THE WARDROBE
A play by Peter Oswald
Note. A two-person play. The last two people in the world, a man and a woman. They have got to try to fall in love somehow. Quite an outlier among these plays - extra dark and strange.
Characters:
Sophie,
Rob
THERE IS A WARDROBE IN THE MIDDLE OF THE STAGE. ENTER ROB FROM THE WARDROBE.
ROB: Well ladies and gentlemen it has finally happened. The worst has come to the worst. There are only two people left in the world, a man and a woman. She’s been desperately looking for him. He’s – well he’s not fully aware of the situation.
EXIT BACK INTO THE WARDROBE. ENTER SOPHIE.
SOPHIE: Where is he? Where in the world can he be?
ENTER ROB FROM WARDROBE.
SOPHIE: Oh no.
ROB: What?
SOPHIE: I don’t believe it. You?
ROB: You don’t know me!
SOPHIE: Forget it!
EXIT.
ROB: She leaves, and wanders the world for many more years, hoping, desperately hoping to find someone – anyone! She falls in love with trees, rocks, streams, birds and bees, she interviews clouds and ravens. But I stayed here with you. An easy time, in your darkness. Never a question, never a question have you asked me, only silence and acceptance. After all, I made you with my own hands, so I have got a right to sit inside you. First you appeared in my mind – a possibility. I thought about different types of wood, and wondered what tools I had or could make. I reckoned I could do it. Mostly a question of patience. To make a real friend out of wood, that takes awhile. So for a long time you were forming in my heart and mind – heart wishing, mind providing a certain provisional realisation before handing over to the hands. This is where you began, deep in here! (HE INDICATES HIS HEART.) And now I sit inside you. What do you think of that? Or ought I to shift your provenance prior to my idea? Where do ideas come from? From the same place as maple trees? Or a place close or parallel to that – somewhere the idea grows, it blows, light on the wind, it needs to find a mind, a brain even, humus in a pot of bone. So you came to me out of a place beyond description and set my mind stirring and my hands shifting. There was a space that required to be contained by maple. And I myself needed something to climb into. But what about her? She at last returns, driven by seventeen whips of loneliness, to the place where she saw him first. And there he still is!
ENTER SOPHIE.
SOPHIE: oh God!
ROB: My love!
SOPHIE: Oh God! The man I hate most in the world!
ROB: The only man in the world.
SOPHIE: This is horrific. Why did it have to be you?
ROB: What’s wrong with me?
SOPHIE: Everything! You’re an idiot! You can’t stand up straight! You’ve been sitting here for years waiting for me in this cupboard! Even though I hate you! Idiot!
EXIT.
ROB: Again she left and wandered for many years, banging her head against great mountains till they shattered into bits, kicking the tails of crocodiles, swimming in straight through the mouths of whales and out through their aresholes. At last she returned, with a seventeen-foot-long spike of loneliness stuck straight through the top of her Sutherland and out through her Kent. And she found – that he was still in his wardrobe!
ENTER SOPHIE. ROB SITS DOWN WITH HIS LEGS OUT OF THE WARDROBE.
ROB: I love my wardrobe.
SHE IS ABOUT TO BRAIN HIM WITH THE CLUB, THEN NOTICES SOMETHING.
SOPHIE: Get back into your wardrobe! Quick!
HE GETS BACK IN, BUT POKES HIS HEAD OUT.
ROB: It was at this point that the hyenas attacked! Female hyenas have a false penis! They give birth to two pups, and one pup always kills and eats the other. They are proof that God is not a nice man. They fight lions, in packs, and eat them alive, or are eaten.
HE SLAMS THE DOOR OF THE WARDROBE. SHE FIGHTS WITH HYENAS. FURIOUS NOISE AND LAUGHTER OF HYENAS, SCREECHING, THUNDER AND LIGHTNING, SMOKE, POURING RAIN. AT LAST SHE IS VICTORIOUS, THERE IS SILENCE. ROB PEEPS OUT OF THE WARDROBE.
ROB: You saved my life!
SHE JUMPS INTO THE WARDROBE AND SHUTS THE DOOR. WARDROBE SHUDDERS; GROANS AND SQUEALS OF SEX. AT LAST WARDROBE IS STILL. SOPHIE EXITS FROM WARDROBE PREGNANT.
SOPHIE: Oh shit, shit, shit, shit! Fucking bastard, what a fucking bastard of a –heap of – Christ! Apollo! Apollo! Why could you not – or some tiger – flayed alive, drowned in sewers, would have been better! A rat, any cocky little clever-dick rat, or an ox, or an otter! Or the sea! The foamy furious sea! But a simpering git of a damp little cuckoo pint dribbling in a ditch! What kind of a child of an idiot, after long haulage and screaming, splitting, dragging out still attached – bloody descendant of a twat – what’s the fucking point? Oh Apollo! Remove this nuisance and replace it with a son of yourself, a little scrap of daylight, sunspot, sunspout!
