Lizzie Siddal E-Book

Jeremy Green

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

Seitenzahl: 100

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2014

Beschreibung

A gripping historical drama charting one woman's dazzling trajectory from model to lover to artist, to a tragic figure in her own right. London, 1849. Lizzie Siddal is plucked from the obscurity of a bonnet shop to model for the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood - an intoxicating group of young painters bent on revolutionising the Victorian art world. Inspired by their passion and ambition, she throws herself headlong into their lives and their art, nearly dying in the creation of Millais' Ophelia. The painting is a triumph. But Lizzie wants more and dares to dream of being an artist herself. Jeremy Green's play Lizzie Siddal premiered at the Arcola Theatre, London, in November 2013.

Leseprobe

Jeremy Green

LIZZIE SIDDAL

NICK HERN BOOKS

London

www.nickhernbooks.co.uk

Contents

Title Page

Original Production

Dedication

Characters

Lizzie Siddal

About the Author

Copyright and Performing Rights Information

Lizzie Siddal was first performed at the Arcola Theatre, London, on 20 November 2013. The cast was as follows:

DANTE GABRIEL ROSSETTI

Tom Bateman

JOHN RUSKIN/CHARLES HOWELL/MR MITCHELL

Daniel Crossley

WILLIAM HOLMAN HUNT

Simon Darwen

JOHN EVERETT MILLAIS/MR TEBBS/GREENGROCER

James Northcote

LIZZIE SIDDAL

Emma West

ANNIE MILLER/GREENGROCER’S MOTHER

Jayne Wisener

Director

Lotte Wakeham

Set and Costume Designer

David Woodhead

Lighting Designer

Howard Hudson

Sound Designer

Andrew Graham

Casting Director

Emma Green

Assistant Director

Georgia Lewis-Smith

Production Manager

Andy Reader

Stage Manager

Anna Sheard

Deputy Stage Manager

Holly Taylor

Assistant Stage Manager

Lily Bootman

Costume Supervisor

Emily Barratt

General Manager

1505 Management

Producers

Copperhead Productions, Peter Huntley Productions

Assistant Producer

Annabel Williamson

For Emma West

Special thanks to Michael Lindall, to Lotte Wakeham,and to the late Mr W. J. Stephens

Characters

CHARLES HOWELL, thirty

MR TEBBS, late twenties

WILLIAM HOLMAN HUNT, twenty-five

LIZZIE SIDDAL, twenty-two

DANTE GABRIEL ROSSETTI, twenty-five

JOHN EVERETT MILLAIS, twenty-two

JOHN RUSKIN, thirty-three

ANNIE MILLER, early twenties

GREENGROCER, late twenties

GREENGROCER’S MOTHER, mid-forties

MR MITCHELL, forty-five

Note on Text

A forward slash (/) indicates an overlap in dialogue or, when it comes at the end of a line, an abrupt following-on of speech.

ACT ONE

Scene One

October, 1869. Highgate Cemetery. Night. A mile away, a church bell strikes the quarter hour.

CHARLES HOWELL appears out of the night, carrying a lantern. Another man with a lantern approaches. It is MR TEBBS.

HOWELL. Are you Mr Tebbs?

TEBBS. I am.

HOWELL. Charles Howell. How do you do.

TEBBS. How do you do.

HOWELL. You’re very young for a solicitor.

TEBBS. Yes. That’s because I’m very good. Are you the man who’s going to put his hands in the coffin?

HOWELL. I am.

TEBBS. Where are the gravediggers?

HOWELL. They went up ahead. The sexton went up with them.

TEBBS. They can’t dig before midnight.

HOWELL. They’re building a bonfire. For heat and light. Shall we join them?

They start to go.

TEBBS….What was she like? Do you know?

HOWELL. What was who like?

TEBBS. The woman. The woman we’re going to dig up.

HOWELL. Does it matter what she was like?

Scene Two

Lights up on HUNT’s seedy studio. Morning.

WILLIAM HOLMAN HUNT – age twenty-five – paints LIZZIE SIDDAL – age twenty-two. He speaks as he applies oil paint to a canvas of A Converted British Family Sheltering a Christian Missionary.

She stands motionless, her left arm cradling a wooden bowl, her right hand poised above the bowl in the act of scooping water from it. Draped across her shoulders is a green shawl.

HUNT. Brilliant! The Academy will be compelled to accept this because it’s brilliant! They’ll hang it high up, hoping no one will notice, but I’m using colour of such intensity, the old farts will look up unawares and die of shock. ‘Aaaah! It’s too bright! Where are the shadows? Where’s the brown slosh? He’s not painting with dark-brown slosh! Aargh!’ Last to die will be Sir Tufton Bufton, wandering in from luncheon. ‘By Gad! – she’s – got – red – hairrrggh!’ They hate anything different – I love anything different. How does it feel to be different, Lizzie?

