny incidents are briefly exposed; a drunken couple argue, a young woman dreams of a bird, an American plans a game of golf, a French couple drink tea, a business man rings home, two lovers whisper, a wife considers her marriage, a silent couple watch television. In one sense ordinary and unambiguous activities but collected together they produce a touching and mesmeric atmosphere. In the morning these people prepare to leave; a woman packs her case, a man comments on the weather, another orders breakfast, an insomniac finally succumbs to sleep. The sparse yet humane text combines with the music to produce a strangely uplifting piece of theatre.

Two Nights

Created some time later, Two Nights has become for me, an antidote to Eight Rooms. Here the challenge was, can you weave together three almost unrelated stories and play them out in the same location? The hotel room is now a more ambiguous, dangerous place, a catalyst for darker journeys, two of them danced, one of them sung to a sparkling counterpoint score. The singers have become a choral accompaniment and occasional extras to the choreographed action. A trapped woman struggles with her conscience and seeks salvation surrounded by strangers, a man haunted by his past is about to end his life. Their stories are danced out in extreme, dramatic bursts accompanied by entries from an abandoned diary, the diary of someone who has become invisible. The three self-contained threads playing simultaneously, are about magic, deception and transformation.

Hotel was first performed by Second Stride at the Schauspielhaus, Hanover, Germany, on 15 April 1997, and subsequently on tour, including to The Place, London, with the following cast:

Eight Rooms

TV/GHOST

Angela Elliott

SILENT WOMAN

Gabrielle McNaughton

SILENT MAN

Colin Poole

US WOMAN

Daniela Clynes

US MAN

Mick O’Connor

AFFAIR WOMAN

Jenny Miller

AFFAIR MAN

Richard Chew

OLD FRENCH WOMAN

Marjorie Keys

OLD FRENCH MAN

Andrew Bolton

GAY WOMAN (1)

G T Nash

GAY WOMAN (2)

Rebecca Askew

DRUNK WOMAN

Carol Grimes

DRUNK MAN

D W Matzdorf

BIRDBOOK WOMAN

Louise Field

BUSINESSMAN

Wayne Ellington

Two Nights

MAN

Colin Poole

WOMAN

Gabrielle McNaughton

A DIARY FOUND IN A HOTEL ROOM

Rebecca Askew, Andrew Bolton,Richard Chew, Daniela Clynes,Wayne Ellington, Angela Elliott,Louise Field, Carol Grimes,Marjorie Keys, D W Matzdorf,Jenny Miller, G T Nash,Mick O’Connor

Director/Choreographer

Ian Spink

Music

Orlando Gough

Designer

Lucy Bevan

Acknowledgements

Quotes in the ‘Will to Power’ section from TAZ by Hakim Bay, published by Autonomedia

Quotes in the ‘Spell’ section from Greek Magical Papyri including the Demotic Spells by H. Dieter-Bitz, published by the University of Chicago Press © 1986, 1992

The musical score to Hotel by Orlando Gough is available for hire to amateur groups who wish to perform the play and have applied for a licence. Please apply to Nick Hern Books.

Eight Rooms

Characters

SILENT COUPLE

US COUPLE

AFFAIR COUPLE

OLD FRENCH COUPLE

GAY COUPLE

DRUNK COUPLE

BUSINESSMAN

BIRDBOOK WOMAN

TV

GHOST

Hotel bedroom. Large double bed, sink, wardrobe, TV.

It is eight identical hotel bedrooms superimposed. Each couple behaves as if they were alone in the room.

1. Arrivals

SILENT COUPLE arrive, start to settle in.

BUSINESSMAN arrives, puts on TV, flops on bed.

TV

rain later . . heavier and more prolonged on to tomorrow

US COUPLE arrive.

US MAN

which is terrific. The window you get a view of the

US WOMAN

uh huh uh huh

AFFAIR WOMAN arrives alone.OLD FRENCH COUPLE arrive.

OLD COUPLE

demain . . le fleuve . . en bateau . . si tu veux

GAY COUPLE arrive.

GAY 1

I told him

GAY 2

you tell him

AFFAIR MAN arrives.

AFFAIR MAN

Miss me?

AFFAIR WOMAN

Missed you. Miss me?

AFFAIR MAN

Missed you.

BIRDBOOK WOMAN arrives. Starts to read hotel brochure.

