Scene: Exterior, Scrapyard on an Overcast Day

Characters

Narrator

Watchman

A (Aggressive, pompous, assertive)

B (Self-Righteous)

C (Nervous and Reticent)

Voice

A hollowed-out pit (perhaps an abandoned quarry, full of debris – cartons, food tins, left to rot in the damp. Long shot, panoramic view of the area, with camera sweeping round its perimeter.

Two-second glimpse of Narrator caught during the circuit. CUT. PAUSE. Long shot of site for 5 seconds, then turn back and close on Narrator, who is standing on the top rung of a step-ladder in the middle of the pit. In one hand, he is holding a hardboard placard, in the other a microphone with a long-flex plugged into a portable recording machine. Close-up of the placard, bearing the title of the play, then move to close-up of Narrator’s face. Then black out.  

Now the Narrator is seated in a cradle, suspended from a crane. He is wearing a dark suit, and looks rather like a journalist

Narrator: (pointing at the heap, facing the audience) Just look at this: it’s a disgrace, a complete eyesore. Why the hell doesn’t the Council do something about it? I certainly would if I were in a position of power.

Voice of A: (through PA) Come on: you’re just as much part of the mess as anyone else is.

Narrator: (aside) This business was conceived in the worst possible taste. (He points at the placard and sneers) That is just a crude pun, quite uncalled-for I feel. (He throws down the placard) I don’t think I would have come here at all if I hadn’t had a Press Card for free admission. (He takes the card from his wallet and waves it at the audience. Close-up of Press Ticket).

According to the script, I’m supposed to be making an inaugural speech. Now, listen, everybody: we all come to gatherings like this to improve ourselves, cultivate our critical and logical sense. If everything is neat and tidy in people’s minds, then the environmental mess will clear itself up as a matter of course.

A, B and C: (During the dialogue of A, B and C the camera sweeps round the site, long-shot. At high speed. Brief shot of Coronation Street-type living room )

A: You’ve got to be a bit mad to keep going; it’s hard to get any inkling of where you’re at, but that’s all that keeps you from being completely lost.

B: does you good to get out and cool off a bit. The Old Girl was really upset that we couldn’t get to the Costa Brava this year.

A: I know what you mean: we had to fork out so much on the new washing machine. Didn’t need it really.

B: Quite, quite. But if you do ask yourself sometimes just what you are doing here, what answer can you give?

A: You can spend all your lives struggling to push things into some sort of shape, only to be totally confused at the end of it.

Narrator: I have to provide full Press Coverage of this meeting.

Voice: (through PA) Do you realise it’s your votes that have put twits like him into office?

(Close-up following connecting-wire of Narrator’s recording machine, then the machine itself, then full-face close-up of Narrator. The voice goes on repeating the same question, uninterrupted save for duration of facial close-up. Camera alternates slowly between facial and full-length close-ups.)

(Camera moves away from Narrator. Fast, long-shot sweep of whole site again, then interposed shot of Motorway; split-second shot of car-crash. The Narrator speaks into his recorder.)

Narrator: The fugitives from the holocaust were in an absolute panic; they abandoned much, broke things up, piling up extra messes as they blundered out. (Aside) I really do hate being a journalist, living at second hand all the time. I’d much rather get directly involved with things as they are happening. (Noise of car collision and screeching brakes). They make no recompense for the peace they disturbed. (Flash of Motorway).

A: You clumsy oaf!

B: Who do you think you’re talking to?

C: You should get your L-plates back on again – I bet you haven’t paid your MOT either. (Scrapyard turns to darkness, under floodlights.)

Narrator: (pulling himself up to his full height) As my foot goes under the wheel, I say to myself it’s up to pedestrians to stand up for their rights. If the economy collapses, and that’s pretty much on the cards now, all vehicles will be at a standstill. We’ll all be pedestrians again, back into organic communication. Oh! Here it comes: (another sound of collision) I should have gone back to the zebra crossing. (Spotlight on Narrator: His voice fades into echoing recording.) Round and round they went, on and on.

(INSERTS: Extracts from documentary films and videos of town planning notices, redevelopment work etc, accompanied by mute waves of the hands from Narrator).

A: (As voice in background) You should look where you’re going!

(Scrapyard returns to daylight.)

Narrator: The former residents felt deeply rooted here. But when they were so heavily threatened, they lost all sense of direction. They just wandered round in circles, glad to make their footprints in the soil, find a few holes to mark some kind of breaks in some kind of walls. 

B: (From background) In the time of Henry VIII, this is where they kept some of their political prisoners. (Scrapyard returns to darkness.)

C: (From background) I’ll be glad to get home for the weekend.

Narrator: I see some pinpricks of light on the horizon

A: (From background) Is the meter ok now?

B: (From background) I think so.

(Narrator returns to the top of his step-ladder, then there is a flash to a psychiatrist’s consulting room.)

Narrator: Yes, doctor, yes, everyone: can I explain myself in order to straighten things out? (Film-footage of old building faced with demolition work) If I swivel my head around, and try to remember the beginning while focusing on the end, I get dizzy, unable to think clearly. I don’t know what it was that everybody walked on when they stopped short of the pinpricks of light, but I guess that it was uniformly flat, and varied in texture.