LIZZIE opens her mouth.

No, no, don’t speak. You know the restriction – models can’t talk in here. I must have no opinion in my head but my own. An artist’s studio cannot be a democracy. Don’t be offended. I am perfecting a new way of living. I call it ‘Sincerity’. I shall paint the truth and speak the truth. I expect to be hated.

ROSSETTI (off). Maniac!

HUNT. Not now!

ROSSETTI (off). Are you there?

HUNT. I’m working!

ROSSETTI – age twenty-five – appears in the doorway. From where he’s standing, he can’t see LIZZIE.

ROSSETTI. Are you really working? Or are you gawping at pictures of female buttocks?

HUNT…. Gabriel, may I present Miss Elizabeth Siddal. Miss Siddal, Mr Rossetti.

ROSSETTI steps forward and sees her. A beat.

ROSSETTI (to LIZZIE). How do you do… (To HUNT.) I thought today was foliage.

HUNT. Friday is foliage. Today is ministering maiden.

ROSSETTI (to LIZZIE). Dante Gabriel Rossetti. Or at least a version of him – the embarrassed version. There are other more agreeable versions.

LIZZIE opens her mouth to reply.

HUNT. Miss Siddal cannot talk.

ROSSETTI. Really? I’m so sorry.

HUNT. No, I mean, she cannot talk because I am paying her sixpence an hour not to talk, or move. She is working. I am working.

ROSSETTI. Yes, but not while I’m here, surely.

HUNT. You don’t intend to stay if I’m working?

ROSSETTI. Miss Siddal, what would you think of a man who refuses to converse with his friend merely because of a painting? Can a painting be more important than a person? I think human beings have first claim on our affections, surely.

HUNT. If you’ve come in search of tin, I don’t have any.

ROSSETTI. What makes you think I’m in search of tin?

HUNT. You’re always in search of tin.

ROSSETTI. Supposing I were. What’s a loan between friends?

HUNT. Debt.

ROSSETTI. You mustn’t mind Mr Hunt’s temper, Miss Siddal. I am a painter, too. I understand the frustrations painters are prone to.

HUNT. Then why do you stay?

ROSSETTI (to LIZZIE). Though I am not only a painter. I am also a poet.

HUNT. Then go and write something.

ROSSETTI. I have. I have been writing. I’m exhausted.

HUNT. What? What have you written in the last three months?

It’s a challenge – to a man who hasn’t written anything recently. ROSSETTI hesitates.

ROSSETTI.

‘She fell asleep on Christmas Eve.

At length the long un-granted / shade’

HUNT. That’s not a new one, is it?

ROSSETTI. Not strictly new, no.

HUNT. In the last three months.

ROSSETTI. Very well…

‘Our Lombard country-girls along the coast

Wear daggers in their garters: for / they know’

HUNT. I heard that last year. It’s not new. Nothing recent then?

ROSSETTI….

‘Break, break, break,

On thy cold gray stones, O Sea!

And I would that my tongue could utter

The thoughts that arise in me.

O, well for the fisherman’s boy,

That he shouts with his sister at play!

O, well for / the sailor lad.’

LIZZIE (moving forwards). But that’s not yours!

Both men are surprised.

(To HUNT.) …I’m sorry, Mr Hunt. Please take a penny from my wages.

(To ROSSETTI.) Tennyson wrote that poem.

ROSSETTI. He did.

LIZZIE. Then why call it yours?

ROSSETTI. I shouldn’t have. It was wrong. Perhaps because my own poetry lately is so feeble, I wouldn’t dream of airing it on first acquaintance with a lady.

LIZZIE (disarmed)….Oh.

HUNT groans.

ROSSETTI. But you like Tennyson?

LIZZIE. Yes. Yes, I do. I think him the finest poet we have had since Keats.

ROSSETTI. You like Keats?

LIZZIE. I revere Keats.

ROSSETTI. Keats is fine, isn’t he.

LIZZIE. He is beyond / fine.

ROSSETTI. ‘A thing of beauty is a joy for ever:’

LIZZIE. ‘Its loveliness increases.’

ROSSETTI. ‘It will never pass into / nothingness.’

HUNT. Oh, for Christ’s sake! (To ROSSETTI.) Now do you see why I pay people not to talk? Suddenly the room is full of opinions! I don’t want opinions – hers, or yours! I come here to work! This is my studio, my painting, mine, mine, mine!

LIZZIE. I’m sorry, Mr Hunt.

ROSSETTI. Never apologise for championing a poet, Miss / Siddal.

HUNT. She was apologising for interrupting a painter!

