David Hare Plays 1

by David Hare

  Elise Nonsense.

  Joanne It’s true. Men have consistently attempted to downgrade the clitoris. They claim it is just a withered penis. What arrogance! A withered penis! The clitoris has been scientifically established as having the greatest concentration of sensory nerve endings of any part of a human body, male or female. More than this.

  Elise There’s more?

  Joanne It has also, inch for inch, measure for measure, a far greater erectile capacity than the comparatively dull, insensitive, numb male organ.

  Elise Is that really true?

  Joanne The satisfaction of the female is correspondingly greater than that of the male. The penis is a poor blunt instrument beside the sensitivity of the delicate amazing clitoris.

  Elise Are you a virgin?

  Joanne Of course.

  Elise Then you don’t know what you’re talking about.

  Joanne You don’t have to have felt a penis to know these things. You can make your mind up perfectly adequately from descriptions and drawings.

  Elise Help me clean the baths.

  Joanne No.

  Elise There’s an inspection in half an hour. As soon as the Greek dancing’s over. And I’ve got my song to rehearse.

  Joanne (sitting) Now give us a song!

  Elise Do you want to see?

  Joanne Please.

  Elise For the Governors of Brackenhurst a song, in the modern idiom.

  Joanne Come on.

  Elise Give us a chance.

  Walking back to Brackenhurst

  Ump a o ye ye

  Had enough of loneliness

  Ump a o ye ye

  Brackenhurst’s the place for me

  It’s the only place to be.

  Elise re-practises getting the dance right that goes with it.

  How was it?

  Joanne Dreadful.

  Elise Why?

  Joanne What does it mean? It doesn’t mean anything.

  Elise I’ve always wanted to entertain. I’m going to try showbiz when I get out.

  Joanne (up) Is it easy to do that walk?

  Elise Nothing simpler.

  Joanne and Elise (together)

  Walking back to Brackenhurst

  Ump a o ye ye

  Had enough of loneliness

  Ump a o ye ye

  Brackenhurst’s the place for me

  It’s the only place to be.

  Joanne I’m coming along.

  Elise Very good.

  Joanne (singing) ‘I’m Singing In The Rain’. Gene Kelly. 1951. I never thought to have any talent. Look, I’ll show you how to do the Gene Kelly.

  She dances, rather slowly, but with some beauty.

  Elise I’ve got work to do.

  Joanne (snatching the brush) Let someone else do the work.

  Elise Give me that. I’ve got to do it.

  Joanne Why?

  Elise Ann told me to.

  Joanne So?

  Elise I’ll report you.

  Joanne What do you think you’re doing, Elise, obeying her?

  They process round with Elise trying to get the brush.

  Are you really going to spend your entire life imagining penises of amazing thrust and magnitude – phantom penises – alternately fucking and obeying, laying down under men whatever they say? Lying down under Ann?

  Elise Give me the brush.

  Joanne Use your claws. And counting your shares? You see, I’ve found out about the shares in Shell Oil and ICI and Marks and Spencer and –

  Elise Good shares!

  Joanne Class traitor – a working-class girl with shares in Dow Chemicals. A very good share the napalm share as long as the war holds. Supply and demand – very much a seller’s market nowadays in napalm.

  Elise I’m putting it aside for my old age.

  Joanne tosses her the brush.

  Joanne Quite so.

  Elise sets to work cleaning one bath while filling another with water.

  Elise You’ve been hunting through my papers.

  Joanne I’m fascinated by your private life. I find it studded with young bucks.

  Elise You have read everything in my room.

  Joanne Everything. If we’re to live together, make this community work, then we must know everything about each other, so we’re strong in each other.

  Elise Not much strength in my things.

  Joanne I don’t know.

  Elise Quite the opposite. I don’t like you hunting about, trying to make me political.

  Joanne Make you? We’re all political. We’re in politics up to our eyeballs, in the shit, God help us.

  Joanne throws Ajax over the floor as she speaks.