(A’s entrance is accompanied by a sound like splintering floorboards, echoing in an empty building.)

B: (From background) They’ll be having rats in here next!

C: (From background) I thought they’d had the Inspectors round!

(Spotlight on B, holding a ball of string, which slips through his fingers. Full length shot of B, then long shot of site. Brief close-up of B, who then moves away.)

(Shot of flickering shadows, a bit like Balinese Shadow puppets. Narrator again at top of step ladder.)

Narrator: Actually, I’m a Film Director; I was only pretending to be a journalist. Now, look at those flickering figures: they seem two-dimensional, but really they are all like you and me, with hopes, fears and souls. In due course, each one of them will make a statement. Now they will all look straight up, or straight down in whichever direction their reflexes push them. (He takes a railway signalman’s flag out of his pocket). End of the line: all change! (Aside) Here we are again: it’s the biggest drag on earth, but at least I get time and a half for it, so I can complete the payments on the washing machine.

(Fade: spotlight on A, B and C)

A: I come of my own accord!

B: (whispering) I come unannounced!

C: (holding out his hands in despair) We all came backwards: calm down everybody, don’t panic!

Narrator: (Now holding a hand microphone) All present and correct: rendezvous OK: over and out. (Fade: then flash showing him wearing a priest’s dog collar) Here beginneth the lesson according to C: This is his first public address, so naturally he feels a little nervous.

(Close-up of C’s face. Switch to auditorium, with C. at lectern. Brief facial close-ups of A and B, then back to C. C operates computer, and flashes up onscreen diagrams of eye, ear and brain.)

C: It is my allotted task to introduce you to some startling new findings in Neuropsychology. The findings of the sensory organs can only be considered as pervasive and overwhelming if the brain can be considered as defined and circumscribed by those organs . . .

Narrator: (Aside) He’s in despair about his PhD. He’s thinking of opting for Incapacity Benefit. (C’s lecture continues, but with faded volume). This lecture is only a formality: he’s got to toss off a few things like this to pay off some outstanding debts. But it’s a real drag for him, and to try and cram it into a one-act play . . .

C: (Back to full volume) Some forms of anaesthesia involve sensory saturation. The senses must never become as pervasive as their findings. After all, sensory saturation sometimes occurs if an unwary person falls asleep, as I’m sure many of you may do in the course of this lecture. One must therefore encounter the environment of sleep, without sleep itself.

(During C’s speech, fade into long shot. Background alternates between scrapyard and lecture room. Then back to scrapyard. C. makes circular gestures with his arms. Long shot: A and B make gestures similar to C’s in the background. Flash to C. burying himself in rubble.)

Narrator: I wanted to have my next hotel complex built here, but planning permission was refused.

A: (Approaches Narrator with aggressive posture) This site area belongs to me! I conned the Deeds when I was working for some crooked Estate Agents. But I never had the funds to develop it. What splendid edifices could arise from it. But what do I see now? The occasional half-buried brick, pricking up here and there, through the earth, between the piles of detritus and the bracken. (Close-up of brick jutting out of ground). 

C: (holding a sack of rubble) I think this may be the last remaining World War II bomb site; quite a historical monument.

B: (to C) You all right there?

C: (to C) Pretty good haul today. Great for the Recycling Plant.

A: (Close up) I am here on behalf of the Smudge Property Development Trust. This mess, this chaos, could, with a supreme effort, be turned to our advantage. (Under his breath) I’m so exhausted! I’m getting sick of the sight of too many futuristic high-rises. I almost feel as if this site should be abandoned, left to go back to nature, and organic growth. No tipping, of course . . . (he continues talking through the PA). I seem to have lost my sense of direction. I desperately need a break from this machine. (to Narrator) I would like to go home, as I am sure you would. (to audience) If I had a free hand and all the resources, I would make this the site of my mighty amphitheatre (flash to picture of Colisseum in Rome)

C: (Flash to interior of ‘Coronation Street’ type house) Mind the bannister rail; it’s a bit ropey. (back to A)

A: That’s a lovely thought, a beautiful dream. But what is the sad reality? A scattering of half-buried bricks, abandoned by some poor workman who had his jobs cut short, forced to leave the site like a maladjusted protagonist onstage, forbidden to clear the stage for the next action.

Narrator: I think he’s talking a lot of guff, but those scattered, half-buried bricks are indeed sad to contemplate.

B: (Close-up; he points to the Narrator) Here is a true dramatist! People like him always make you feel you are getting somewhere.

Narrator: (wistfully) The substratum may be too hard for them to sink back, to be embedded in the clay from which they were originally dug in order to be baked.

A: They just make rubbish these days.

B: You all right there?

C: In the old days, things were made to last.

Narrator: Scrapyards induce a feeling of peace and wholeness, because through them one can witness the natural processes of corrosion, decomposition and other operations of the elements going their full organic cycle.

C: I’m getting fed up with nothing happening. I’m going to complain to the Director.

Narrator: You can’t do that without consulting me first.

