The Legend of Ned Ludd (NHB Modern Plays) E-Book

Joe Ward Munrow

• Herausgeber: Nick Hern Books
• Kategorie: Poesie und Drama
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024

Seitenzahl: 97

Beschreibung

Machines can make our work easier. They can also make it vanish overnight. Joe Ward Munrow's play The Legend of Ned Ludd weaves together stories from around the world and takes us on a whirlwind global commute, from the Luddites' nineteenth-century war against new technology through to London, Liverpool, Lagos and beyond… But we're all at the mercy of The Machine. And, in this powerful exploration of work, automation and capitalism, The Machine selects the scenes for each performance, resulting in 256 possible versions of the play, spun from all the stories included in this published edition. It premiered at the Liverpool Everyman in 2024, directed by Jude Christian. 'Thrillingly audacious… an arresting drama of man, machine and revolution… each scene change is like a magic trick… gradually unfurling profound observations' - Financial Times 'An unpredictable and novel theatrical experience… thought-provoking and engaging… quietly devastating' - The Stage 'Ambitious and witty' - Indiependent

Leseprobe

Joe Ward Munrow

THE LEGEND OF NED LUDD

NICK HERN BOOKS

London

www.nickhernbooks.co.uk

Contents

Original Production Details

Acknowledgements

Dedication

Characters

Note on Play

The Legend of Ned Ludd

About the Author

Copyright and Performing Rights Information

The Legend of Ned Ludd was first performed at the Liverpool Everyman on 20 April 2024, with the following cast:

B

Reuben Johnson

A

Menyee Lai

C

Shaun Mason

Recorded Translations

Neelima Samaiya & Manuel Mouchipku

Director

Jude Christian

Set and Costume Designer

Hazel Low

Lighting Designer

Laura Howard

Sound Designer

Kieran Lucas

Costume Supervisor

Shellby Hamer

Voice Coach

Elspeth Morrison

Producer

Michelle Cailleux

Production Manager

Dan Franklin

Company Manager

Sarah Lewis

Stage Manager

Kate Eccles

Deputy Stage Manager

Roxanne Vella

Assistant Stage Manager

Kaila Sharples

Book Cover

Beth Lewis

Assistant Production Manager

Diego Gutiérrez Córdoba

Assistant Producer

Zoe Walker

LX Plotter

Jack Coleman

LX Operator

Jack Wood

Sound & AV Programmer

Ian Davies

Sound & AV Operators

Roxanne Vella & Kaila Sharples

Automation

Mike Cantley

Stage Crew

Jack Higham

Set Construction

RT Scenic

Wardrobe Maintenance

Eleanor Ager-Cantley

Captioned Performance

Steph Carter

Acknowledgements

This play took a very long time to write and the amount of people who helped get it over the line is huge.

My massive thanks go to Kevin Binfield, without whose book, The Writings of the Luddites, I wouldn’t have been able to write the play.

Thanks also to: the brilliant writers, dramaturgs and directors who gave notes and helped hone the script. Jay Miller, Ashleigh Wheeler, Craig Gilbert, Ellie Horne, Lucy Morrison, Jane Fallowfield, Dan Hutton, Mark Ravenhill, Andy Routledge, Frank Peschier, Jen Tan, Tommo Fowler, and especially Jude Christian.

The amazing actors and makers who helped me in and out of the rehearsal room – Yusra Warsama, Joshua Higgott, Selma Brook, Simon Scardifield, Kirsty Ryder, Helen Carter, Reuben Johnson, Menyee Lai, Shaun Mason and especially Amaka Okafor and Thanh Le Dang.

The translators who helped me realise the global scope of the play – Stevie Duong, Joe Mak, Alena Baimukhametova, Julia Munrow, Mark Huhnen, Joginder Kaur, Elliott Greenhill, Jesmar Arevalo, Daisy Aigbe and Baudoin Mathix Mbiandji Ndipomi. Special thanks to Neelima Samaiya and Manuel Mouchipku.

Nathan Powell who facilitates any of the good creative work I do.

Rachel Taylor for not giving up on the play.

A shout-out to everyone at the Liverpool Everyman and a special thank-you to Mark Da Vanzo and Ashlie Nelson for being bold enough to programme this slightly bonkers play. It’s massively appreciated and I hope it pays off.