EXIT WEEPING. ENTER ROB FROM WARDROBE. SPEAKS TO WARDROBE.
ROB: Forgive me, my love! I have made you filthy – or she has! I’ll have to clean you out with cloths!
HE RUNS AND GETS BUCKETS AND CLOTHS AND STARTS TO CLEAN OUT THE WARDROBE.
ROB: Nothing to do with you, nothing to do with you, is it, what she makes me do, inside you! Thank God you can’t talk or see, or smell or hear – but you can feel! I feel that you can feel! Your deafness echoes in my head - it stings me, your lack of touch, your blindness is a blinding light! Friend, keep on keeping silent, I hear every word you are saying, loud and clear, your larynx is the centre of the earth, all truth is in you! Now I am calm again, you are filling me with calm, thankyou for this calm. Well I wish there was something I could give to you, you give so much to me. Well I suppose I did make you, but that doesn’t give me the right to abuse you, it is my duty to spare you from suffering as much as I can, to respect you!
ENTER SOPHIE.
SOPHIE: Stop talking to the cupboard!
ROB: It’s a wardrobe.
SOPHIE: Stop talking to it!
ROB: Alright.
SOPHIE: You have got to fight the hyenas!
ROB: I can’t!
SOPHIE: Oh Christ!
DARKNESS. HOWLS AND HYENA LAUGHTER. ROB GETS BACK INTO WARDROBE. SOPHIE, HEAVILY PREGNANT, FIGHTS THE HYENAS AS BEFORE, AND DRIVES THEM OFF. SHE IS EXHAUSTED. SUN SHINES BRIGHT, CLOSE TO THE EARTH.
SOPHIE: Apollo! Apollo! Drive every speck of this man’s genes out of my womb, and enter it yourself! For fuck’s sake, Apollo! Let my child be your child, a child of the sky, nothing to do with this tosser!
SOUND OF HYENAS.
SOPHIE: The hyenas are coming back!
ROB PEEPS OUT.
ROB: The lions will save us.
SOPHIE: Lions? Lions? How will they save us? Lions!
ROAR OF LIONS. SOPHIE PREPARES TO FIGHT. ROAR AND GROWL OF LIONS CLOSES IN FROM BOTH SIDES. ROB DRAGS HER INTO THE WARDROBE AND SHUTS THE DOOR. DARKNESS. THUNDER AND LIGHTNING. BATTLE OF LIONS AND HYENAS, WITH ROARING, HOWLING, GIBBERING, LAUGHTER OF HYENAS. AT LAST THE NOISE DIES DOWN. THE WARDROBE IS SHUDDERING, SOPHIE CRYING OUT IN LABOUR. DOOR OPENS, ROB FALLS OUT, RUNS AWAY. DOOR CLOSES, MORE SHUDDERING AND SCREAMING AND GROANING. AT LAST DOOR OPENS AND SOPHIE EMERGES WITH BABY.
SOPHIE: Fuck! It’s his, it’s his, the useless little shit! It’s got him written all over it! I’ve been screwed, I’ve been fucked, I’ve been shafted!
SHE PUTS THE BABY DOWN AND EXITS. BABY SCREAMS. SHE RUNS BACK ON.
SOPHIE: Fucking shut up!
SHE RUNS OFF. BABY SCREAMS. SHE RUNS ON, FEEDS IT.
SOPHIE: Miserable fucking little tossing little –
ENTER ROB.
ROB: I was right about the lions!
SOPHIE: Yes you were right about the lions.
SHE PUTS THE BABY DOWN AND LEAVES. ROB PICKS IT UP AND TALKS TO IT.
ROB: Once upon a time, and the sun rose sweating out of the vegetables, and a man came, long long time striding over the waves, and he sat down, and for a long time he stared and he stared. And all around, the little stones were jumping, they were jumping all around, the little stones, and he stamped his foot, and that was that.
SILENCE. SOPHIE CREEPS BACK ON. BABY STARTS TO CRY.
ROB: However, in the trees –
BABY STOPS CRYING.
ROB: there were mice. Little mice in the trees, little green mice, running up and down the branches, with red berry eyes, all over the holly and the ivy, and sometimes they would drop down, drop down onto the ground, a constant faint patter of little green mice dropping onto the ground, and scampering away in all directions. No end, no end to them, no end to the little green mice, for indeed, they bred beneath the bark, and there they teemed, and all day long they swarmed over the trees, and dropped down with a faint patter, onto the ground, as the stars would like to do, if they were allowed.
SOPHIE DRAGS HIM INTO THE WARDROBE AND SHUTS THE DOOR. WARDROBE SHUDDERING AND SOUNDS OF SEX. STAGEHAND ENTERS AND REMOVES THE BABY. WARDROBE DOOR OPENS, ROB FALLS OUT, FOLLOWED BY SOPHIE.
SOPHIE: Where is it?
