The Play’s The Thing
Cast:
Whoami
Igwt Mroomh
M
The DP
Prologue:
And while theſe Scenes the conſcious Knave diſpleaſe,
Who feels within the Criminal he ſees,
The Uncorrupt and Good muſt ſmile, to find
No Mark for Satyr in his Generous Mind.
– Henry Fielding, Rape upon Rape
Act I
A bathroom, plush and regency, with a clawfoot bathtub, a bidet, plush green-carpeted floor, a huge crystal chandelier, a little too bright.
Enter M, who begins running the bath and pouring unguents into it. The steam rises thick and fast around them. Sometimes you can’t see them properly for the steam.
Enter Whoami and Igwt Mrooh, both in robes. Whoami sits on the toilet with his head in his hands.
Act 2
Whoami starts speaking as if he had been in mid-sentence
…and so, after all of that for so long, after everything that the mummy has done to make it hard for me to even be a person—oh don’t let’s discuss THE MATRIARCH now things will get away from me they always do…. Politeness has nothing to do with consent. And for me, politeness is the name of the game. You can take me to the execution block but you can’t force me to know things that I don’t know.
M begins to put unidentifiable items into the bath. She is clearly suffering from a very severe eczema flare up.
Act 3
Whoami: So much of being loved is building other people up, smoothing over their holes with beneficent jam. At breaking point you have to whip around and just latch onto somebody else’s hesitance – that stem cell of fear that you recognise because it threatens to make you, too, into NOBODY. So you siphon off a morsel of that sweet unformed stuff and just mutilate it into yourself. Yes that’s ultimately the thing that you do. You take what is unformed and full of potential, that stem cell, and you inject it with yourself and it becomes part of you but a part that’s so sexy because it’s so unfamiliar. Like wanking with a numb hand. The irony is, even when the hand points the finger in my direction, it is still my own hand.
Walks over to the mirror and pressing one finger on his brow between his eyes
Polyphemus is still screaming that NOBODY blinded him.
Picking up a nearby object and putting it absent-mindedly in M’s hands as he paces around the tiny room.
Think of the baby, who you are so happy to take care of. His fingers wrap and curl around anything within his palm’s reach. A baby lies nakedly in the centre of the universe willing it all to be his, barely realising that it isn’t. I was only a baby again that night, so powerful. People love to take care of powerful things, that’s why all the movies are about who gets to take care of the kryptonite.
Long Pause. He does a brief tap dance—an excerpt from Fred Astaire’s number with Ginger Rogers in the engine room in Shall We Dance, then ends in mid-swing, lacklustre.
You’re so quiet over there, trapped inside that itchy skin. Well, we are all trapped! Captives of a story. It feeds us though so who are we to complain! You keep one finger sticking through the cage bars as you fatten up and then, one day, the witch eats you up. You wait. I prophesy they’ll say: “The baby humiliated me!” “Stamp on the baby!” “But how is the baby coping?”
Act 4
Enter The DP.
Whoami: Look at me! Look at me! Look at me!
The DP turns to face the mirror, trying not to look at Whoami, but she can’t escape him in the reflection. She stares directly into her own eyes.
The DP: It doesn’t look good.
M glances up, stirring the bath with a large wooden stick. Her bandages have started to unravel into the bath—as she stirs they are unraveling from her arms. The DP bows her head for a second and emits a long suffering sigh.
The DP: What are you going to need?
Whoami: A place.
The DP: A place for what?
Whoami, pointing to M: A place to channel that anger.
Canned laughter, 1, 2, 3 minutes of.
Act 5
Igwt Mroomh: I, too, am afraid of being washed away by a story from which I can never recover.
Then she turns to face Whoami. They look the same.
Igwt Mroomh: The worst part of all of this is that I know you, Whoami, I’ve known you for years, but I don’t have an excuse for not knowing this about you. You’ve been a friend to me, you’ve even been normal at times. But I’ve been horribly surprised, bamboozled, humiliated. Now I have to clean you all off, I have to make this space all clean of you, sorry.
Igwt Mroomh steps into the bathtub which M has been preparing and starts to sink out of sight, singing her song.
Whoami: Can I have some quiet please? I’m trying to figure myself out.
As she sings her voice becomes bubbles—the bath has filled up over her head. The bubbles continue to sound brightly for the rest of the scene. The bath continues to run over the edges of the tub.
M and the DP are holding each other’s hands and leaning together and laughing. Then a door opens in the back of the stage that was invisible before, and the DP, suddenly serious, takes M by the shoulders and pushes her through it.
The DP: Never return!
She closes the door behind M and resumes her place in front of the mirror.
Whoami: I’ll be revenged on the whole pack of you.
CURTAIN