Contemporary Monologues for Women

by Trilby James

  WHERE An allotment, Berlin, Germany.

  WHEN 1942, night-time, winter.

  WHAT HAS JUST HAPPENED The play starts with a group of actors rehearsing a play. There are two strands to the play: the story of Eva, a German Jew; and the story of Isaac and Bashar, a young Israeli and an elderly Palestinian. Eva’s story takes us from 1933 to 1990, after the fall of the Berlin Wall. The narrative moves backwards and forwards in time and sometimes stops as the actors within the play take breaks. At this point in the story, Eva is married to Aron, and they have three boys, their own son and two who are the sons of Eva’s cousin. Before the war, Felix was their friend. With the rise of Fascism and subsequent outbreak of war, Felix has joined the Nazi Party and is now Eva and Aron’s enemy. In this scene, Felix has come to the allotment where Aron and Eva are in hiding following a tip-off from one of their neighbours. He has come to arrest them. He demands to know why there are only two children with them. Aron tells him that their own son is now in England and that they only had enough money to send one child on the Kindertransport. Felix asks, ‘So you chose your own child?… Tell me what happened.’ Eva’s speech here is her response to him.

  WHAT TO CONSIDER

  •

  The historical background. Take time to familiarise yourself with the plight of the German Jews and, in particular, the Kindertransport that enabled Jewish children to flee Germany.

  •

  Before the war, Felix was in love with Eva and was hurt and angry when she chose to marry Aron.

  •

  Aron and Felix at one time shared a successful shoe business.

  •

  After this speech Eva offers to let Felix sleep with her if he will let them all go. Read the play to find out whether he keeps his word.

  WHAT SHE WANTS

  •

  To describe as best she can her feeling of loss. Note how visceral her memory is.

  •

  To appeal to Felix’s sense of humanity.

  •

  For Felix to spare them.

  KEYWORDS body cream hair scalp perfume skin nostrils hand

  Eva

  The train went from here to the Hook of Holland and then to Harwich. I persuaded myself he was going on holiday and that he would be back soon. It’s what I told him. Before he left I bathed him. He was five and so his body was like cream. I washed his hair, he complained, but it was for me, not for him and I scratched his scalp and cascaded warm water over him, I knew it was the last time. I held him tight and the hot perfume of his skin entered my nostrils. I dressed him and we picked up his bags and I carried one and he the other. We caught a tram and I took him to the barrier at the Grunewaldstrasse where all the other children were. There his hand slipped mine. It surprised me, the speed. I tried to keep my eyes on him but he was whisked away. The officials took him. I waved the train goodbye. It was laden with children. Some of them smiled and waved. After it left, there were hundreds of parents left on the platform. We were so quiet. We were Jews and we didn’t want any attention on ourselves. I walked home. It took me hours. When I returned to the flat, the water was still in the bath. It had gone cold but I couldn’t let it out. I lay on his bed and I covered myself with his clothes.

  Beat.

  What can we give you to let us go? […]

  EVA takes off her coat and unbuttons her dress.

  […] It’s what you want. […] Take me, Felix. […] Take me. Any way you like. […] Take me. Then let me go. Take me and let us all go. In the shed. Now. Let yourself. Look at you. I know you want to and now you can. You can have me. Finally. I’m all yours. To the victor the spoils.

  Mogadishu

  Vivienne Franzmann

  WHO Becky, fourteen, white.

  TO WHOM Peter, her stepfather, forties, black.

  WHERE Their kitchen.

  WHEN Present day.