EXIT SOPHIE.
ROB: (TO WARDROBE.) I am sorry, I am sorry, I am sorry! Again! If I was stronger! Where are the cloths?
HE GETS CLOTHS AND CLEANS WARDROBE.
ROB: Probably you have taken yourself off to a secret place, this is just a shell you have left behind, like we leave our snoring bodies lying around. You have taken yourself off, far away to a secret glade, perhaps the glade where you grew, that is a sacred place! And there again you are quiet among the shrieking jays and the squirrels bashing their anvils! You have no roots there anymore, no sprays or buds or anything, but still you are there, your spirit is there, and there is nothing left for us but this unechoing husk! A dead place haunted by the ghost of a ghost, a dead leaf in the air! But I will fetch you back, I will tempt you back, my friend!
ENTER SOPHIE, FRANTIC, WITH CLUB.
SOPHIE: Where is it?
ROB: I don’t know!
SOPHIE: Where is it? Where is it?
SHE CLUBS ROB UNCONSCIOUS AND EXITS. HE SLOWLY COMES TO, CRAWLS OVER TO THE WARDROBE, RESTS HIS HEAD AGAINST IT, SOBBING.
ROB: She’s such a savage bitch! To put it mildly! Of all the people in the world! If she wasn’t the only one left! She clubbed me on the head! I’m the bloody father! She was screwing me into the wood, what choice did I have? She should have been looking after it! My heart’s broken if she doesn’t find it. I’ll bloody murder her! But what’s the point in talking to you, sweetheart, you’re not here! Come back! Oh can’t you come back from your hushed place in the woods! Come back! Oh, you are coming back! I can feel you, my friend, my sweetheart! The box is no longer just a box, I am not alone. Hello! Hello! Kind of you to return! You drive her out, you drive her right out of my mind, you with your sweet peace. You’re not like her – you – if it wasn’t for you I’d despair! You are so beautiful! I made you so well! Out of maple! Your doors open so sweetly, and they close so snugly – when they’re closed they’re closed. You’re not too heavy, but you’ve got enough weight to be solid. You’re really well grooved and planed. You’re tight, that’s what you are. And you’ve got proper brass fittings. Not like her.
SOPHIE ENTERS DURING THIS SPEECH, LISTENING.
ROB: I’m going to get into you now, my darling.
HE CLIMBS IN. SHE GRABS HIM OUT.
SOPHIE: Speak to me like that!
ROB: You?
SOPHIE: Yes me! Speak to me like that!
ROB: You’re not made of maple!
SOPHIE: But I open and close!
ROB: No you don’t! Not properly!
SOPHIE: Speak to me like that or I will kill you slowly!
ROB: My darling – you are so brave and strong – and you don’t stink – you fought the hyenas –
SHE CURLS UP ON THE GROUND, SOBBING. HE EXITS INTO THE WARDROBE AND CLOSES THE DOORS.
SOPHIE: Wardrobe, I hate you! You think you’re so shiny! Well I am shinier than you! You think this is me, down on the ground? No, this is not me – that is me, up in the sky!
MOON RISES IN THE SKY.
SOPHIE: That is me! I get up crescent, sharp at the ends and very bright and thin in the evening, I float down very slowly, not like an autumn leaf, not like a foundering boat – say maybe like a jewel on the neck of a black woman sinking very slowly into mud with her eyes shut in the dark. That is me. I change, I bob up again, rounder and rounder each time, then I am a target for the sun’s light – every dart a direct hit! Then I diminish, and there’s nothing you can do to stop me, nothing! Scrabble with your hands in the air if you like, sniffle and wail and stamp – or howl! Impossible to stop me vanishing away like a beach till I disappear completely into mysterious regions of utter blackness. Not a thought of your entire head can get to me in that place! Much blacker than the bottom of a waterbutt. Not black at all – black is bright in comparison to that. Then I come back. Knowing much more than anyone or anything, very thin and white crescent sharp at the ends in the morning, more knowledgeable and wiser than the supercilious rocks. I know the name and address of every earthly and heavenly body, from comets to daisies. And you are just a piece of furniture! Maybe once you were trunk and boughs, dressed in green leaves, but look at you now!
EXIT. DARKNESS. MOON. ROB GETS OUT OF THE WARDROBE AND EXITS. DAYLIGHT. ENTER SOPHIE HEAVILY PREGNANT. FAINT GIBBERING OF HYENAS.
SOPHIE: Get out! Come out! The hyenas are coming back! Don’t tell me the lions will take care of it! You can’t rely on lions! Typical of someone who spends his time crouching in a wardrobe, to imagine that you can rely on lions! Once they saved us, yes, but that was by chance, it happened to be convenient to them. They do not have our interests at heart, they are lions, they could just as easily eat us, they would eat us, if they weren’t distracted by the hyenas! This wardrobe life is crap, it’s totally crap, you can’t understand anything sitting inside a wardrobe! I’m going to smash up your wardrobe for firewood, I’m going to cook my fucking breakfast on it! Come out! Get out!