  Elise What’s that for? Help me scrub.

  Joanne No.

  Elise Ann’ll see to you. Wait till I tell her. What is that for?

  Joanne It’s for Ann to clean. Principles of guerrilla warfare. I am fighting back where least expected.

  Ann enters in Greek costume.

  Ann Did you grease the bottoms of the Greek dancers’ shoes?

  Elise Did she do that?

  Joanne Not saying.

  Ann They’re falling about like skittles in there. I’m going to have a word or two to say. Free form and bodily expression it’s meant to be, and you’ve got them tumbling about showing their knickers in front of the Governors. Clean up that mess on the floor, Joanne. If you won’t help, then you’ll have to go.

  Joanne Suits me.

  Ann Are these chairs not done, Elise, mercy, and the Governors not five minutes away?

  Joanne From where I’m standing I can see the butcher calling at the door. He’s knocked twice and looks like giving up.

  Ann I’ll go down and speak to him.

  Joanne I think it’s a delivery, I’ll see to it.

  Ann Please, I can manage.

  Joanne I am Domestic Science, I can go.

  Ann I am Kitchens, I will.

  Joanne The Governors are waiting for you in the Hall.

  Ann Out of my way.

  Joanne Let me.

  Ann Quick or he’ll go.

  Joanne Exactly. Back to the Greek dancing.

  Ann I want to see the butcher.

  She gets by.

  Joanne There’s nothing between his legs you couldn’t find elsewhere.

  Ann Vulgar. Heartless child.

  Joanne So?

  Ann You’re fired.

  Ann rushes out. Joanne yells after her.

  Joanne If a lascivious and debauched headmistress can’t even …

  Elise drudges on. Joanne turns back.

  I’m out of it. She’s just let me go. And there’s a Warner Brothers Retrospective at the National Film Theatre and I just couldn’t be happier.

  Elise What about our community?

  Joanne The mistake of any doctrinal group is to render itself monolithic. In other words, intercourse or isolation? I’m leaving. I must take my practical experience of a feminist community – Brackenhurst – to my sisters in the outside world. Who can benefit from what I learnt here.

  Elise She won’t let you go.

  Joanne To show women everywhere they don’t have to lie down for anyone.

  Elise You haven’t done anything here. You haven’t gone one inch towards helping any woman here.

  Joanne I’ve got that woman on the run. This place’ll never give off that dreadful masculine chill again. Look, she’s chasing the butcher down the drive.

  Elise You’ve closed the whole place down.

  Joanne Well, that’s good, isn’t it? Are you going to run that bath all day? Dawn. An empty street. A delicatessen. Goldstein’s delicatessen. A scrap of paper blowing down the cardboard street. A streetlight still lit. Two boys dressed in something like tweed and urchin caps, sly as hell with shining faces. A brick, a window, they throw it through, hands into the cooked meat counter but the alarm’s gone and we’re on our way into another Warner Brothers Retrospective season.

  Elise has turned the bath off. Ann has e
ntered. Joanne continues to fanfare the Retrospective.

  Ann You know I don’t mind about all the troubles, Joanne, that have set you aside from the rest of us, your being an artist and therefore different. But the point must be made. You live in a world of your own, and you must control your fantasies.

  Ann throws her a leg of lamb. Joanne catches it.

  You are Domestic Science.

  Joanne You sacked me.

  Ann That remains to be seen.

  Joanne I’m dismissed, (threatening with the joint) I promise you.

  Ann We need you far too much.

  Elise Far too much.

  Ann There’s no need for that now, Elise. The Governors have gone.

  Elise What about my song?

  Ann Keep it for another time.

  Elise My song.

  Ann There are very few Governors left. A few more Governors than pupils in fact, but not very many all the same.

  Ann has been standing at the back. She drops to her knees.

  God, why I allow it I will never know.

  Joanne (gently) Let me go. There are only five pupils. You don’t need three teachers.

  Ann Where would you go?

  Joanne I’d work in the cinema again.

