Four Plays

by John Osborne

  BOX MAN: Well, it does help, lady.

  OLDER LADY: In the case of men, it appears not to be necessary. We women can be put down, if that is the expression, by the flimsiest physical or intellectual failing. We have been eternally abandoned from the Old Testament onwards. All I say to you now is that we may all probably totally abandon you. Men, I mean.

  (She turns to the CHAP, who applauds.)

  Would you mind?

  CHAP: Certainly.

  (He assists her down the steps although she seems to be in no real need of it.)

  My turn.

  CHAIRMAN: Hurry it up a bit. CHAP: Right ho, squire.

  The nude is female by definition. Nudity is evasive, fleeing from description, allusive…

  (During this speech, various classic female nudes appear on the screen)

  The naked male may be powerful, even beautiful, but self-defining like a jet aircraft in flight. Seldom is it more than technology made Flesh. Female, in this sense, is Art. The Male is Critic. Or, so it seems to me at this moment. Female is Art, secretive even when it conceals nothing. Revealing all, it is no sphinx for nothing, it contains and sustains life itself, taming random seed and even time. Making mystery of woman, the liberationists would say, is to belittle her in a glib religious conspiracy of fake mystery. Imprison her with the useful poetry of femininity and you destroy her in a cloud of voracious male imagination and inevitable social enslavement. The course of history! Woman is dead! Long live Woman!… I do not believe it. She has always triumphed in my small corner of spirit, just as I have failed her image – my broken, misty, self-deceiving image you may say – during most of my life. And, remembering it, what a long time it has been. I believe in Woman, whatever that may be, just as I believe in God, because they were both invented by man. If I am their inventor, they are my creators, and they will continue to exist. During most of my life. What made me think of it? Watching a couple in a street late at night in a provincial town. Being in love, how many times and over such a period. Being in Love! What anathema to the Sexual Militant, the wicked interest on free capital. Anathema because it involves waste, exploitation of resources, sacrifice, unplanned expenditure, both sides sitting down together in unequal desolation. This is the market place I have known and wandered in almost as long as I indecently remember or came to forget. Being in love, quaint expense of spirit, long overripe for the bulldozer; of negotiating from the strength of unmanning women’s liberation. Those longshore bullies with bale hooks in bras and trousers seamed with slogans and demands… Being in love. Desolation in the sea of hope itself Sentimental? False? Infantile? Possibly. And infantile because my memories of the phenomenon, if there be such a one, is or ever will be, start so young. From three, yes, I know it was three, even till the only twenty-one, there were so many girls, girl-women, women of all ages, I loved. Very few of them were in love with me, alas. Being in love blunders all negotiations and certainly differentials. I have been sometimes indecently moved to tears and if there were a court of justice in these things, I would have been dealt with summarily as a persistent offender, asking for innumerable, nameless and unspeakable offences to be taken into account. However, if I have been such a villain in this manor of feelings, I have tried to be as clever as I know how. Knowing, as we all know, that there is no such thing. If I have used blunt instruments and sophisticated gear, I’ve tried to avoid soft risks and only go for the big stuff. Naturally, I’ve made mistakes. In fact, when you look at it, the successful jobs have been far fewer than the fair cops. But that is the nature of crime itself, of being in love-, you are incapable of adding up the obvious odds against you, unlike the law-abider with his common sense and ability to discriminate between his own needs and that of the rest of society. To sustain and endure beneath the law –

  GIRL: Beneath, naturally –

  CHAP: – Being in love is a crime against women, and yes, oh yes, reducing them to objects – as this splendid lady has pointed out. To fantasies of poetry, poetry and piety and bourgeois poetry, notwithstanding the workers at that. It demeans men and serves their historic despotism, whatever you think, over the female. So much is said; so let it be so. It has not been the truth to my past; though it may well be that of one who has been a truly conniving peasant toiling under vicious and unnerving tyranny. The revolution is about to break, comrades, and I for one shall not wait to be explainable or forced heads down in the opening wave of forced collective. Girls past. If I ever yearned for a figment England, so I yearned for them; for girls past, fewer in the present and sadly, probably in the future. Who were they? All I remember most is their names, what they wore, sometimes what they looked like. Not very much.

  GIRL: You’ve said that about four hundred times.