SHE STARTS TO GO INTO LABOUR.
SOPHIE: Oh shit! Fuck! Crap! Fucking shitting crapping crap!
SHE GETS INTO THE WARDROBE, CRIES OUT IN LABOUR, WARDROBE SHUDDERING ETC. GOES QUIET. DOOR OPENS, SHE THROWS OUT A DEAD BABY.
SOPHIE: (FROM INSIDE THE WARDROBE.) Feed it to the hyenas!
ENTER ROB, PICKS UP THE BABY, EXAMINES IT, DOESN’T REALISE IT’S DEAD, STARTS SPEAKING TO IT.
ROB: So the hippopotamus crawled up into the oak tree and fell asleep. At about midnight he heard a low rumbling far away in the west, followed by the squeaking of bats – a white horse came galloping by in the dark, its hoofs not quite touching the earth –
ENTER SOPHIE FROM THE WARDROBE.
SOPHIE: It’s dead.
ROB: She is dead.
SOPHIE: She is dead. It.
ROB: Bury her by the river.
SOPHIE: No, put her in the wardrobe and set fire to it.
ROB: No, put her in a little boat in the river.
SOPHIE: What little boat?
ROB: Build a little boat and put it in the river and set fire to it with her in it.
SOPHIE: Feed her to the hyenas.
ROB: No! Too dangerous!
SOPHIE: Or the lions!
ROB: Leave them out of it!
SOPHIE: Put her in the wardrobe and set fire to it!
ROB: No!
SOPHIE: Bury the wardrobe with her in it!
ROB: No!
SOPHIE: Push it into the river!
ROB: No!
HE RUNS OFF WITH THE BABY. SHE HOWLS AND PICKS UP A KNIFE AND FOLLOWS HIM. HE RE-ENTERS, RUNNING, WITHOUT THE BABY, SHE HOWLING, CHASES HIM ACROSS THE STAGE AND OFF. SHE RE-ENTERS, DRAGGING HIM BY THE THROAT. SHE TIES HIM UP, AND STARTS SHARPENING THE KNIFE. HE IS SOBBING. SHE SINGS.
SOPHIE:
My mummy was a flowergirl
She stuffed me in the ground,
And cut me at the roots to sell,
Where could a sadder tale be found?
SHE APPROACHES HIM WITH THE KNIFE. HE STARTS TO SCREAM. SHE IS ABOUT TO START CUTTING HIM. ROAR OF LIONS. LIONS ROARING AND GROWLING GETS CLOSER FROM BOTH SIDES. SHE PANICS AND CLIMBS INTO THE WARDROBE AND SHUTS IT. THUNDER AND LIGHTNING, FIGHTING BETWEEN LIONS AND HYENAS,WITH ADDED TRUMPETING OF ELEPHANTS AND DOWNPOUR OF RAIN. STOPS. ROB IS SOAKED. ENTER SOPHIE FROM THE CUPBOARD.
SOPHIE: Still alive?
SHE UNTIES HIM.
ROB: Thankyou.
SOPHIE: They saved you again – the lions!
ROB: Well, yes.
SOPHIE: And they didn’t eat you.
ROB: No.
SOPHIE: Why not?
ROB: Because of the wardrobe.
SOPHIE: What?
ROB: If you burn the wardrobe they will eat us.
SOPHIE: Oh.
ROB: You think this is me, it’s not.
SOPHIE: Oh.
ROB: I’m that –
SOPHIE: What, that bird?
ROB: No – the light!
SOPHIE: The sun, you are the sun are you?
ROB: Yes!
SOPHIE: Are you sure about that?
ROB: Yes! I am that and so are the lions.
SOPHIE: The lions I could believe – but –
ROB: I get up in the morning –
SOPHIE: Yes –
ROB: And I sprint through the sky from the east – I leap, and grab hold of this rope –
SOPHIE: Yes –
ROB: This invisible rope, and I climb, I climb up, right up to the very height –
SOPHIE: Gosh
ROB: And from there I illuminate the whole earth.
SOPHIE: Woooo!
ROB: Water goes up in steam, plants grow, and all things draw from me their vital force and urge to rise up.
SOPHIE: Then what?
ROB: Then I begin to descend. I slowly swing on the rope, as it lowers me down, down, into the west, and then the whole world darkens, rooks begin to go home, blackbirds go tic tic tic tic tic, I teach all things how to perish and collapse and curl up in the dark – all, that is, except the deathless and murderous mooncreatures –
SOPHIE: And where do you go at night?
ROB: I am in the wardrobe –
SOPHIE: Doing what?
ROB: Fucking the moon –
SOPHIE: Well that’s true enough!
ROB: The lions are obedient to me –
SOPHIE: So far –
ROB: So far. We have an understanding. But if you burn the wardrobe –
SOPHIE: Yes –
ROB: They will not respect me and then –
SOPHIE: You are the sun...