BIRDBOOK WOMAN

The hotel is situated . .

in every room . .

continental or full English

in case of fire.

OTHERS join in brochure.

2. Settling In

BUSINESSMAN phones home.

BUSINESSMAN

Hi darling . . no really . . yeh . . yeh . . put him on.

Hi darling . . you did? . . big kiss, bye bye.

Hi darling . . you did? . . big kiss, bye bye.

Darling . . bye bye . . big kiss, bye bye.

GAY 1

we don’t have to

GAY 2

of course we don’t

GAY 1

we can simply

GAY 2

spend some time

GAY 1

get to know each other

GAY 2

get to know each other?

GAY 1

again.

US MAN

Golf in the neighbourhood . .

little guy in reception made me laugh when he said . .

if we get an early night we can make an early . .

US WOMAN

uh huh uh huh uh huh

OLD COUPLE

son chapeau

They laugh.

AFFAIR COUPLE

can’t believe

just so

nothing like

wonder

BIRDBOOK WOMAN is reading a bird book.

BIRDBOOK WOMAN

sparrowhawk . . tinted eggs . . sedges . . nightingale

DRUNK COUPLE arrive cheerful and noisy.

because I really sincerely do

you’re completely right to

and he’s such an arsehole

which nobody understands except you

3. TV

By now many people are lying on the bed watching TV, often changing channels.

TV

your mother’s very upset . . further consultation . . returns to feed her young . . in London . .

VIEWERS

turn over turn over

BUSINESSMAN reads a book.

BUSINESSMAN

raced towards him . . headless . . blood on his

OLD WOMAN reads a book.

OLD WOMAN

longtemps soulagé. . son beau visage . .

4. Sleep

Most of them are in bed by now.

BIRDBOOK WOMAN reads.

BIRDBOOK WOMAN

Care charmer sleep son of the sable night . .

and let the day be time enough to mourn . .

and never wake to feel the day’s disdain.

GAY COUPLE and AFFAIR COUPLE quartet.

your eyes

do you like?

this is so

my angel

skin

so wet

further and further

always

5. Quarrel

DRUNK COUPLE quarrel loudly.

what the hell do you think

shut up shut up

just say that again just

out get out

don’t you dare

always knew

kill you

never

OTHERS are alarmed by the noise.

shall we phone the desk?

shall we bang on their door?

are they hurting each other?

shut the fuck up

The drunk couple are exhausted, the quarrel ends, everyone settles down again.

TV

not quite far enough down the table

35 . . 42 . . 43 . .

TV is turned off.

6. Insomnia

Care charmer sleep continues.

INSOMNIAC (GAY 2)

I’m I’m afraid I’m afraid I I’m afraid I can’t

I’m afraid I can’t sleep

I’m afraid I can’t sleep afraid I can’t sleep

I can’t sleep can’t sleep sleep

7. Obsessive

US MAN gets up quietly. All is quiet except insomniac.

He does ritual movements. He keeps stopping and going back to the beginning.

US WOMAN wakes up.

US WOMAN

What?

US MAN

Honey.

US WOMAN

What you doing?

US MAN

Honey.

US WOMAN

Come to bed.

US MAN

Honey.

He goes back to bed, seems to sleep.

8. Lonely

US WOMAN

hold you close because I’m lonely

are you there? because I’m lonely

when I hold you close it makes me lonely

never close never there

lonely

GAY 2 has been continuing insomniac song. Now sings with US WOMAN.

afraid and lonely

can’t sleep and lonely

hold you close because I’m lonely

I wish I was with

afraid I can’t sleep

lonely

9. Anguish

AFFAIR WOMAN wakes up.

AFFAIR WOMAN

afraid I can’t sleep

how I miss

what if I lose

danger danger

children in danger

gone what if they’re gone what if

AFFAIR MAN wakes and soothes her.

hush hush hush

10. Dreams

GAY 1 is dreaming.

walking down the road I saw a

car who is a man who is a

flying down the hill I saw a

bird who is a meeting of the

doctors of the house who is a

cupboard with a cat who is a

mother of a yellow and a

running up the mountain

to get before it happens

to the child who is a

bird who is a falling

OLD FRENCH MAN is dreaming.

l’oiseau blanc dans le metro

le chapeau dans le bateau

BIRDBOOK WOMAN is dreaming.

up

round

down

in

INSOMNIAC GAY continues during this.