  WHAT HAS JUST HAPPENED Becky goes to the same school where her mother Amanda is a teacher. Amanda has recently been suspended from teaching there. She was trying to break up a fight between a black boy called Jason and a Turkish boy called Firat. During the fracas, Amanda was knocked to the ground by Jason. She was reluctant to make an official complaint, fearing it would result in Jason’s permanent exclusion from the school. In the meantime, however, Jason has accused Amanda of racially abusing him and of pushing him. While the school investigates the truth of Jason’s allegations it has been decided that Amanda should stay at home. Jason’s father, Ben, is adamant that his son is telling the truth, and it is not long before the police are involved and the incident is subject to a criminal investigation. All this has placed a huge strain on Amanda, her husband Peter and Becky. Here, Becky, who is not sleeping well and is late for school, has been joined for breakfast in the kitchen by Peter, her stepfather. Becky asks Peter whether he remembers when he first met her and what she was like. He tells her that she was sad and that for six whole months she did not speak. She is surprised at this. She does not remember. There is a silence between them and then Becky asks ‘Did you ever see the old pier in Brighton?’ The speech that follows is made up of the conversation they then have.

  WHAT TO CONSIDER

  •

  Becky’s father committed suicide. The tie to which she refers is the one that he used to hang himself. It was her Christmas present to him.

  •

  On some level she blames herself for her father’s death.

  •

  Becky self-harms. She cuts herself. Her arms and legs are a criss-cross of scars.

  •

  Peter describes her as brave, funny and clever. Later on in the play she courageously confronts Jason in order to try to persuade him to tell the truth.

  WHAT SHE WANTS

  •

  To explain her six-month silence.

  •

  To explain her depression.

  •

  To relive a memory that has taken on an even greater significance owing to the strangeness of the photograph. To what extent is her need to do this related to her feelings of guilt and her compulsion to self-harm?

  •

  To distance herself from Peter (he is not her real father) but at the same time to seek comfort and reassurance from him that she is not a bad person.

  KEYWORDS obsessed deteriorating weirdo cheesy headless

  Becky

  Did you ever see the old pier in Brighton? […] My dad was obsessed by it. […] He was always going on about how it was deteriorating. He used to take a photo of it every week so he had a record of it falling down. What a weirdo. […] I’ve got this photo of me and him standing in front of it. This really old woman took it. Dad asked her to and she was shaking because she was nervous in case she took it wrong. He bought her a cup of tea after and he kept making her laugh calling her ‘lady in red’ and ‘scarlet woman’ because she had this red coat on. He could be really cheesy sometimes. I mean really fucking cheesy.

  Pause.

  And then we walked her back to her house and when we got there, she bent right down and took my hand and said, ‘You’re very lucky to have such a wonderful daddy.’

  Pause.

  Talk about cheesy. That is cheese on toast. That whole story is mature cheddar on a piece of poor-little-me toast. […] If I close my eyes, I can see that woman so clearly. I can remember everything about her. Everything.

  Pause.

  But when I think of Dad, I can’t see him. It’s like he’s getting further and further away from me and the more I try, the more I try to imagine, the more I look at photos of him to try and remember, the stranger he looks. […] When we got the pictures back, she’d cut his head off. In the photo I’m holding hands with a headless man.

  Mother Teresa is Dead

  Helen Edmundson

  WHO Jane, late twenties – ‘she has a strong regional accent (from somewhere that places her well away from London)’.

  TO WHOM Mark, her husband, Frances, a middle-aged English woman with whom she is stay
ing in Chennai, Srinivas, an Indian man who runs the children’s shelter where she has been working.

  WHERE The studio of Frances’s house in a village near Chennai, India, where Mark and Jane have been sleeping on the sofa bed.

  WHEN Present day.

  WHAT HAS JUST HAPPENED Before the play starts, Jane, having left her husband and five-year-old son without warning, has been travelling around India compelled by an impulsive desire to help those in need. When she arrives at Chennai Central Station, she meets Srinivas, an Oxford-educated Indian man, and goes to work in his shelter for street children. She is also taken in by Frances, an artist, who offers her somewhere to stay. During this time she has been clinging on to a white plastic carrier bag the contents of which are a mystery to us. She says there is a baby in the bag, but Frances knows that cannot be true. At the start of the play, Jane’s husband Mark arrives at Frances’s house. Jane has asked Frances to contact him, and he has travelled from London in order to take her back home. She has been absent for seven weeks, and Mark wants to know why she left. She explains how she needed to ‘get back to something simple… to get down on my knees and help someone who couldn’t help themselves’. She misses her son, but is unsure about whether to go back with Mark. One night while they are asleep on the sofa bed, Jane has a nightmare. Her crying wakes up the household. She is talking about having killed a baby. Srinivas asks her what she means. The speech that follows is Jane’s response.