ROB: Yes.
SOPHIE: I am the moon.
ROB: Are you?
SOPHIE: Yes I am.
ROB: Are you sure?
SOPHIE: Definitely.
ROB: You?
SOPHIE: Me.
ROB: Christ.
THEY LOOK INTO EACH OTHERS’ EYES FOR A TIME. HE TAKES HER BY THE HAND AND LEADS HER INTO THE WARDROBE. SOUNDS OF SEX, SHUDDERING ETC – LESS VIOLENT AND PAINFUL THIS TIME. SHE EXITS PREGNANT FROM THE WARDROBE. SOUND OF HYENAS. SHE LOOKS ROUND IN RAGE AND TERROR.
SOPHIE: Here they come again!
SHE SEIZES HOLD OF THE CLUB, BUT IS TAKEN WITH LABOUR PAINS.
SOPHIE: You’ll have to fight them this time!
LAUGHTER OF HYENAS. SOPHIE GETS INTO THE WARDROBE, IN LABOUR. SHE KICKS ROB OUT. HE TRIES TO GET BACK IN, THEN SEIZES THE CLUB AS THE NOISE OF THE HYENAS CLOSES IN. HE SCREAMS A WARCRY AND RUSHES OFF. THUNDER AND LIGHTNING, CRASHING AND BANGING, SCREAMING, SHOUTING, LAUGHTER OFHYENAS, HEAVY METAL MUSIC, POLITICAL SPEECHES, POETRY ETC. AT LAST SILENCE AND FALLING RAIN. ENTER FROM WARDROBE, SOPHIE, WITH BABY CRYING. SHE SITS UNDER AN UMBRELLA, FEEDING THE BABY. RAIN STOPS.
SOPHIE: Where are you?
ECHO: Where are you?
SOPHIE: What’s happened?
ECHO: What’s happened?
SOPHIE: No lions?
ECHO: No lions?
SOPHIE: Oh fuck.
ECHO: Oh fuck.
EXIT WITH BABY. RE-ENTER DRAGGING ROB BY THE LEG WHILST CARRYING THE BABY. HE IS UNCONSCIOUS AND BADLY MAULED.
SOPHIE: No lions, eh? Where were the lions? They’ll come now and finish you off.
DISTANT ROAR OF LIONS.
SOPHIE: They’ll come now and finish you off. Then we’ll get some bloody peace and quiet round here at last. Lions! ‘Oh, the lions will come!’ Where were they? It was all just hyenas wasn’t it, but anyway, if the lions had come, what would you have been? Ripped to shreds by lions and hyenas! Lord of the Lions! The sun in human form! You know what, lions are lions! Hyenas are hyenas. And you’re fucked. Lions, lions, here’s your friend, your Lord, come and finish him off before he starts to rot! Then the hyenas’ll have him! Hurry, hurry, lions, while he’s still fresh!
DISTANT ROAR OF LIONS.
SOPHIE: Relatively fresh. He was never particularly fresh. Always a little bit off. But he was the only slice of ham left in the shop. And I the last, the very last shopper, the only shopper remaining. Obviously we were going to be drawn together – the last chop left in the shops, and the last shopper! I paced the aisles, I scanned the shelves, but there was nothing but emptiness piled up sky-high! Packets and packets of hunger. Except him. If I hadn’t been utterly desperate, if I hadn’t had a spike of loneliness seventeen feet long sticking through the top of my Scotland and out through my Kent! To coin a phrase. Now we see the real you, don’t we. Now all is revealed, the fine veneer of nonsense washed off – this is what you really look like, not a pretty sight, all chewed up and spat out by hyenas. This is what you looked like to me the first time I saw you, in my mind I foresaw this state, I saw through you, but after that, Jesus, after I’d searched the world once or twice; you started to take on almost an air of attractiveness. I wish I could have stuck it out alone! I wish I could! Searched the world until I dropped, rather than settle for you, all that the whole world could offer! Birds of Paradise, dolphins like waves falling out of the water, volcanoes, it can achieve easily, it churns them out of its workshop, humming birds and scarlet carnivorous plants – but in the way of humans, in the way of men – you were all it could do! Ran out of inspiration, the world did, like in Iceland the sun can’t get up half the time. Deep down the world is very weary, I think, it’s not well, and on one of its worst days it produced you! My God, if I was an antelope, I could have taken my pick of the horny bastards! If I was a buggering ant! We really do have to make do, us humans! Or if I could have been unreproductive, like a rock – or a plank whose children are splinters! But no, something dragged me half round the world, that all-in wrestler my cunt had me in a headlock, marched me round the planet to a rendezvous with your cock. Chained to a buffalo I’d have had more motor-control. It was these children, these screaming invisible children – it’s not just after they’re born they’ve got you running after them like poor bloody swallows! No! It starts well before, well before! When you’re a little girl eyeing up pillars and columns and stiff little icicles, fingering the future – filthy delicious illusion, but real enough, forcing you at cockpoint to make it real, through the shuddering and screaming sweats and flux, the mucky blood, sucking you into a swamp of your own sluck, these demon little children, screaming, screaming to be born! And then fed and everything –
BABY SCREAMS. SHE FEEDS IT. ROB MOANS, FAINTLY LIFTING A HAND.