A: (Picks up an empty tin can, with its bottom knocked out, and looks through it as if it were a telescope) I really am getting into industrial aesthetics and photography! If this area were more extensive, it would suggest to me an inland drainage zone, which could be a scenario for a fabulous documentary, and then perhaps become a salt flat, or reclaimed land.

Narrator: (aside) He seems unable to descend from his podium.

(A slips on a banana skin, falls flat on his face, gets half-buried in rubble, then picks himself up)

C: He’s a landscape gardener now

Narrator: I hope you appreciate the extent of his misfortunes. I do not wish to impose on you too much by describing it, so I’ll let him resume.

A: Now I have crumbling soil, all over my eyes and my tongue.

(C moves in front of A, and obscures him from view)

C: I wish to raise a point of order.

B: What does that idiot think he’s doing?

Narrator: A deserved his fall. I bet he was fantasising about being a guided missile: he was trying to abandon himself totally to some obsession, and yet retain his observer’s detachment. You can’t do both.

(Switch to fairground)

C: I want to have a go at the rifle range

B: Roll up: break up the ’appy ’ome!

C: One does not make those painful echo-soundings with pebbles from the sea, but rather with projectiles that have never previously been discharged.

A: Discarded bricks make me think of living forms being restored to the womb.

Narrator: Well: what a distinguished biologist. Do you think there’ll be a good harvest this year?

C: I think the frost will cut it down a lot

Narrator: Much better than a bulldozer finishing them off.

(Switch to lecture theatre)

C: (at lectern) All the others are quite mistaken. Mine is the true vision.               I am convinced that this area was once a quarry. But the clay was long ago worked out. The underlying hard rock may be material for the building works of the future. Man has made his indelible stamp. The ravages of man have turned vast fertile tracts into desert.

B: (at another lectern) Ladies and gentlemen, we must reach a valid aesthetic appraisal of our situation. The depression spread out here before us is at once a covered impression, and a pierced, indented impression. Denting or imprinting, one could say, is some kind of veiling; it deflects the observer’s attention into many nooks and crannies, away from that nakedness which is such a shapely thing.

A: (interrupting him) The act of veiling is akin in form to the naked shape itself. (aside) The other two haven’t got my perceptivity. Unlike me, they cannot articulate a full response to their surroundings. There is a veiled quality in their speech.

(B and C turn on A)

C: Drat you!

B: Crawl back under your stone!

C: Get back into your hole!

A: This is my hole.

B: Fight you for it!

C: Help!

A: This is mine – mine!

(They all chant ‘mine’ – first of all in unison, then consecutively, accelerating speed; the chant is taken over by the PA. Narrator takes centre stage: A, B and C freeze into silence.)

Narrator: Can I please ask you all to behave in an orderly manner. Could each of you state your case calmly and rationally; then the issue of ownership can be settled.

A: The final proof of my ownership of the pit would be to allow you Squatters’ Rights, ponce, to occupy it and be its contents. Such integrated organic ownership is the antithesis of proven legal ownership. I’d love to turn you into a lousy, squatting pile of refuse to get my revenge on you; I know what I want.

C: It all depends on how much of one’s perimeter is pared off when one advances beyond it into the pit, in order to make a more complete perimeter, a vantage point, setting for a memorial to someone who never existed.

Narrator: Yet who finally does own the place? Those who paid to get in, or those who are paid for staying in? What is the use of a vantage point if one can neither look out from it nor leave it?

C: But we can’t go now: this is just when the action might start.

A: Yes: we’re right in the thick of what might happen.

Narrator: We’re supposed to be putting on a Festival – to give the poor people some relief from the humdrum routines of their daily existence.

C: Indeed: we mustn’t let anyone down

Narrator: The audience space is crammed to capacity. Now the entrances are blocked, because no more can be admitted; the exits have also been blocked, because of a State of emergency.

C: I feel that some spectators are entering the area, as if they were using the exit, in reverse motion.

Voice: Emergency instructions for the audience will be flashed up onscreen in due course.

Narrator: There is a happy interchange, almost a conversation, between the screen and the exit. They flicker sympathetically at each other.

C: (gesticulating at A, B and the Narrator) Shut up, the lot of you, for God’s sake! I’m terrified: you lot blow everything up, go on so much. By the time you’ve finished, there won’t be any exits left . . . (turns towards B and A) But let’s not make too many thoughts confuse us.

(B takes a piece of paper out of his pocket, tears it up, and throws its pieces at the audience.)

B: Another Tax Notice: I get sick of bureaucracy!

C: Documentation has been deprived of its shelters now the city offices have been ruined and abandoned. All the contents of the files are strewn about in the open, hopelessly lost.

C: That’s just like us really. It may be that we have always been talking rubbish, aiming our words at thin air and uninterested passers-by.

(A, B and C start blowing bubbles)

Narrator: I want my comments to really cut the ice like a pickaxe, not to make a mumbling whirr like a fan, soothing a gang of drowsy spectators.

B: There’s so much more to be done to free ourselves from the prejudices in which the media have soaked us. After all, we are human beings – not just tubes of glue, pumped full of slime to ooze out in small blobs when the powers that be want to make full use of us – and they don’t give a damn for us, be sure of that.