Finally, a big thank you to Alf and Leo, for making me laugh every day.

J.W.M.

For my Mum and Dad

And dedicated to the memory of Curtis Warren Thwaites

Characters

A

B

C

Any race or gender, the only important thing is that the cast is diverse.

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

Note on Play

This is a play about work.

That means there is a certain amount of work to do – for both the actors and the audience.

There are twenty-three scenes in this play but in each performance the audience will only see fifteen of them.

In each performance eight of the scenes that are performed are randomly selected by a machine or random-choice algorithm or app.

The actors only know which scene they will be playing when the machine has selected it.

The tabulated form of the play looks like this.

The scenes in bold are non-negotiable, they are in every performance of the play.

The scenes that are subdivided into A and B columns will have one of those scenes in that row performed and then move on to the next numerical row. For instance, for the third scene the machine will either pick scene 3A or 3B. The next scene would then be either scene 4A or 4B – again randomly picked by the machine.

If you’re simply reading the play you can arbitrarily decide which scenes you read as you progress through the play or flip a coin, etc.

However, if the play is being performed, the play requires that a machine or random choice generator (there are smartphone apps and websites for these) selects the scene. i.e. the autonomy lies with a machine or algorithm rather than a human.

Translations

Each of the scenes in which the characters would not be speaking English also contain a translated version of that scene. These translations can be projected as subtitles, or potentially the scenes could be played in those languages with subtitles being provided in English.

The Machine

The machine that selects the scene can be as simple or as complex as required.

It could be as simple as a smartphone with a random-choice- generator app that instantaneously selects and flashes up the scene to be played.

Or it could be a nightmarish, mechanised, loom-like device full of cogs and wheels that clanks and judders as it makes its choice.

Hopefully it is something that a designer and director can have fun with.

1. THE CAST

Lights up.

The actors are on stage. They use their real names.

There is room here to play and improvise around these lines and potentially mock the largeness of the idea, the natural waste in the scenes not witnessed by the audience and the amount of work that the play puts upon the actors. This is not obligatory, it’s just an offer to find the humour and joy in this moment between cast and audience.

C Hi

B Hi

A Hello.

Beat.

C I’m Shaun

A And I’m Menyee

B And I’m Reuben.

Beat.

Tonight will be a story of stories

A The stories of capitalism

B And globalisation

C And automation

Beat.

A In this play there are over twenty different scenes

C We each play dozens of different characters

B In dozens of different stories

C Different times

A Different places

B Different people

C Some of the people you might know

B Some of the people you definitely don’t

A Most of the stories that you see tonight

C Will be selected randomly

B By the machine

Pause.

A So, we, the actors, won’t know what scene we’ll be playing until the machine makes its choice.

B And the fact that it’s random means there are actually two hundred and fifty-six versions of this play.

Pause.

That’s a lot.

C It’s a fucking shedload

B Some people could say, it’s too much.

A Not me.

Pause.

C So, the play is pretty much guaranteed to be different every night.

B Literally.

C So this is a story of stories

A Stories of capitalism

B Globalisation

C Automation

B Money

C Power

A But mainly, it’s the stories of work.

B The stories of us.

2. THE LETTER

Complete darkness.

A voice. Potentially automated.

To the Gentlemen Hosiers of Nottingham and surrounding areas in the year of our Lord 1816.

Our lords and betters, we humbly appeal to you in this time of calamity and distress;

We are destitute of all the comforts of life – our only acquaintance being pinching poverty and pining want.

We wish to live peaceably and honestly by our labour;

And to train up our children in the paths of virtue and rectitude But we cannot accomplish our wishes.

Thirty years ago, a silk-stocking maker obtained a decent subsistence.

No longer.

The twin evils of rising prices and new technologies means we have been overtaken and overridden, roughshod.

These new machines make our previous peaceable contentment impossible.

And we appeal to you, gentlemen, to put pressure on parliament regarding the death penalty for machine breaking.

Yes, machines have been broken. Looms have been tossed into the street.

But we are starving by inches, our children ever more so. We wish to remind you that it is better to be content with a moderate profit than have your manufactories burnt to the ground.

Some of us have appealed to you through letter and some of our kin have recently been driven to take up arms and have met with the gallows’ cold embrace.