SOPHIE: Oh Christ, alive are we? Wanting to live a bit more, is it? Determined to breathe? To carry on buggering about? Jesus.
HE MOANS SOME MORE.
SOPHIE: Why didn’t the hyenas finish you off, eh? Why the hell did they leave this – normally this is their favourite kind of dish, a rag of failed flesh, a piece of unintelligent carrion getting ready to breed a whole new generation of composite-eyed things. Well I suppose – you must have killed them. Must have killed all of them. If there was even one little one left it would have knocked you off in this condition – and vastly improved its own. You must have either killed them all or frightened them – really frightened the few that remained. They are not easy to scare, hyenas, since they are able with x-ray vision to see everything’s bones, with clairvoyant sight the putrid future of even the liveliest whippet! That’s what makes them laugh! Haha! Just saw you in my mind’s eye arse up in a swarm of flies! Forgive me, vicar, for spluttering on my tea, I just imagined my fangs fixed in your head! That’s hyenas.
ROB: Help me –
SOPHIE: Dear God – it must have been – like Custer’s last stand, or Cuchulain chained to his post – there’s blood on your club – and hide! How the hell did you survive? Throughout the night they attacked again and again! Tattered and bloody, half-rabid, he stood his ground! Hoping, hoping for his lions! Is that a distant roar? No, just the thunder, just the blood in my head! Jesus, this was heroic – by accident you have ended up doing something fantastic! Never mind the lions, you don’t need them!
SHE PUTS DOWN THE BABY AND RUNS TO GET WATER, WHICH SHE GIVES ROB TO DRINK, ALSO WASHING HIM.
SOPHIE: Child, your father is an idiotic, accidental hero of some kind – and he is probably going to die, so look on him, look on him well, with your blue and forgetting eyes!
ROB: Get me into the wardrobe!
SOPHIE: Oh his wonderful wardrobe!
ROB: Please!
SOPHIE: Always back to the wardrobe! Look at this, look at this, child, be sure to forget this aspect of your father’s character – his wardrobe!
SHE HEAVES HIM INTO THE WARDROBE AND SHUTS THE DOOR.
SOPHIE: Let the wardrobe decide. Since that’s what he wants. Let the wardrobe decide whether he lives or dies.
SHE SINGS TO THE BABY.
SOPHIE:
My daddy was a fisherman
He chucked me in the sea,
With a hook through my abdomen,
Oh misery, oh misery!
GROWLING FROM INSIDE THE WARDROBE.
SOPHIE: Hello? Feeling better already?
GROWLING, BARKING, FROM INSIDE THE WARDROBE.
SOPHIE: Have we turned into a dog, have we? Woof, woof!
HYENA LAUGHTER FROM INSIDE THE WARDROBE.
SOPHIE: Oh, I see! A hyena! This is rabies, is it? Oh dear, oh dear!
ROB BURSTS OUT OF THE WARDROBE ON ALL FOURS, TRIES TO MOUNT HER.
SOPHIE: No you don’t!
SHE KNOCKS HIM FLYING. HE WHIMPERS, BARKS, WHINES, LAUGHS, RUNNING AROUND, ROLLING, PISSING, CRAPPING, SNIFFING FOR SCRAPS AND GOBBLING THEM UP.
SOPHIE: A hyena is not a kind of dog it’s a kind of a cat. That’s why they fight with lions. The hyenas can’t bear the beauty and pride of the lions and the lions can’t bear that there should even be such a thing as a hyena. A hyena is a caricature of a lion, it’s anti-lion propaganda, a slur, smear and libel against lions, a lie on four legs, a misrepresentation, and similarly, lions are hyena-obliterations, one glimpse of a lion and whoever thought hyenas the slightest bit pretty is put right. You don’t look at it, you look at the lion, and so the hyena vanishes. If lions could be uglified, shrunk, manged, hindquarters cowed down, and their roars bronchitised into hoarse and shrill gibbering, how the hyenas would applaud them! How happy they’d be, at peace and easy, their culture confirmed, but as it is the existence of lions is torture, starvation, the rack and madness to hyenas – yes, lions are the ugliness of hyenas and hyenas are the rage of lions.
ROB BARKS AT HER MANICALLY.
SOPHIE: You’ve not turned into a hyena, have you, you’ve turned into a dog! Alright then – sit!
HE REFUSES TO SIT. SHE KNOCKS HIM DOWN.
SOPHIE: Sit I said! Sit, dog!
SHE KICKS HIM TILL HE SITS.