  CHAP: So I have. Yes. I have indeed…

  (He descends from the pulpit and he and the GIRL clasp each other)

  GIRL: Heart of my heart…

  CHAP: Heart of my heart…

  GIRL: People don’t fall in love. (To audience) That idea is no longer effective in the context of modern techniques. We are not nations or nation states. All that must go. We are part of an efficient, maximum productive ECONOMIC UNION. And Economic Unions do not fall in love. They amalgamate. They cut down. They are Now in the Land’s future. We are that Land and we are on the brink of Progress. Even Progress has its cliché programmer. But there. We have nothing but gain to contemplate. Loss, such as it may have been, is, has been, ground into the shining, kindly present even that is ours already! Even at this moment. We are tearing down. We build! We build now. And NOW. We are not language. We are lingua. We do not love, eat or cherish. We exchange. Oh yes: we talk. We have words, rather: environment; pollution; problems; issues; oh, and – So century, century as is and will be – APPROCHE MOL Approche moi To me…

  (The GIRL turns from the audience and kisses the CHAP)

  CHAP: Oh, heart, dearest heart. What does that mean! Rhetoric. I do, I have, I’ve wanted you, want you, will, may not and so on. I love you, yes. I shall. Shan’t. Heart… And I want, yes – here we go – want to fuck you… Not cum-uppance or any of that… Heart: I want you. Legs high. High. Open. Prone: if you like. We can both laugh. And enjoy. Enjoy me if you can. I do enjoy you. I do. I want you, thighs enveloping my head. Mist. I shall want to breathe… Give me you. I’ll do what I can with me. I hate to use the words between us – but – I want what I know, have known, we know has taken, done, enjoyed, laughed over; cherished. Between us. Girl. Chap. We are lost without… You know. Don’t you?

  GIRL: Yes. I really think – perhaps – I do.

  CHAP: Do. Don’t. Will. Won’t. Can. Can’t. I wish I were inside you. Now. At this moment… However.

  GIRL: So do I. However…

  BOX MAN: Very nicely expressed.

  CHAIRMAN: What do you know about it?

  BOX MAN: If I may be allowed to say so.

  (Everyone in the cast looks up at the BOX MAN, with the exception of the GIRL and the CHAP who are intent upon each other)

  CAST: Piss off.

  CHAIRMAN: (Sings to the FATHER’s accompaniment) My balls are like a red, red rose.

  BOX MAN: What time is it, for Christ’s sake?

  GIRL: (To the CHAP) I’ve watched for you all my life.

  CHAP: Likewise.

  GIRL: And looked and wanted and as you would say, observed.

  (BOXMAN stands up and sings the opening bars of a patriotic song. The auditorium is then almost bludgeoned by a recording of the same song. After a few bars of this, the CHAIRMAN gets up, holding his bentwood chair)

  CHAIRMAN: Well, I think that’ll have to do this time.

  CHAP: It will.

  CHAIRMAN: I’m not a good chairman at all.

  INTERRUPTER: No!

  CHAIRMAN: Very well, then –

  (He extends his hands to the rest of the cast and they all stand hand in hand together and sing ‘Widdecombe Fair’ in its original. During the song they produce hunting with the words on each piece THE – VE
RY-BEST- OF-BRITISH -LUCK)

  CAST: Tom Pearce, Tom Pearce,

  Come lend me your grey mare,

  All along, down along, out along lea,

  For I want to go to Widdecombe Fair

  With Peter Davey,

  Dan’I Widden…’

  (And so on. CHAIRMAN addresses the audience.)

  CHAIRMAN: So: that’s what you’d call your lot. Our lot… And may the Good Lord bless you and keep you. Or God rot you.

  (All the CAST hum ‘When You Are Weary, Friend of Mine’ as they pick up their chairs and go off, leaving the GRANDFATHER, who strums and sings Old Father Thames’. He then goes off with his chair and the stage lights dim as one of the stage management comes on and idly turns the handle of the barrel organ.

  The cast return to face the audience but with no sense of ‘Taking A Call’. The INTERRUPTER boos and’walks out, the BOX MAN applauds enthusiastically and drinks some more beer. The actors go off as the curtain falls.)