A: But we can’t live without resembling tubes of glue to some degree: we all culminate in pointed nozzles, and we have to be jabbed at the top before we can be of any use to anyone.

B: you bloody idiot!

A: No: you’re the idiot; you don’t have the sense you were born with.

C: Please, let us pursue the analogy. If the perforation, the job, is total – that is, if the pin is not replaced once the blob has been applied, then the glue will become hard and unusable. But the tube, of course, will not cave in so easily (shouts) . . . I’ve found an aid to survival!

Narrator: (direct to audience) We are all going through a course in Survival Mechanisms.

B: Covering a pinhead with glue will turn it into a larger pinhead.

C: Which is what the pit can do to the ground surrounding it.

A: Which is what those pinpricks of light can do to anybody’s eyesight.

Narrator: Which is what I can do to all of you.

A & C: (in unison) Which is what you can do to all of us, Amen.

A: Then we’ll all play ring-a-roses, to show that we know where the pit really starts.  

C: We will emulate the planetary orbits.

B: I am sure there are masses of obsolete machinery buried under the tin cans. I’m sure they once helped the world go round, or else went round in circles on their own.

Narrator: Hmmm – an interesting throwback to the early stages of the Industrial Revolution (photo of old steam engine here)

B: Listen, everybody: if we are to make anything of the area, we’ll have to build a circular wall inside the pit. I’m getting a clearer idea of what a pit really means, emotionally: a hollow pocket at one end, deliberate rejection at the other, and happy curves between the two.

B: What a marvellous idea! It’s so natural; one can walk freely, happily between the droppings of carelessness and the droppings of deliberation. I will lay formal claim to the ground, which is already beautifully chopped up by the imprints of pieces of metal.

C: I wouldn’t like to obscure the old imprints by stamping my footprints all over them; the Industrial Archaeologists would not like that at all.

A: I see your point. It would be better if we all jammed our feet in biscuit tins (just as we jam our bodies in rooms) and hobbled happily over the site; then the industrial archaeologists would be happy.

C: (suddenly excited) Come on: let’s get a game going, and see which one of us can score the first goal.

B: No: that’s stupid; let’s fight each other for it.

C: for what?

A: For what comes out of it.

B: OK: the fight’s on; but let’s make some rules for it. This old crankshaft: I will throw it at your head, and I’ll throw this old cog at your rib-case. (close-up of cogwheel). A bruised and ruptured human body can relive and repeat the actions of a disused machine. The cogs will stick into your body; if they are not removed, you will get gangrene.

A: The springy grass resists footprints. It jumps up like rubber, and obliterates their traces immediately after their makers have forged on ahead. I just can’t get to grips with things. My feet cannot penetrate the roots of the grass: they form splinter-depressions, curve-depressions, curve uppermost, in the earth. The bedrock of the depression can be broken up, ground into powder by those struggling, fingering roots. They indent the chunks of soil and hold them together.

C: The cogwheels round here all seem to have lost their spindles (he rummages) what’s this? An earth-clogged carburettor (he throws a carburettor, and then a cogwheel, across the stage.)

B: The game, of course, is quite fouled up if you deal any card of machinery into an inappropriate flush, the wrong part of the body. We are playing a substitute for poker. There is only one joker in the game: it is shaped like a key, and can be aimed at any part of the body/ But since it is smaller than the other pieces of machinery and relatively light, it must be directed with great force and accuracy.

C: How inspired you are! What a great game: I can see how you arrived at the idea. This area has the shape of a roulette wheel.

Narrator: (moves to centre stage) This does shed some light on the ritual content of children’s games. (moves off to right again)

B: We’ll turn around.

A: and count to ten.

B: And you can run and hide.

(All three rush off. Stage plunged in darkness for 10 seconds, then B returns from left.)

B: We still have to ascertain who owns this dratted space. And should one of us actually bury himself in it? This could be a good idea. The very existence of a depression means that some things have been thrown up and down. I wish I were above the top deck of a shiny new bus, to be suspended in mid-air as I moved forwards. That would do a lot for my perspectives.

(Enter C from right)

C: I think we should play hide and seek

(A moves to centre stage)

A: (Jumping from the ground) I have seen stars! I feel as if a huge crankshaft has just struck me. Ah: now it has fallen on my feet, just before my toes splay out. I’d love to play see-saws with the crankshaft, and never let it fall to the ground again. I would have it bolstered on my bruises. But it hurts. No: on reflection, I think the throwing game is pretty boring. Why can’t we all go home, and leave this depression to its own miserable devices? Why do we have to drag ourselves down here, sink so low?

Narrator: I can’t convince these creeps about the value of a new experience. I think they’d rather have stuck with playing poker.

A: (to C) You were muttering away all the time I was talking, trying to butt in on everything I was trying to say. You were sabotaging me!

C: It was you interrupting me. You certainly did squeeze yourself out of your tube, but you were unaware of having done so.

