COLLAGE PLAYS ONE

Part of a series of collage plays to break up the normal flow and surface connections in the narrative, aiming go deeper in the connections than the naturalistic.

Any voice can be played by any gender.

This was the first one I wrote, or assembled, others I`m working on the various elements are further apart textually and visually but seem to connect across the spaces between them.

VOICE TWO-- The personal is in the national, the bus missed on the important day, the vote that

goes the other way.

VOICE THREE-- They wheezed their way to carbon cars. Some sat in silence. Others shrugged. ‘We’ve survived worse.’

VOICE ONE-- Listen closely as the wind carries their cries. To the untamed ones lashing the air with their unruly branches. 

VOICE TWO-- She watched it turn blue and she knew their lives were over.  Sandy would say different of course.  Sandy the optimist, the champion looker on bright sides.  

No, not this time.  Especially Sandy.  He would know this couldn’t be fixed with a joke and a waltz around their living room to the music inside their heads. She smiled at the time he’d been made redundant at the factory and they’d danced, and she’d asked him.  ‘Sing the song.’

VOICE ONE-- You to. Ready? One two…

VOICE ONE AND TWO-- (Sing.) Stuck In The Middle With You.

VOICE THREE-- Let me tell you about a road.  Tarmacadam stripped pale, shimmering in the fallen sun.  Let me tell you about a car, travelling slowly down the centre of that road; shadows stretch from either side, cover and grip the car.  Inside the car a mother, a father, a sister, squint into the low sun, to look and bend to point and twist and shout at the car to stop, to reverse, to turn into one of the shadows. Also inside the car, a boy sits against the plastic back of the seat, to blink and look…gaze as the shadow looms, drops, wavers with slightest of breeze…A boy sits…What do you see?

VOICE ONE-- Framed in the doorway a husband and wife, a father and mother hug and smile across at the boy who watches from his side of the canal.  He sits on a broken tree which lies on its side roots stiff in the airless air…like petrified guts. Petrified guts?    No. Try again.

VOICE TWO-- A boy sits on the broken tree. Can we call him a child?  Yes we can. He’s only ten years old.  He bounces a football and watches it roll down the banking of the canal and float in the still and clear and pure water.  He listens to his parents laugh and smiles back as they smile across at him.  His mother shouts.  ‘Tea in ten minutes Mark.’  He nods. He feels hungry.  He is a growing lad on the cusp of starting High School and the rocky road to adolescent.  He sits with a knife…Leave alone.  The boy spreads his fingers wide on the tree and brings the knife down again and again between the gaps.  Once he…Leave alone.

VOICE THREE-- For the first time since his mother had died he cried. 

VOICE TWO-- Thing is: I was there. Thing is:  I read that book. Thing is:  Fiction or fact that’s me.

VOICE ONE-- Things I wonder. What if it is?