SOPHIE: Good boy! That’ll do for a start. Stay there and guard the baby. At least you haven’t turned into a lion. That’d be the day.
EXIT SOPHIE WITH CLUB. ROB STANDS UP AND SPEAKS TO THE WARDROBE.
ROB: All night I fought with the hyenas. They turned to ghosts and mocked me with human voices. They led me far away into the darkness, far away from the lions. They turned into lovely and sweet-fanged women. They turned into lions with the faces of children. Gentle and sensible wardrobe, help me, help me! My head is burning! Thankyou, thankyou, again, again, you are helping me. But why did you let me go mad? Please don’t let me go mad. I was in you, sheltering in you, hoping to get well, then I went mad.
HE PICKS UP THE BABYAND SPEAKS TO IT.
ROB: All through the night the man stood on the bridge with his face turned to the west. Slowly the sky filled up with plankton and krill – or are they the same thing? In pink clouds drifting from the west. He turned his face to the east – a light and cold rain fell on his face, making him blink. He turned his face to the north – a low rumbling deep underground rose to his ears. He never turned his face to the south. Why – we must not ask. There was no water under the bridge, the river was dry.
HE PUTS THE BABY DOWN, GOES TO THE WARDROBE.
ROB: Help me to escape from this woman! Whenever she is near, I turn into a dog! I love you, not her! I don’t love or like her at all! Not at all! If elephants were love for her, in my heart they would be extinct! If grass was love for her, the hills of my heart would be brown! And so on! She is violent and spiteful and calls me an idiot and worse! I would rather face a hundred hyenas than even think about kissing her once! There has got to be a better existence than this! When I am hiding inside you, I can imagine it! When I shut your doors and crouch in the dark! You are my love, just because of that! Imagination is nothing, but it is better than anything! Help me! Find me a way to live without her! She is the only woman on earth! I am the only man! Aaaaghhh! Help me, help me! If there was anyone else, anyone! Ah, help me, help me! Thankyou! Thankyou, again you are helping me. I want to trust you not to let me go mad! Or is there some strangeness in you now you picked up in the woods that time you went away? Some wood-madness? Are you no longer the person you were? I am a fool to imagine that you could be, after the things we have done in you, the things we have done! We have destroyed you!
HE PICKS UP THE BABY AGAIN.
ROB: The lemon tree bent its head and once again tried with all its might to read the words that the little child had written in the book. One by one its leaves curled up and dropped and its bark cracked in anguish. Still it could not decipher one letter of the message the child had scrawled, never mind a word. Never mind the whole book! That was somebody else’s destiny, and yet still the lemon tree strained and strained its little lemony head, and squirmed its roots in frustration.
HE GOES OVER TO THE WARDROBE.
ROB: I have got to trust you, I know. I am going to climb into you and never come out!
EXIT INTO WARDROBE. ENTER STAGEHAND, WHO REMOVES CHILD. ENTER SOPHIE.
SOPHIE: Here boy! Come boy! Come! Here boy! Where are you? Are you in the – cupboard – wardrobe – are you?
SHE OPENS THE WARDROBE.
SOPHIE: Where is the baby?
ROB: You took him!
SOPHIE: No I didn’t! I left him with you!
ROB: I put him on the ground.
SOPHIE: What?
ROB: I put him on the ground when I got into the wardrobe –
SOPHIE: Why didn’t you take him with you?
ROB: I didn’t want to!
SOPHIE: What?
ROB: I didn’t want to. I wanted to be alone in the wardrobe!
SOPHIE: Hyenas have taken him!
ROB: No – I killed them all!
SOPHIE: You?
ROB: Yes me! I killed them!
SOPHIE: You made a deal with them!
ROB: What?
SOPHIE: Your life for the child!
ROB: What?
SOPHIE: You sold my child in exchange for your life!
ROB: I was fighting for my life!
SOPHIE: And you lost! You screamed – spare me, take the baby!
ROB: You think they would agree?
SOPHIE: Yes!
ROB: They eat whatever is in front of them!
SOPHIE: You – with your dog-language, you communicated with them!
ROB: No!
SOPHIE: Then where is the baby?
ROB: I don’t know! Why don’t you look for it?
SOPHIE: If not hyenas – something else! Snakes! There is no safety here for a child!
ROB: It is impossible for us to bring up a family!
SOPHIE: Why?
ROB: Because of the snakes, because of the hyenas, because of everything else!
SOPHIE: We must be brave – and vigilant!
ROB: Impossible!
SOPHIE: Why?
ROB: Because we hate each other!
SOPHIE: I don’t!
ROB: I hate you! Whenever you are gone I want to be with my wardrobe! Not looking for snakes! I am miserable! You turned me into a dog!
SOPHIE: I didn’t!
ROB: My hatred of you turned me into a dog!
SOPHIE: Why on earth do you hate me?
ROB: I fought the hyenas all night! When I came back – you laughed at me!