B: But it’s just because none of us are getting any real experiences that we tried working out this stupid game – as a substitute. I know all the sensations, all the kicks we desire, are basically worthless. But if we surround ourselves with something as depressing as this scene here, we can forget the futility of all our pastimes. We can pretend we’re on holiday, breaking the monotonous patterns of normal life.

(Narrator moves to central stage, waving his arms round like the conductor of a symphony orchestra. He makes mocking gestures at C.

A: (moving in front of Narrator) This all feels a bit like ice-skating to me (moves right and back).   

Narrator: Our crowd must be practical. This pit should be declared Common Land, so that the whole community will be able to play in it indefinitely in the future, the permanent open zone under the everlasting Motorway – so that everybody may know, without danger to themselves, what it means for people to maim each other with cold artefacts, with the ball of time, the chain of time, for which the key is missing.

A: Let’s keep the game going, if only to cultivate the art of marksmanship. If we are very lucky, they may make a straight descent. Grazing our bodies as they fall to the ground, and then pile up on top of each other so that we can walk over them (shots of Frisbees and flying saucers)

B: If we do that, we must keep our feet well apart from each other.

C: Just as the top deck of a bus is apart from its lower deck.

A: Just as the bus is distinguished from the road (brief shot of bus in motion)

B: Just as the road, so far away, is apart from the pit.

C: Something like a disused railhead, through which the lines are still operative.

B: I was the first to discover the essential facts.

C: If, of course, one could see bus and pit alike from a great height, if only the light of day were not so overcast, nor the tall buildings of the town so far away, things would be so much better. It would be great always to have aircraft on tap whenever we wanted to look at something.

B: I wish there were some huge pantechnicon wheel-hubs we could throw at each other, indent each other’s skins roundly with the centre holes within the hubs.

A: As I made my way here, walking along a disused railway line, I kept my feet exclusively to the rotted sleepers, confined myself to a network of wooden ribs.

C: I don’t think that’s nearly so much fun as playing hopscotch. Each sleeper is placed equidistantly from its fellows; the line ends at the zenith of an incline, before reaching the pit; it peters out before starting to head downwards.

A: I like ribs and networks; the highways form them. That is what I want most outside the depression. Inside it, anything remotely resembling a ring seems to be smashed or dislocated. (Sound of car engines) Shshsh – we must remember we are all conspirators. I feel good, and I think we should all feel good.

(B and C burst into cheering and hand-clapping)

B: Well played!

C: Goal!

A: Everyone round here is a quasi-karate expert; they can all immobilise someone with the blow of a crankshaft without causing him any permanent injury, make it bounce on someone’s veins without splitting them open.

C: Our eyes and noses are most sensitive when they are confined within walls.

Narrator: He’s right, you know: it’s dark in here.

C: How inspired

A: That means the feature film is due to start.

B: I hate having to look outwards; it makes me feel as if my head is splitting open.

(Fade into long shots of pill-boxes, sailing-ships, with some close-ups of cannons and sails)

A & B: (In unison, to Narrator) We wish you’d shut up; we can’t help you to say what we really want you to say.

B: I feel I am pushing my very bulky senses through some strange, fragile walls.

Narrator: (with a shrug of the shoulders) I think he’s trying to be an aesthete again.

B: Well, nobody else can help you to say what you want to say. No: I’ve got another idea. It might not really be you that’s talking, but a recorder equipped with reverb.

Narrator: If that is so, I shall have transcended mortality to become pure sound, the belligerent essence of all echoes, of all projections aimed at the end of echo.

A: Think of all the projectiles that fell short of their targets, lost their impetus, and fell into land or sea.

C: Stop this drivel; we are desperately short of time; that’s why we come rushing here in a panic.

A: Wait a mo: I hear echoes of our voices in the distance, chanting “It’s dark in here.”

C: It’s dark all around us, and I’m afraid all those pinpoints of light may be snuffed out.

Narrator: If that’s the case, then a grand spectacle is imminent. So we should sit down in the rubble and make ourselves comfortable. We’ll be the audience.

(They pile up cartons and rubble to make surrogate chairs)

A: The sprawling town of the future is now a foetus expanding in the architect’s brain. But now I can hear the fans in the offing.  (Sound of a crowd) All of the metropolitan rush hour is piling in here. At the end of the spectacle, the mob will lose all sense of balance and proportion. They’ll rush out, cramming, blocking the limited routes to the perimeters of safety. Outside a few rare sanctuaries, all is chaos, shouting and brawling.

B: (Impatient) Come on: we haven’t got all day.

(A discovers the top of a paraffin heater. He picks it up and throws it at C.)

A: I think there’s a torch inside your head.

Narrator: He conned that phrase from W.B. Yeats – conceited pedant!

A: I’m going to make you all laugh on the other sides of your faces.

Narrator: I wish I had a coke oven here; it’s quite chilly.

C: Damn you all! I’m not your bloody amphitheatre.

B: No: you’re the foyer.

A: No: you – get into the middle (tries to push C; C opposes him)

C: Don’t you dare touch me. If you want to get anything from me, you must throw something at me; that’s one of the rules of the game – as near as we can get to understanding each other. I only license long-distance tactile contact.

Narrator: He got that bit from reading about Descartes retiring into his stove to get his thoughts together.