11. Obsessive 2

US MAN gets up again while dreaming is going on, starts rituals as before.

BUSINESSMAN dreams.

a cat who is a

woman with a furry and a

purring and a further and

further and a further and a

fury and a

US MAN finishes rituals satisfactorily and goes back to bed.

Silence. Everyone is still.

12. Ghost

GHOST

It’s me.

Let me into your sleep.

Let me in when you wake.

I’ve been dead so long

I’ve forgotten why

I’ve not gone away.

I walk out of the night

can’t you hear

can’t you see

it’s me

I’ve forgotten who

I’ve forgotten why.

13. Dawn

Silence. But now and then a little sound from the insomniac.

OLD FRENCH WOMAN wakes.

OLD WOMAN

tous les matins

très bonne heure

j’ai peur de mourir

les oiseaux

j’ai peur

BIRDBOOK WOMAN wakes.

BIRDBOOK WOMAN

blackbird thrush starling wren

INSOMNIAC falls asleep.

OLD WOMAN gets up.

OLD WOMAN

je me lave

très bonne heure

j’n’ai plus peur

le matin

les oiseaux

14. Morning

BIRDBOOK WOMAN gets up and dresses, takes birdbook and binoculars and goes out.

BIRDBOOK WOMAN

blackbird

OLD WOMAN makes tea and wakes OLD MAN.

AFFAIR COUPLE reprise ‘your eyes’ and goodbye goodbye.

GAY 1 wakes. GAY 2, INSOMNIAC, still sleeping.

GAY 1

don’t know what you want

but I want you

again

US MAN wakes cheerful, US WOMAN still sleepy.

US MAN

looks like a great day

US WOMAN

uh huh

US MAN

not a cloud in the sky

US WOMAN

uh huh

BUSINESSMAN puts on TV.

TV

after the break . . relationships expert . .

BUSINESSMAN phones home.

Hi darling . . big kiss

SILENT COUPLE who have been asleep throughout wake up.

DRUNK COUPLE waking up.

my head bang my belly bang my eyes bang my knees bang my heart bang

OLD COUPLE

on va au fleuve

allons vite

OLD COUPLE leave.

AFFAIR WOMAN leaves.

AFFAIR MAN

your eyes

my angel

what if I lose

This becomes duet with GAY 1.

INSOMNIAC still asleep.

AFFAIR MAN leaves.

BUSINESSMAN

bacon and eggs and tomato and sausage and mushroom and bacon

GAY 1 joins in.

BUSINESSMAN leaves for breakfast.

GAY 1 can’t wake INSOMNIAC so leaves for breakfast too.

DRUNK COUPLE manage to leave.

SILENT COUPLE leave.

Nobody left but INSOMNIAC asleep.

The TV is still on.

TV

bright spells and scattered

clearing later

shaping up to be a nice

and over now to

Two Nights

From a diary found in a hotel room

Hand Gone

my hand has gonejanuaryvery late at nighttoday my whole left sidesix and a half minutesdisappeared

July

july

city out of sight in the haze

wish I could disappear

magician made the tower disappear from the ground up

and all the people who lived

Thin

thin and cold

the wind blows right through me

Mysterious Disappearance

mysterious disappearance

the judge said

any disappearance or loss

unknown puzzling baffling

hard to explain or understand

mysterious disappearance

a ring left on a dresser

later it’s not there

no evidence of theft

the loss would be mysterious disappearance

Suddenly

suddenly at a party

ran out invisible and hid

saw myself slowly appear in the mirror on the wall in the

sauntered downstairs for a drink

‘where have you been?’

try to stop fading but

or shall I try to disappear?

no good the way I am

Will to Power

the will to power as disappearance

it says

logical radical option for our time

it says

not a disaster not a death

but a way to what?

Shadow

will I still have a shadow?

will I still have a mind?

wind blow through

will invisible eyes still see?

Spell

the spell if I dare

here in a hotel room

eye of a nightowl

smear your whole body

say to Helios by your great name

Zizia

Lailam

a a a a

I I I I

o o o o

ieo

in the presence of any man until sunset

make me invisible

Hand . . Light

held my hand up to the light and

THIS IS A CHAIR

This is a Chair was first performed by the Royal Court Theatre at the Duke of York’s Theatre, London, on 25 June 1997, with the following cast:

JULIAN

Linus Roache