Grotty E-Book

Izzy Tennyson

• Herausgeber: Nick Hern Books
• Kategorie: Poesie und Drama
• Serie: NHB Modern Plays
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 90

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2018

Beschreibung

Grotty is a dark and savage play exploring the London lesbian scene. A couple of little sad old basements that drip with sweat and piss, with second-hand noise pulsating from some gay-boy night upstairs. The women sit there in their uniformed black… and they are looking at you. They are not nice girls. But Grotty is not a nice story. Izzy Tennyson's play was premiered by Damsel Productions at The Bunker, London, in May 2018.

Leseprobe

Izzy Tennyson

GROTTY

NICK HERN BOOKS

London

www.nickhernbooks.co.uk

Contents

Original Production

Dedication

Grotty

About the Author

Copyright and Performing Rights Information

Grotty was first performed at The Bunker Theatre, London, on 1 May 2018, with the following cast:

RIGBY

Izzy Tennyson

TOAD/KATE

Rebekah Hinds

WITCH/ELLIOT

Grace Chilton

NATTY/JOSIE/

Anita-Joy Uwajeh

DR ALEXANDRA

MOTHER

Clare Gollop

Director

Hannah Hauer-King

Designer

Anna Reid

Lighting Designer

Zoe Spurr

Composer & Sound Designer

Alexandra Faye Braithwaite

Producer

Kitty Wordsworth

Production Manager

Heather Doole

Stage Manager

Katie Bachtler

Assistant Producer

Molly Eagles

Assistant Director

Rosie Gray

Assistant Designer

Elle Tennyson

Assistant Stage Manager

Izzy Evans

Assistant Production Manager

Zara Janmohamed

For my best friend HHK

With a special thank-you to Adam, Jules and Kitty

Characters

RIGBY, twenty-two

JOSIE, twenty-four

TOAD, thirty-two

WITCH, thirty-two

NATTY, thirty-two

ELLIOT, twenty-two

KATE, twenty-three

MOTHER, fifty

DR ALEXANDRA, thirty-six

This ebook was created before the end of rehearsals and so may differ slightly from the play as performed.

Prologue

RIGBY. Are you turned on by mental-health issues in people? Is that really bad? Like fancying someone with cancer? Is that really bad? Is that bad?… (Pause.) It probably is. When does depression stop being depression and starts being a predominant part of your personality?… (Pause.) I lock myself in toilets at parties because I’m like that. I cry on trains because I’m like that. I’m just like that, that’s Rigby… (Pause.) Do people who take the jump enjoy the fall before they hit the ground? Because I’m constantly finding myself standing on edges of buildings. Not intentionally, I don’t think. I don’t know.

Her phone drops out of her pocket. It hits the floor. Lights snap up when the phone starts ringing, to reveal WITCH and TOAD beside her. RIGBY picks up the phone and turns it off to stop the ringing.

Now when you go clubbing – (Wipes nose on sleeve.) I mean straight you or gay-boy you – (Wipes nose on sleeve again.) and you want a fuck, or not a fuck – (Looks at sleeve, Jesus the stuff has spread everywhere.) you want a boyfriend or a girlfriend, you know, someone who gives a shit about your existence on a deeper level, you’re not just in the room, you are the pivotal point in the room, in the club, in London, in the world, you know?

She plays with her sweaty fringe as if in preparation for going somewhere.

Now unless you’re not some sad retard that grew up on a farm, you know what to do. Don’t you? You walk in, you see a guy at the bar, eyes meet, you get a drink, pretend that you’re having a great time even though you ramble the same old recycled conversations like they’re classics. Then he shouts in your ear, something painfully predictable and uninspiring and it doesn’t throttle your world, but still, it’s exciting. Actually no, that does throttle your world in that moment, and for the rest of the week. That’s the sad thing. And from there this happens, and from there this happens. You know. You know the way it goes. Because you’re a normal fucking person.

RIGBY’s phone starts ringing again. This prompts TOAD and WITCH into action.

TOAD (to WITCH). What are you doing with Rigby?

WITCH (to RIGBY). You know Maisy?

TOAD. What are you doing with Rigby?

WITCH (to RIGBY). How do you know Maisy?

Lights snap down again, just RIGBY. Phone snaps off.

RIGBY. Now if you’re unlucky enough to turn out to be a sad little lesbo, like me, none of this applies. None of this applies. Everything I learnt from being a normal person in my earlier life, with you know, ‘sleeping with men’ goes out of the fucking window because lesbians are not normal. Fact. And I’ve only just come out, like for five seconds, and it doesn’t take me long to realise how shit it is.

Phone goes.

TOAD. Oh God you’re not –

WITCH. What?

TOAD. Fucking her are you?

TOAD laughs.

WITCH. Why are you laughing?

TOAD. It’s funny.

WITCH. What is?

TOAD. You’ll laugh when I tell you.

WITCH. What is it?

TOAD. It’s hilarious really.

TOAD grins at RIGBY. RIGBY is desperately trying to turn her phone off but it’s proving diffcult this time.

WITCH. What is it then?

WITCH looks at RIGBY for an answer but RIGBY isn’t looking at them. She can’t turn off the phone.

And who’s that?

RIGBY turns the phone off and with that the lights snap off. There’s a shift in atmosphere. TOAD and WITCH have gone. RIGBY is alone with us.