  WHAT TO CONSIDER

  •

  At the end of Jane’s speech, Srinivas picks up the plastic bag and takes it to Jane. Inside there is a brown envelope containing a passport, a wedding ring and some money. Jane is forced to remember how the woman would not take them. ‘She thought I was trying to buy her baby. She wouldn’t let him go. Not for my whole world.’ In this way we realise that the tale of the baby is a kind of delusion/fiction and that Jane’s ability to distinguish truth from fiction/illusion has been blurred. It is important however that you play the speech for real.

  •

  Make a decision about how and why she convinced herself that she had killed the baby.

  •

  Jane is highly sensitive. Decide to what extent her creative and imaginative personality is in some way linked to her tendency toward depression.

  •

  The courage of a woman who, however misguided, is prepared to put thought into action.

  •

  Read the play to find out whether she decides to stay in India or to go back to London.

  WHAT SHE WANTS

  •

  To make confession.

  •

  Forgiveness or (given her state of mind) punishment. You decide.

  KEYWORDS thin tiny safe care nothing need dry hard flat dead

  Jane

  The woman in the shanty town, with the thin baby. I gave her my passport and my keys and my rings and she gave me her baby. And it tucked itself into my neck, like a tiny bat. And I started to walk. I walked and walked to find a safe place for the baby, because I have to take care of this baby. It’s dark, it’s night and now there are people behind me. There are people. They’re following me through the streets. And I walk faster and I almost drop the baby and I put it into my bag to keep it safe. And I run. And I reach a shore. It is the sea. And now I can see them. They’re coming from the darkness. They’re boys. They’re only boys. Each one’s older than the one before. They’re begging from me – ‘Medam Medam, Medam Medam’. They’re running around me. They’re excited. Their eyes are shining. They’re laughing and doing somersaults. And they start to touch me, tugging at my sleeves, just touching, slightly, ‘Medam Medam’. ‘I can’t,’ I say, ‘I’ve got nothing’. ‘Medam Medam,’ they tap their mouths. They point down into their throats, their throats are like caves. They pull at me now, ‘Medam Medam’. I lift the bag above my head to keep the baby safe. I’m panicking – ‘I’ve got nothing’, they love it, my fear, it’s thrilling them. The youngest one’s on the ground, he has his hands around my legs, ‘Medam Medam’. I drag him, with every step I drag him along the sand. He’s laughing, the older boys are laughing, pulling at my skin and hair. I try to get his fingers off my ankles but they’re so strong, they’re strong with need. ‘Get off me. Get off me’. I free my leg, my leg’s free and I kick, I kick his head, hard. I kick. His fingers come off me. He falls back. There’s nothing. There’s shock. Then he smiles, and sits up and rubs his head, like he’s in a cartoon and the boys laugh and laugh and I run. I run fast, with the bag against my chest. And when I stop it’s almost light and I’m in a square. And I sit on the ground, the stone ground, and I open up the bag and I put my hand inside to take out the baby, the baby… but it is dead. It’s dry and hard and flat. It’s dead.

  My Name is Rachel Corrie

  Taken from the writings of Rachel Corrie

  Edited by Alan Rickman and Katherine Viner

  WHO Rachel Corrie, twenty-three, American. (In the speech below, she is still a teenager.)

  TO WHOM The audience (see note on ‘Direct audience address’ in the introduction).