A: (to C) Come on: please wear this paraffin heater; it will amplify your voice.

C: (drawing back) I’m not into that kind of amplification. I’d rather find a key, and shake it like a dice in a pot.

A: But it also makes your hearing more acute if you wear it.

Narrator: I think he’s fantasising about being a brain-surgeon.

A: If you’re too rough with it, you will break it into pieces.

B: If any form is magnified to excess, all form is lost.

A: (to B) The key you spoke of: is it numbered on its side?

B: Only as clearly as are anybody’s days here.

C: Perhaps the key could fit the exit to the amphitheatre.

A: But what the hell are our feet for? Let’s just kick the bloody thing open.

C: you’re wasting your time; you might as well be talking to a brick wall. I fear the gabbling of the crowd, spouting through the auditorium. I think the exits are locking automatically.

B: The paraffin heater is important because it once gave people comfort. Try and imagine its old times; turn the wick up.

(A jams the paraffin heater lid on C’s head)

A: (to C) you’re awfully privileged now, you know.

C: I think I’ve made you all look like a bunch of twits.

B: Just as you feel about yourself

A: I always like things to have a sense of proportion, make sense, just as we seem to be doing to each other now.

C: Our dialogue is so marvellous it’s nearly choking me . . . But now I cannot see: it’s very dark in here. The town is so far away, and I’d really like to be in the middle of it now.

Narrator: That’s an old gimmick derived from Ancient Greek religious rites, you know.

C: I’m sure the balloons of breath get turned inside out, like in the comics.

B: If you can really hear and feel yourself resonating inside the helmet, you have no real need to walk or gesticulate outside of it. Come here: I want the helmet, want it to surround me: the first one now shall later be last!

A: (Restraining him) Did nobody ever tell you?

B: No: nobody ever did.

A: I see!

(A loses his balance. His boots make long, deep troughs in the rubble. His stick-on rubber soles and heels come off. The boots come half way off his feet.)

Narrator: This is disgraceful! Stop it at once: don’t let this harmless game degenerate into total barbarism!

(There is a melée between A, B anc C. The Narrator prises them apart.)

C: This is outrageous! But wait, think a moment: I can push C instead of pulling him, so that his forked legs will suggest some struggle, some working towards the unity of his head.

(He pushes C. forward, making deeper troughs than those made by the boots.

A: Gotcha, stupid: you asked for it, didn’t you?

(A’s feet become ever more deeply immersed in rubble; it becomes ever harder for him to move. He almost falls down, but the sheer height of the rubble keeps him upright. B is enraged. He stamps his feet and waves his arms, then tries to pull the helmet off C’s head. He does not succeed. They lose their balance and fall down. C. extricates himself and comes to the front of the stage.)

C: I’m the king of the castle! (He struts back and forth along the stage.)

Narrator: Why can’t you be friendlier with each other? Why don’t you play at see-saws, holding up C, parallel to the ground? Now that he is wearing a helmet, I feel that his head is a dual organ, like his arms, his hands, his legs, his feet. I think it’s a great pity that the rubble is not piled up into a giant container, with the same proportions as the helmet. At some point we will all leave this area. But we will make our final return at the sounding of the last trumpet, when the secrets of all hearts are finally laid open. And that is the spectacle we should witness.

(With shouts of ‘Got it!’ ‘Right!’ etc, A and B sway C like a see-saw: A holds him by the shoulders, B by the feet. They lose their balance and land head first in large biscuit tins. C returns to a standing position. Zoom to the image of a pillbox.)

Narrator: What we are witnessing here is a microcosm of the State of the World. All of my instructions and observations must be relayed worldwide. To do this, they must be fed into a filtering, decrypting nodule and disseminated worldwide, saturating all the social media. The nodule is centered in the pillbox, controlled by powers mysterious to me, impenetrable, electronically guarded by death-rays. So we are all deprived of responsibility for our own actions.

B: The real importance of the pillbox lies between its own interior and that of the many parts of the world outside, including that circular town nearby.

(Close-up of pillbox. One of its walls fall down, to reveal a watchman sitting on a bare wooden chair, with his elbows on a small table, on which there is a newspaper, a bottle of milk, a cup and a saucer.)

Watchman: (scrutinising A, B, C and the Narrator) You can think your own thoughts to your heart’s content. That’s what has made me stay for so long in this vacuum-hole. In some ways I’d like to get out, in others I’d like to stay here. Maybe I’ve got an impulse to drive myself underground.

B: (yawning) Clocking-off time coming up?

Watchman: Pretty soon. You’ve got to be a bit mad to keep going in this world, haven’t you?

C: Time is like a well-rounded tea-urn, like the one I’ve got back home. I’ve got a grinding job of nothing, just like you. I really am desperate, waiting for the end of my life. I look forward to feeling really sleepy, to that time when I could melt into a mirror on a wall, which must be there somewhere: I’m sure I’ll find it when all human enmity is at an end. Then I would take all the words I’ve ever spoken and hang them on a clothes-line, to be the world’s supreme example.

A: Come off it.

B: Why don’t you talk sense?