RIGBY. So. Welcome to the desert. The London lesbian scene, a couple of sad old basements that drip with sweat and piss. You have three options. Three different basements. Basement one. Soho. Shithole. We all sit down there, hearing second-hand pulsating noise of some gay-boy night coming from upstairs. They are having a great time. I can feel their sweat and pre-cum sink and drip through the basement ceiling. And we all sit there, looking up at it. (Shouts at the ceiling.) I HOPE YOU ARE HAVING FUN UP THERE YOU SELFISH POOFS!

R&B starts playing.

What is it with R&B and lesbians? They always play it, they pump it in like it will make up for the lack of testosterone. It’s horrible. So the room is filled with a mixture of business women with Justin Bieber haircuts – (Points.) saggy-boobed bloke types – (Points.) baby-gay northern lesbians that have come over on some awful mini-rugby-league tour, and – (Points.) your fucked-up-on-some-sort-of-drug, pyjama-bottomed, dry old hippy, with a mohawk. That she’s shaved herself. She’s foreign. Actually not always gay, just lost and wanting a good ‘vibe’. Then you have a gaggle of straight tourists who treat G-A-Y Late very much as the Victorian general public treated Bedlam as venue for their entertainment.

Basement two. The queer scene. ‘Edgy’ drag nights and feminist talks with insufferable ‘queer’ – (Fake coughs.) straight girls, normally Goldsmith graduates. They put on an array of terrible ‘queer’ performances that scream ‘I was the quirky one at Marylebone College for Young Ladies.’ Aka live art. Sorry did I mention all these ‘queer’ people are straight? All those girls have boyfriends, it’s just pixie haircuts and septum piercings are very ‘in’ at the moment. They are the equivalent to a Japanese tourist wearing a ‘I Love London’ T-shirt on Oxford Street.

Then there is Basement three. The Dalston scene. Your serious lesbians. You’re really going down the rabbit hole here. I’m at the ‘Clam Jam’. And it’s a Wednesday, a fucking Wednesday. All lesbian nights are outreach projects. Clubs do their bit for us. And I’m at a night called the Clam Jam. Can you imagine being straight and having to go to a event called ‘The Cock and Hole’?

And I’m alone, and yes I have friends, I have friends, thank you, just no one else in the world goes out on a fucking Wednesday, alright?

So I’m here, in the Clam Jam. And it always seems darker in the room on lesbian nights. Though it is advisable to dim the lights for most lesbians.

So you go to the bar. You get served by a tribal butch buzzcut barmaid whose plainness has an aggression to it, like she’s making some sort of statement by looking so fucking awful. And she hates you, because there’s some secret lesbian code of conduct that you’re failing at, because you’ve ordered a ‘normal-person drink’ like a gin and tonic.

And everyone is wearing black. They are the Women in Black, the Dalston scene. Late twenty, thirty-somethings. In advertising, digital design, music industry, et cetera, et cetera. They like their music, they’re very serious about it. The best tables are marked theirs, by a crowd of empty Prosecco bottles. They sit there in their uniformed black, a deep-rich black only lots of money can buy… and they are looking at you. They have this sinister presence, a bit like a group of Nazis in World War Two films, but to be fair to the Nazis they did have the best uniforms. Hugo Boss. Fact.

Anyway just because they glare doesn’t necessarily mean they don’t fancy you, so I don’t get too disheartened too early on. But just to give you the heads-up, being chronically disheartened is part of it.

RIGBY looks at two women sitting at the back of the Clam Jam. These women are NATTY and TOAD. There are dressed identically in black.

So you sit there at the bar… (Wipes nose, laughs a bit.) And you make eye contact with one of them, and – (Laughs again.) and you think – (Laughs.) no one goes to the circus to get laid, do they? (Laughs.) I do.

Chapter One

Part 1 – Drinks with Tweedledum and Tweedledee

RIGBY is sitting at the table in between NATTY and TOAD at the Clam Jam.

RIGBY (to audience). I’ve dated Maisy Toad for about three weeks which isn’t a lot, considering the way she’s been. I’ve been conditioned. The texting every day, I get my drinks paid for, get taken to secret MTV gigs, she’s the social-media executive at a music video production company, she has three thousand, five hundred and fifty-five followers on Twitter. And I like telling my friends that. It makes me sound… Better, improved and more interesting. She also has a lovely flat. This is very important to me. Toad was your pure-bred, out at fourteen. At twenty-two, my age, she had moved in with her girlfriend, this forty-three-year-old prison officer and her kid. The kid was called Ronaldo. She told me that on our first date. Oh and if you are wondering who this is, on our date – (Points at NATTY.) this is Natty. Toad’s friend. She’s always fucking here. Always. Fucking. Here.

TOAD (to RIGBY). How are you feeling? I’m worried because you didn’t sleep last night. (To NATTY.) I asked her to buy me toilet paper on the way home, guess what she brought me?

NATTY. What? She was round again last night? Doesn’t she have a home to go to?

TOAD. Yeah, guess what she brought me?

NATTY. What?

TOAD. Kitchen paper. And cava.

NATTY (to RIGBY). You muppet.

TOAD. She’s a nightmare.

RIGBY. Well I was just in a rush –

TOAD. Wasted obviously as per –

NATTY. Obviously –