  The End

  THE END OF ME OLD CIGAR

  Characters

  LADY REGINE FRIMLEY

  STAN (‘MR’ FRIMLEY)

  WAIN

  STELLA SHRIFT

  LETITIA PANGBORN

  MRS ISOBEL SANDS

  LADY GWEN MITCHELSON

  JOG FIENBERG

  RACHEL, THE COUNTESS OF BLEAK

  LEONARD GRIMTHORPE

  SMASH DEEL

  FREDERICK BLACK

  STRATFORD WEST

  JOHN STEWKES, M.P

  ASHLEY WITHERS

  ROBERT BIGLEY

  The End of me Old Cigar was first performed at the Greenwich Theatre, London, on 16 January 1975, with the following cast:

  LADY REGINE FRIMLEY, Rachel Roberts

  STAN (‘MR’ FRIMLEY), Neil Johnston

  WAIN, Toby Salaman

  STELLA SHRIFT, Sheila Ballantine

  LETITIA PANGBORN, Angela Galbraith

  MRS ISOBEL SANDS, Jill Bennett

  LADY GWEN MITCHELSON, Jasmina Hilton

  JOG FIENBERG, Marty Cruickshank

  RACHEL, THE COUNTESS OF BLEAK, Joanna Lumley

  LEONARD GRIMTHORPE, Keith Barron

  SMASH DEEL, Roderic Leigh

  FREDERICK BLACK, Ian Milton

  STRATFORD WEST, Kenneth Macgarvie

  JOHN STEWKES MP, Charles Kinross

  ASHLEY WITHERS, John Grillo

  ROBERT BIGLEY, Mike Lucas

  Director, Max Stafford Clark

  ACT ONE

  Scene: Frimley House.

  The sitting-room of farge country house. It should be very large. Jacobean, perhaps, with Knole sofas. Anyway, whatever period, furnished in the most circumspect taste and careful-careless luxury, reflecting a little on the extravagant nature of its owner, LADY REGINE FRIMLEY. There are huge, elaborate mirrors everywhere. She is lying back, listening to the final trio of’DerRosenkavalier’. As she listens, enraptured, her ‘husband’ STAN, (she is a widow) sits reading the Melody Maker and various racing papers. She is about late thirties, slightly older than he. She is a most attractive woman, finely but comfortably dressed. He is rather the sort of man who poses in the nude for magazines or manages pop groups or boutiques. Presently, but not for a while, she brings the trio to an end by turning off the record player. Pause.

  STAN: What you turn it off for? Any tips for the Gold Cup?

  REGINE: Lady Be Good.

  STAN: Get on. What’s his form? Can’t even find it here.

  Oh, yes… If the going’s wet.

  REGINE: One of the stewards told me. He put a hundred pounds on for me – to win, of course. And I’ve had a tip

  from the weather bureau…

  ‘Es send die mehreren Dinge auf der Welt,

  so dass sie ein’s nicht glauben tät,

  wenn man sie möcht erzählen hor’n.

  Alleinig wer’s erlebt, der glaubt daran und

  weiss nicht wie…

  Da steht der Bub, und da steh’ ich,

  und mit dem fremden Mädel dort

  wird er so glücklich sein, als wie halt Männer

  das Glücklichsein verstehen’

  STAN: That’s Kraut, I know. What is it? What you were listening to?

  REGINE: Three women, singing together, right? One, older, the Marschallin, the other two younger.

  The Marschallin is renouncing the boy she loves. But as you watch this great cascade of love spurring out like the thunderous spray of a vast waterfall of heartbreak, comes this sound. But you know it’s three women. The love of women, the love of woman for woman, the love of love itself and life. Continuing and replenishing the earth. Only they, the true fruit and proper multiplies. The fruit of a tree yielding seed. Listen, if you can tear yourself away from Smash Deel. (She turns up the record player again) This is the Marschallin, the older one, watching her young lover with his betrothed: (Pause) ‘Most things in this world are unbelievable when you hear about them.

  But when they happen to you, you believe them, and don’t know why –

  There stands the boy and here I stand, and with that strange girl

  He will be as happy as any man knows how to be…’ (She turns it off) Isn’t that sublime?

  STAN: Yes.

  REGINE: Vulgar and sublime as only woman can achieve. She renounces the thing she loves the most: Octavian, orders, her life, her heart, to go to his bride.

  STAN: Was it written by a man?