SOPHIE: You should have locked me in the wardrobe!
ROB: You are stronger than me!
SOPHIE: Let me go into the wardrobe now –
ROB: No –
SOPHIE: Let me go in!
ROB: You can’t go in!
SOPHIE: I am very sad. I have lost three children. I am too weary even to look for the last one. Let me into your wardrobe now, where we conceived them and I gave birth to them!
ROB: You will have to kill me to get in there! She is mine!
SOPHIE: Listen! The hyenas are coming back!
SOUND OF HYENAS.
ROB: No – I killed them!
SOPHIE: They are coming back! They liked the taste of our children, now they are coming for us! Let me in!
ROB: You will have to kill me first!
SOPHIE: No –
ROB: You will have to fight them!
SOPHIE: I can’t – I have lost three children – let me in, let me in –
ROB: I hate you! I want you to die! I want to live alone, at peace in my wardrobe, she is the one I love, not you!
SOPHIE: I know that! I don’t mind! I love her too! Let me in!
ROB: No! Go and die!
SOPHIE: The lions will save me!
ROB: They will not save you!
SOPHIE: I am the last woman on earth!
ROB: I know! When you are dead, I will be free!
SOPHIE: I am sorry!
ROB: For what?
SOPHIE: For laughing at you!
ROB: You are not sorry, you are just afraid to die!
SOPHIE: I will try to be sorry!
ROB: You? Impossible!
SOUND OF BABY CRYING.
SOPHIE: My child! It is still alive! It must have wandered away!
ROB: Too late! The hyenas are coming!
SOPHIE: There it is! Under the myrtle bush!
SHE RUNS OFF. SOUND OF HYENAS LOUDER. ROB FOLLOWS HER A LITTLE WAY.
ROB: (TO WARDROBE.) She won’t find it, she didn’t hear it, it wasn’t it. She won’t find it. She has found it.
RE-ENTER SOPHIE WITH THE BABY. AS SHE RETURNS, ROB RUNS TO GET INTO THE WARDROBE AND BLOCK HER FROM ENTERING.
ROB: No! Give me the child and go!
SOPHIE: Let me in!
ROB: I will save the child – you go!
SOPHIE: Then that’s the end of everything!
ROB: Good!
SOPHIE: Might as well leave the child to die then!
ROB: No! Give him to me!
SOPHIE: I’ll take him to die with me!
ROB: Give him to me!
SOPHIE: No! I am going now – he and I – to die with the hyenas! You are just what I always said – an arch-tosser, a total arse, better as a dog than a man, srap of an owl’s cast stuck to my foot! I spit you out of my head, I have forgotten your face, curl up in your wardrobe and toss yourself to death!
EXIT SOPHIE WITH CHILD. THUNDER AND LIGHTNING, RAIN, GIBBERING OF HYENAS. FINALLY, ROAR OF LIONS. SILENCE. RE-ENTER SOPHIE AND BABY. SHE SITS BY THE WARDROBE.
SOPHIE: That was a fine anger! You must have been really angry, to shut us out like that, with the hyenas! Of course you knew the lions were coming. Or maybe you didn’t. That was a mighty anger, thunder can’t summon up half that umbrage! Lions are fairly mild in comparison. Earthquakes restrained. I reckon hurricanes are envious of your fury. Or maybe you caused the storm! Maybe that was your lock-them-out-and-leave-them –to-die silence, expressing itself. Perhaps you are the cause of all storms. I can respect that, I can respect the weather, and gods. Not you, so much – but the things that are in you. I can respect those. I am not sorry in the slightest but I reckon it was inaccurate to call you a total arse. You are an arse, of course – and an arch-tosser, and yet: there is something existing within you parallel to that. Alongside the tosser there is – a kind of sunlight – that you might call Apollo, I guess. We are moving off now, the wardrobe is too contentious, I suppose because you made it. It makes your fury worse, makes it infinite, and infinite fury is, ultimately, the refuge of a tosser. We have seen a cave with a small and defensible entrance, large and roomy within. No veneer, no brass or anything. No snugly fitting doors, odour of beeswax. Join us if you like, I might need help, it is going to be hard persuading your son to breed with the least objectionable ape – join us if you like, or if not, not.
EXIT WITH CHILD. DOORS SLOWLY OPEN.
ROB: What do you think? I can always come back to you. But before too long, you would be full of owls, swarming with woodlice, eaten by woodworm, crumbling to dust. I can’t leave you. You might be struck by lightning, and I want to be inside you when that happens! What? Wait a minute, where are you going? Stop! Don’t leave me! Stay! Are you going back to the woods? Please! Why? I want to stay with you quietly here, I don’t want to go with her! Stop! Gone! Gone again. Left me with nothing but the husk again. Can’t follow – I can’t see you! I can’t sit here in an empty wardrobe. So I have got to – wait! Wait! Woman!
EXIT RUNNING. END