C: What I say makes perfect sense to me

Watchman: You lot ought to learn to relax and take life as it comes.

Narrator: (Moving to centre stage) I feel like an author now. It’s phrases I want – fighting, mutilating, castrating each other’s syllables, single letters, pen-strokes, key-taps. I think there are some dark clouds up above me, though I cannot be sure. I cannot see any mirror either. My instinct tells me that the pill-box was built upside-down; the builders inverted the architect’s blueprint. What should have been the floor became the ceiling, and vice-versa.

(Flash to a fairground)

A: Roll up! Roll up! Any more for the tunnel of love?

B: Two pounds for four balls: come and break up the ‘appy ‘ome!

C: Lovverly bunch of coconuts

B: Two pounds for the lucky dip.

(Back to scrapyard)

Narrator: I think the whole world would be upside down, if enough people agreed that it was, and since there’s some unstated agreement between us all, about something, this little world here is the right way up, whether it’s upside down or not.      

 Watchman: I’m really quite glad the wall fell down. There isn’t a proper floor here. I wouldn’t like the bottom to sink any lower. I prefer things to be on an even keel.

Narrator: Well: now that this space has been opened up, some of the congestion could be eased. But then I would be really worried about you getting buried, choked in rubble. And where is my terminal? Or was it anywhere? Or was it purely a figment of my imagination?

Watchman: You broke my mirror; you’ve no right to do that. It’s only me who can break mirrors. I wish you’d go away; I want to be left in peace.

Narrator: I know I’ve got an over-fertile imagination: I’m always dreaming up ghosts, but I do feel sympathy for you . . .

Watchman: you’re just a bloody nuisance who doesn’t know when to shut up!

Narrator: Poor wretch! What can be done for him, and for those millions of others who share his sufferings? I did so want to reach an ordinary person for once in my life. There’s really nothing going on here; I dreamed it all up. I’ve read so many books on ecology too: all those things put together make me hopelessly confused. Now I can’t even remember what the town looks like

Watchman: I wish you’d be a bit more considerate when you’re throwing things around. They keep clattering on my roof, and I can’t get my kip.

A: We have come here to get away from the crowd and find inner peace.

B: We are in search of the truth.

C: We are eco-campaigners, making a survey of society’s callous negligence.

Watchman: I can see quite clearly what you are. Go on: kick the pillbox to your heart’s content; use a battering-ram. You see, I’ve carved my initials in the concrete, so that my name too goes down in history.

Narrator: Neither of us can make an exclusive claim to initiating the observations or the dialogue. Many an author tries to disguise his ignorance by smothering it in big words.

A: He’s trying to lead us up the garden path.

B: He’s driving me up the wall; he makes me feel I’m being directed, manipulated, as if I were no more than a bit-part actor.

Watchman: None of you really know how it all began.

Narrator: This calls for another fairground game. (He pulls a large number of keys from a bag nearby, and distributes them to A, B and C). Now, this is a bit like playing darts. Try and take good aim, and get your key to go through the remaining slits in the remaining pillbox walls. (A, B and C nod). The pursuit of the throwing game exemplifies the patterns of aimless mobility practised by our disillusioned, disaffected generation. In contrast to them, the watchman is a figure of supreme meditative calm.

B: At last I am beginning to feel that my words have found their way home: there is a mirror of reverberating sound which preserves and substantiates them. We will not get our proper reverb and multi-tracking until we have a clear grasp of our ideas.

Watchman: You’re not made of the same stuff as my old mates the builders. You’re too fond of the sound of your own voices. I’ve found some peace of mind; you lot have to sort out your own turmoil.

B: I want the city lights to become my own supplementary eyes, in the back of my head.

Narrator: Admittedly, I made my commentary behind your back. All right: I’m just a journalistic creep. When I try to make things clear, I just get them ever more confused.

C: Do we have no definition, no story?

A: We’ll all have to start talking sense for a change.

B: I’d love it if we were all standing on a field of natural gas.

Narrator: There can be no reflections without exterior light.

B: We must understand how walls crack and grass grows.

C: When the Watchman greeted us, he must have thought we were a three-part mirror capable of showing him his reflection.

B: If all our discourse makes sense, then we are perfect mirrors for each other, and we need not look beyond ourselves to find the truth. But what are we doing here? We cannot know, because we never talked to each other like this before we arrived here.

C: Let’s get away from here. I’m scared; I think we could be arrested.

B: no: if we leave, we’ll lose our precious thread of mutual understanding.

(The following speech blends live and recorded voices)

Narrator: It’s really shallow and narrow-minded to want to look outwards all the time, as pointless as treating a railway track as an end in itself rather than a means of direction and transportation. Indeed, montage techniques can make it look circular and self-perpetuating, like a conveyor-belt, but it is, after all, a flat, shallow track, linear but subject to curvature. Think of what you are doing before you go any further. Do not take my mention of a conveyor-belt lightly. Then make an extension of your throwing game by casting chunks of rubble up the slope. Every piece hitting the incline will make another piece fall down (He picks up an old crankshaft and throws it; some rubble duly falls.) None of us will get hurt. I do not want to move. Now I have found my true direction: Magnetic North. (‘Magnetic North’ is repeated several times, live and recorded.)