There are men, women and children rising in every portion of the kingdom to replace them.

Those who have been lost will not die in vain.

Their cries will echo through this land.

So, let me make myself plain, there shall be no correspondence beyond this point.

If you comply with our previous requests, all will be well. However, if not, I, Ned Ludd, and an army of men, women and children, who number in their thousands,

Will call upon you,

And if we cannot break looms we will break something else And we will do it too, in spite of the Devil.

Yours,

A friend of the poor,

Ned Ludd

God Protect the Trade

3A. CHANGSHA. CHINA. 2015.

A and B are sat at computers. They are intently playinga computer game using keyboards. Possibly a large backdrop projection means we can see what they can see on the screen. B’s avatar was trying to mine gold in the game but now is being attacked by a group of characters.

A 你今天做了什么?

What did you do today?

Pause.

你今天做了什么?

What did you do today?

B 滚开。

Fuck off.

A 在说我吗?

Me?

B 不是，我是说那些美国人。

No. I mean these Americans.

A 我知道。

I know.

B 他们是脑袋有问题对吧? 咱们彼此河水不犯井水。

I don’t know what their problem is? I haven’t done anything to them.

A 去冬泉谷走一趟吧，那里安静一点，昨晚我在那边 找到黄金。

Take a trip to Winterspring, it’s usually more quiet there, I mined gold there all last night.

B 没时间了，老板说要在四点前给他十万块黄金。

I haven’t got time, boss said I have to get him a hundred thousand pieces of gold before four o’clock.

A 真搞不懂他们要这么多黄金来干嘛。

I really can’t understand what they do with this gold.

B 他们把黄金卖给人。

They sell it.

A 这个我也知道，我是不明白那些买的人。他们要黄 金来干嘛？

Yes I know that. What I can’t understand is the person who buys it. What they do with it?

B 你可以在游戏中用黄金取得领先地位。很明显那些 警卫根本不在乎这个，可是总有些懒得花时间玩游 戏的美国胖子会想用这个方法。警卫把我们的黄金 卖给他们换钱，然后那个美国人再用虚拟黄金买他 们一直想要的虚拟宝剑。

The gold helps you to get ahead in the game. Obviously the guards don’t care about getting ahead in the game but there’s probably some fat American somewhere who can’t be bothered to play the game for hours and hours. The guards sell our gold to them for real money and then the American uses that virtual gold to buy that shiny virtual sword they’ve always wanted.

A 他们良心过意得去吗？就这样坐享其成？

And they’re happy with that are they? To get the reward without the work?

B 他们根本不介意。

Well. They’re happier than us.

A 我才不会这么做。

一定不会。

Well. I won’t do it.

I won’t.

B 那你来动手吧。

Well, then maybe you should do it.

A 才不要，给人家惊喜才是我一贯的作风

No, I like to surprise people. That’s my style.

B 那你要自己承担后果。

Then you have to bear the consequences yourself.

A 什么?

What?

B 你要承担后果。 他今天在工厂里是这么说的，做 不到就要承担后果。

You have to bear the consequences. He said it at the factory today, that anyone who can’t do it will bear the consequences.

A 那是什么意思?

What’s the meaning of that?

B 就是说 - 你要承担后果。

That is to say – you have to bear the consequences.

Pause.

A 他亲口告诉你的?

Is that how he told you?

B 也不算，虽然当时他在我旁边，但没有真的对着我 说。说不定在跟我们其中一人说 吧，也有可能是 跟全部人说，或者只是他在自言自语而已

No, he said it next to me right into the air, not really to me, maybe he’s talking to one of us, maybe to all of us, or he’s just talking to himself.

A 在吓唬吧。

Scary.

B 有被吓到吗?

Are you scared?

A 之前他们不让我假释，现在我天不怕、地不怕。

Since they told me I can’t get parole I have decided to not be scared.

Pause.

你今天有到外面去吗?

Were you outside today?

B 没有，一整天都在工厂里。

No, all day in the factory.

A 那你一定有弄了些什么东西吧。

So, you made something.

B 对。

Yes.

A 在哪家工厂?

Which factory?

B 塑料厂。

Plastics.

A 要到外面去才能找到的哪一家吗?