  Ann You couldn’t cope, it’s become terribly hard work. They have seventy-millimetre equipment. That’s man’s work.

  Joanne There’s no ready reason …

  Ann (no longer resigned but really angry) You’re as much sold on this place as the rest of us. (recovering) Isn’t she, Elise?

  Elise Yes.

  Joanne Why do you want me to stay?

  Ann Because we love you.

  Joanne Why do you love me?

  Ann Because you’re you. You’re my testament to Brackenhurst, I remember the Princess said to me –

  Joanne Snob.

  Ann The Princess said – ‘Why employ somebody with such a feeble grasp of reality?’ She meant you. ‘Your Highness,’ I replied, ‘here we care.’ And her Highness answered and I was very moved by this, ‘Perhaps in the kingdom of the mind the sane are mad and the mad sane.’ Such a way she said it. And they say royalty aren’t intellectuals. They aren’t in the way you are, Joanne: neurotic and miserable, trying to make us all sad.

  Joanne She still took her kid away.

  Ann You drive everyone away. The Governors fled so fast you might have thought the house was on fire. Your feminist appeals strike no chord in women and simply repel men.

  Joanne Good. It was a real disappointment to me when you gave in. Chastity was something of a passion of mine. To have held off for so long, Ann, and then to give in to the butcher – a fine man, a working man, an artisan, certainly. But not the man you deserve, through no fault of his own a victim, poor sod, one of the sodding people.

  Ann I’m a cumbersome performer. I don’t count myself very much. I haven’t laid bare great golden fields of happiness I’d care to tell you about. I don’t have simple sexual needs. No one who teaches at Brackenhurst does. We’re all in the Freud and underpant class. The men I’ve known leave soon afterwards. But my experience of men is what makes me a woman.

  Joanne How grotesque.

  Ann Grotesque it may be to you whose experience of sex is the Brackenhurst changing-rooms in among the brassières, but to those of us –

  Elise Do keep it down –

  Ann You’re on my side.

  Joanne leaps on to the end of the bath facing the audience.

  Joanne All my suffering! I shall crop my hair like Joan of Arc. Dreyer 1926.

  She falls face downwards into the water, comes up.

  Extravagant gesture.

  But Ann is over at the side of the tub and speaks at once.

  Ann While you’re there, Joanne, listen.

  Elise takes Joanne’s other arm and they support her head over the edge of the end of the bath.

  The world is not divided into two. The bad and the good and the women and the men. Do you understand that? Do you understand?

  Joanne I don’t believe it.

  Ann and Elise duck her head and hold it under the water.

  Ann Can you hear me?

  Ann and Elise lift her head out.

  All right, do you feel better? You’ve caused a lot of trouble with your views. Let’s get this straight. I am a woman and I’m inferior to men. The woman’s place is below, beneath and under men.

  Joanne It’s not.

  Ann and Elise duck her head and hold it under the water.

  Ann I will fight to the death for my right to be inferior. Inferiority is a privilege I wish to preserve. I don’t want to be equal. And I don’t want my girls equal. And I don’t want a socialist community.

  Ann and Elise lift her head out.

  Joanne Now it comes out.

  Ann pushes her down repeatedly and hard into the water.

  Ann See what I want? See what I want?

  Elise Leave her alone.

  Ann I’m losing my pupils, my Governors, my school, my self-respect.

  Elise Leave her alone. Let’s go for a drink.

  Ann lets go of Joanne. Ann and Elise leave.

  Ann (as they go) Yesterday she handed all the girls a jar of Vaseline.

  Exeunt.

  Joanne gets dripping out of the bath.

  Joanne Very good, excellent.

  Blackout, end of scene.

  During the scene change: Henry Mancini.

  SCENE FOUR

  Common Room. Ann and Elise are at opposite ends of the room, well dressed. They’re pissed, but elevated not slurring.

  Ann Drink?

  Elise You can take me out tonight.

  Ann goes to get a drink.

  With the present shortage of men you may take me out.