ROSSETTI. Are you a poet, too, Miss Siddal?

LIZZIE opens her mouth to reply.

HUNT. She’s a seamstress.

ROSSETTI (to LIZZIE). Have you never tried to write poems?

HUNT. No, she sews. And sometimes picks up money modelling, but only when she stands still and keeps quiet.

ROSSETTI (to LIZZIE). I haven’t seen you before.

HUNT. Gabriel, Gabriel. If you wish to hold a conversation with Miss Siddal, may I suggest later you take an omnibus down the Old Kent Road?

ROSSETTI (to LIZZIE). Is that where you live?

HUNT. Why do you keep asking her questions? I’m talking to you. (To LIZZIE.) Don’t answer his questions. (To ROSSETTI.) What do you want to know? She lives with her parents south of the river Dad’s got a shop sells knives and forks thinks he’s gentry doesn’t know his daughter models when she isn’t sewing in a hat shop ribbons mostly on bonnets pleasant girl red hair very useful reads a lot but otherwise unremarkable yours for sixpence an hour do you have sixpence of course you don’t I do. ‘That is all ye know and all ye need to know’ – Keats.

ROSSETTI….I wonder you are not employed at the docks squeezing large cargo into small holds. You cannot compress a life into a minute’s breath. It is dismissive. One might even be tempted to call it rude.

LIZZIE. Mr Rossetti. You are kind to leap to my defence where none is needed. Mr Hunt is trying to compress time, not me. It is his money that’s at stake – his canvas that needs attention. Any roughness in his manner will be amply compensated by the brilliance of the painting he will bring into the world.

ROSSETTI….My God, but that is beautifully spoken. Where did you learn to speak like that?

HUNT (warning him). Gabriel.

ROSSETTI. Is it not nobly said?

HUNT. She reads books.

ROSSETTI. She took your part.

HUNT. I’m paying her.

ROSSETTI. I’m not surprised. I’d pay her, too, to speak so well of me.

HUNT (exploding). What is the reason you are here? What? I have a work of art that will not wait. It must be done in time. I can’t come out to play. What do you want from me?

ROSSETTI (like a pathetic little boy). Company.

HUNT groans.

HUNT. There are six weeks left. Don’t you have your own painting?

ROSSETTI. I have nothing. And even if I had something, the ‘Greybeards’ would only criticise me, and I hate criticism. I like praise.

HUNT. Then stay home and show your work to your mum. No wonder you live there. ‘Look, Mama, here’s what I did.’ ‘Oh it’s lovely, Gabriel.’ ‘And here’s what else I did.’ ‘Oh it’s lovely, too, Gabriel.’

ROSSETTI. In point of fact I do have one idea I have long considered.

HUNT. Which one?

ROSSETTI. Beatrice Portinari.

HUNT. Then paint the woman. What’s stopping you?

ROSSETTI. I could never find a face to fit. (To LIZZIE.) Beatrice Portinari was the love of the great poet, Dante Alighieri. Do you know the story?

LIZZIE. No, / I…

HUNT (stopping him from telling the story). No. No.

ROSSETTI. Dante said that from the moment he saw her, he felt his destiny was fixed. When Cupid’s arrow strikes, Miss Siddal, the wounded carries the wound for life, there is no remedy. Once we fall in love, we love for ever. Dante loved Beatrice from a distance.

HUNT. Pretty pointless way to love somebody.

ROSSETTI. What could be more moving than love unrequited? A life full of yearning! One day in the street, because of a stupid misunderstanding, Beatrice refused Dante her greeting as she passed by. It broke his heart.

HUNT. The end.

ROSSETTI. She had red hair.

A beat.

HUNT. I don’t know if you’ve noticed, Gabriel, but Miss Siddal is not available at the moment.

ROSSETTI. I will have money next week to pay a model’s wages. My aunt has promised to send me a guinea. (To LIZZIE.) I have a studio in Highgate.

HUNT. What a pity. Miss Siddal tells me on Monday she goes back to work at the hat shop. The bonnet-making season has returned, which is excellent news for ladies with bad hair – and good news for women who sew who need money to eat. You’ve never had a sweetheart, Gabriel. You think they live on sighs and sonnets. They don’t, she doesn’t, she works. And so do I, so please, please, please, for the love of God, leave me to work!

ROSSETTI….Of course. You only had to say. Miss Siddal. I do hope we meet again. (Leaving.) Maniac.

LIZZIE. Mr Rossetti. There has been an unexpected change in my circumstances. I will be available next week, if that is of any interest.

ROSSETTI. Really?

LIZZIE. Yes.

ROSSETTI. Well. That’s remarkable news, isn’t it.

Scene Three

ROSSETTI’s