  WHERE Rachel’s bedroom. Olympia, Washington, USA.

  WHEN Some time before January 2003.

  WHAT HAS JUST HAPPENED The speech that follows comes close to the start of a play about the true-life story of Rachel Corrie. In January 2003, aged twenty-three, Rachel left home to join the International Solidarity Movement in Gaza. She was killed on 16th March 2003, when an Israeli bulldozer ran her down as she was attempting to protect a Palestinian home. The play is made up from extracts of her journals and emails. At this point in the story, Rachel is still at school.

  WHAT TO CONSIDER

  •

  The extraordinary braveness of a young woman who is prepared to fight and die for what she believes in.

  •

  From an early age, Rachel was politicised. She held strong and passionate views about human rights.

  •

  Her trip to Russia is a seminal experience. It is after this that she develops her ‘wanderlust’.

  •

  The Israeli/Palestinian conflict. Take time to familiarise yourself with the arguments. It is hugely complex and, as it was for Rachel, not an easy thing to understand.

  •

  The play takes the form of one long monologue.

  WHAT SHE WANTS

  •

  To introduce herself. Note how she identifies herself as the ‘outsider’.

  •

  To describe her need for experiences beyond the everyday.

  •

  To express her growing disquiet with things American.

  •

  To explain her restlessness.

  KEYWORDS naked fire belly dirty pretty flawed broken gorgeous awake sob home

  NB This play offers a number of other speeches from which to choose.

  Rachel

  Okay. I’m Rachel. Sometimes I wear ripped blue jeans. Sometimes I wear polyester. Sometimes I take off all my clothes and swim naked at the beach. I don’t believe in fate but my astrological sign is Aries, the ram, and my sign on the Chinese zodiac is the sheep, and the name Rachel means sheep but I’ve got a fire in my belly. It used to be such a big loud blazing fire that I couldn’t hear anybody else over it. So I talked a lot and I didn’t listen too much. Then I went to middle school where you gotta be cool and you gotta be strong and tough, and I tried real hard to be cool. But luckily, luckily I happened to get a free trip to Russia and I saw another country for the first time.

  In the streets and the alleys it was an obstacle course of garbage and mud and graffiti. There was coal dust on the snow, everything was dirty. And they always said to us, ‘How do you like our dirty city?’ Oh, but it was so pretty with the little lights in the windows and the red dusk-light on the buildings. It was flawed, dirty, broken and gorgeous.

  I looked backwards across the Pacific Ocean and from that distance some things back here in Olympia, Washington, USA seemed a li
ttle weird and disconcerting. But I was awake in Russia. I was awake for the first time with bug-eyes and a grin.

  On the flight home from Anchorage to Seattle everything was dark. Then the sun began to rise, the water was shining, and I realised we were flying over Puget Sound. Soon we could see islands in that water, evergreen trees on those islands.

  And I began to sob. I sobbed in all that radiance, in the midst of the most glorious sunrise I’d ever seen, because it wasn’t enough. It wasn’t enough to make me glad to be home.

  My Name is Tania Head, published in the volume Decade

  Alexandra Wood

  WHO Tania Head, 9/11 survivor, Spanish.

  TO WHOM The audience, whom she addresses as members of the World Trade Center Survivors’ Network.

  WHERE A meeting room of some kind.

  WHEN 2003.

  WHAT HAS JUST HAPPENED The speech forms the start of a longer monologue based on the experiences of 9/11 ‘survivor’, ‘Tania Head’.

  WHAT TO CONSIDER

  •

  In reality, Tania Head was a fake. Her real name was and is Alicia Esteve Head. She was in Barcelona at the time of the attack but came to prominence in 2003 when she claimed to be one of only nineteen people to survive the explosion above where the second airplane entered the South Tower. She subsequently became President of the World Trade Center Survivors’ Network. She was exposed in 2007 when her true identity was revealed.

  •

  There are many theories as to why she decided to make up such a thing. Research her.