  Ann Thank you.

  Elise Don’t be shy.

  Ann What would you like?

  Elise Scotch.

  Ann Go mad and have a Campari.

  Elise I’ll have a Scotch.

  Ann My first …

  Elise What? Go on, say.

  Ann (mumbling) Lovely dress.

  Elise Thank you.

  Ann Lovely.

  Elise Huh huh.

  Ann You’ve got the figure for it, too. So slim.

  Elise Flat-chested. I’ve always had small breasts.

  Ann I didn’t imagine they’d shrunk.

  Remark is unreasonably funny. They laugh.

  Oh very good. So far very good.

  Elise It doesn’t convince me for a moment. I feel exceedingly foolish. I’d never laugh at a joke like that.

  Ann I was perfectly well in there.

  Elise It’s not a bit realistic.

  Ann I wish I had your breasts.

  Elise You’re welcome to them.

  Ann I don’t know what it is people like about big breasts.

  Elise Don’t be absurd. Absurd. If you ever talked like – a man would fly if you said that.

  Ann Who’s the man?

  Elise You are.

  Ann So?

  Elise So …

  Ann I make the rules.

  Elise You can’t have it both ways. Are you a man?

  Ann I’m the bloody man.

  Elise Then no breasts. Breasts are out. You may comment on mine but you may not refer to your own.

  Ann I knew when I first met you that here was someone very warm, very responsive, who would understand the troubles – in my life immediately.

  Elise A great improvement. Certainly …

  Ann A lot of people want the physical thing.

  Elise That’s my experience.

  Ann But when somebody special –

  Elise Absolutely the same thing with me.

  Ann Then there is an immediate – I want a word.

  Elise Rapport –

  Ann Rapport –

  Elise Yes?

  Ann It’s going to be more than physical. Though of course it may be physical as well.

  Elise As well. Of course.

  Ann It will in f
act be better for the physical thing will be based on something real.

  Elise That’s tremendously exciting.

  Ann It will be based on our respect for each other’s minds.

  Elise Rather than our bodies.

  Ann You know.

  Elise I know.

  Ann Don’t you think we have something?

  Elise Ann, I’ve no sooner sat down than –

  Ann I don’t mean to rush you.

  Joanne enters unseen at the back of the stage, but they realize.

  Elise And in front of Joanne.

  Ann and Elise burst out laughing.

  There’ve been others, Ann.

  Ann I know.

  Elise Oh I don’t mean others physically, though there have been others – physically. I mean I’m not young enough to imagine … Let’s say I’ve woken up more times than I’ve been to bed. I’m not young enough to think things will ever be different.

  Ann I don’t want to crowd you out.

  Elise No.

  Ann I mean it.

  Elise Yes.

  Ann No I mean –

  Elise Listen.

  Ann Yes.

  Elise We’ll have a go.

  Joanne Is this a private game or can anyone join in?

  Elise It is for two players.

  Ann Elise and I.

  Elise Love is not a game. The love of a man –

  Ann Here played by me –

  Elise For a woman –

  Ann Elise –

  Elise Is the yolk of the cosmic egg. The good bit.

  Joanne I see you’re going to be foolish all night.

  Elise I’ve come from the graveyard where my father is buried into the light of a room where a man sits and waits not attending the service, not invited. His room has white walls and enough books to go round and – oh – he has, I cannot describe, it he has wise eyes and is peaceful and well liked and contented in the evening, and can forget, is able to forget.

  Ann I’m walking with a dog across a hillside and can see the farm where he is mending a barn door at which he is hopeless, as he is at most practical things, but I keep it in me that I don’t think he’s very good at things, as he is nice and as he is a bit soulful.

  Joanne I’m lying with my legs open being licked off by a dog. He is brave and nice and has wise eyes.

  Ann Your hair’s all wet.

  Joanne I fell in the bath.

  Ann I hope it taught you a lesson.

  Elise Describe his prick.

  Ann Uncircumcized.