  REGINE: Two men, overbearing Viennese pigs. Strauss and Von Hofmannsthal.

  STAN: What, the Blue Danube geezer? He could have been a woman.

  REGINE: Richard not Johann. He was a soppy man. You should read their letters to each other.

  STAN: What, were they pouves?

  REGINE: No. It’s a lesson of two men trying to collaborate.

  STAN: Like Morecambe and Wise?

  REGINE: Do you know what he said, forty years later when some American soldiers broke into his house at the end of the war? They demanded: ‘Who are you?’ And he replied: ‘I am the author of Der Rosenkavalier!’

  STAN: That must have stumped them. Who’s this Rosy Cavalier? How’d he treat his wife?

  REGINE: Abominably.

  STAN: But don’t they, the audience, know it’s a bird in drag?

  REGINE: Of course they do, dolt! But they don’t feel it. They feel them as three women, resplendent in their bodies and star-pointing female voices.

  STAN: Didn’t Shakespeare do that?

  REGINE: But everyone knows Rosalind and Viola are an oafish Elizabethan’s hairy idea of what they want a woman to be: poor imitation men. I’ll take you to see it one day.

  STAN: Thanks.

  REGINE: I often wonder if Mozart wasn’t a woman.

  STAN: Wasn’t he called Wolfgang? Good name for a group. Not bad – Wolfgang…

  (He pronounces it WOLF.)

  REGINE: His sister, his Constanze. He understood women. Ach, Constanze! All his women were like sisters. Look what fools men are: Almaviva pillaging and bullying for the privilege of his enslaved maidenheads; Figaro himself; Papageno – pathetic; Leperello, notching up the count of brutal seductions on his master’s belted so-called manhood. The belt of young girl’s slavery and gullibility; and Don Giovanni, that arch pretender! Squalid rides into town, cowboy cocksman, penile gangster. He got his St Valentine’s Day all right, bootlegging his crabs and disease and sad seed all over civilisation. They’ve all got their St Valentine’s Day coming to them, this blight of the world’s Casanovas. A quick, sharp burst from all over the earth; from every girl from the North Side, the South Side, the West Side, the East Side.

  STAN: Thought St. Valentine’s Day was for lovers. Why, I sent you a card once.

  REGINE: Very sweet of you, darling. But misguided in these times.

  STAN: I see Smash Deel’s number two in the charts.

  REGINE: Yes, he mustn’t start to slide. He’s coming here today.

  STAN: What – Smash? Cor! Can I see him?

  REGINE: You wil
l. You’ll be busy with your camera and tapes.

  STAN: No, not when he’s on the job. Afterwards. Perhaps when he’s finished? I could have a chat with him? About his work and that?

  REGINE: When he’s had his this and that with the girls – which I suspect won’t be much of either this or that. His trousers are too tight for his padding not to cast doubt on that holy of holies.

  STAN: Think he’s bent?

  REGINE: Just straight nothing-in-particular. Well, we shall see. About the only sensible lines in ‘Man-God’s Genesis’ I really like are the ones, how do they go: ‘And I will put enmity between their seed and her seed; (her seed, note) – it shall bruise their head, and thou shalt bruise his heel.’ Well, his maybe along with a lot of other bruised heels and there’ll be no bruised heads among us. As for bruised heels, you should be on yours getting down to the bank with all last night’s stuff and put it in the box.

  STAN: Right. I just want to put something on the three-fifteen –

  REGINE: Well, hurry up with it. What horse?

  STAN: Mr Spats.

  REGINE: Not a chance.

  STAN: Who says so?

  REGINE: That trainer who was here last night. Captain Addison.

  STAN: Who’d he say then?

  REGINE: Periwinkle II.

  STAN: Periwinkle II. Sure?

  REGINE: Look with my retention, I could be one of those middle-aged matrons who fictionalise their marriages with endless streams of consciousness.

  STAN: Eh?

  REGINE: And are you sure you got the stuff on him?

  STAN: Oh, sure. He’s quite an old stallion himself. Got through four of the girls. In three-quarters of an hour. I thought the film was running out. REGINE: Good. Sounds like our bank manager. He was quite a bull – under those striped trousers. By the way, I can’t find my key.

  STAN: What?

  REGINE: To the bank box, stupid.

  STAN: Never mind. I’ve got mine.