C: Dear audience: it is futile for us to try and bury ourselves in the mental rubble of abstractions. I’m sure all your homes are getting perilously near this state of chaos anyway, and nobody’s situation will be remedied simply by ranting on about it.

A & B: no; you’ve got to have proper debate and discussion.

Narrator: Remember, all of you: no looking out, only at each other.

B: We cannot keep on unburying ourselves, just in order to make more rubble in which to bury ourselves deeper. That would evoke the idea of a conveyor-belt in quite the wrong way.

A: What do you think you’ve got to convey?

Narrator: There’s no actual conveyor-belt coming up the incline outside the perimeter. So I don’t see there’s any cause for worry.

B: OK: Let’s keep our minds on the perimeter, and remember – a mirror is as good as a wall.

A: Just as an eye sometimes resembles a mirror.

C: Let’s not get too confused now.

B: I feel that the watchman is the real owner of everything round here.

C: If that’s the case, he’ll also hold all the records, and be the one to tell the final story.

B: Think of a broken wheel, kept vertical in its proper context. I can see one there.

Narrator: Why a broken one?

B: Because it is broken, it cannot roll away or get lost without strong external pressure. (He pulls the broken wheel out of the rubble.)

C: We will have none of it.

B: No: I shall approach it gingerly.

C: and then you will seize it!

B: My muscle power will first of all be conserved, then concentrated.

A, C & Narrator: (Aside) Over and out!

B: I’ll do it to numbers: count for me, please.

A: One

B: Two

C: Three

B: Gotcha! (He seizes the wheel and tugs at it. The rubble forms an incline beneath him and on either side of him. A wheelbarrow emerges. B loses his balance and falls on his back. The wheelbarrow hurtles over him and ends, wheel uppermost, behind his head.)

Narrator: He had so many years on the waiting list for an allotment, and now see what’s happened to him.

B: I have discovered the makings of a new game. I’m going to play at throwing this at one of the remaining walls of the pillbox, and see how many throws it takes to knock the wall down

Watchman: Can I join in?

Narrator: Of course you can, you’ll add strength to the throw.

(The two of them seize the wheelbarrow, and throw it. The wall remains intact. B lifts the wheelbarrow slightly, so that the wheel can rotate freely in mid-air. Then he lowers it back to the ground. The two of them pick it up and throw it again. Now the wall crumbles; a hole appears. The watchman throws hundreds of keys through the aperture.)

A, B &C: At last we can see the end of our troubles.

Narrator: There’s hope now: these keys point to the final phase of the action.

Watchman: I’m beginning to understand why you lot are here.

Narrator: Yes: our environment is neither inflatable nor contractable, but painfully rigid.

B: Couldn’t things have been different?

Narrator: No: the government said the alternatives would be too expensive.

A: Were you in the SAS then?

Narrator: No: I was preoccupied with writing my memoirs

B: Then please clue us in on a bit of background.

Narrator: The original panic-stricken bearers had been sent on a sabotage expedition.

B: (Excited) Yes, yes . . .

Narrator: So they deposited, fused their charges and fled. There was a colossal explosion. So this pit could be the result of a bombing attack. Perhaps a waste of good explosives, as there were no reports of any stockpile losses. There was such a massive throng that it would have been impossible to identify the sabotage team.

C: Yes: it was a bit like that in The Wages of Fear, wasn’t it? 

Narrator: There was a small number of people pursued by a big crowd, then absorbed in it, generating a mass panic. Something had to happen to bring the crowd to its senses, like a war or a natural disaster. The interplay of two factors which they could not grasp shrank a total day, scraped the bottom of a static, indefinite night, with the sun debarred from interference. For a blanket of time, none of the crowd could feel confident of seeing the light of day again.

B: so the disaster happened, and we are living with its repercussions.

A, B & C: So that’s why we’re here: we’re all part of the story.

Narrator: So masses of people came to set their feet on the site of a crucial historical event, and to what end? All for the sake of another pile of documents.

B: I think that bureaucrats are a pain in the neck.

Narrator: And so we are stragglers, both in relation to the panic-stricken crowd, and to the amphitheatre audience we were talking about.

B: I feel a bit better after that explanation. Now I know how to see things in proportion – through shrinkage by walking . . .

A: and shrinkage by talking.

C: Talking too much makes one short of breath. The state of one’s breath is a surer sign of panic than the strength of the wind.

Narrator: Everything’s got to be pulled down or blown up some time.

B: What a relief to be down in this pit, this enclave of safety. But I guess many city walls are the residue of past panics.

A: We should all fall inside the bomb together.

B: But one can never do that inside enclaves of safety.

A: There were cars, fountainheads of rubble, before they got abandoned and broken up. But they were all set in motion by internal combustion – via spark plugs.

B: When the drivers wanted to get out, they had do to so sideways, through doors opening obliquely. They never fell through the seats, except for those of a few specially designed models . . . Oh! I think I’m just talking round in circles.

C: Listen everybody: Looking out is fine now; but don’t look in, whatever you do.

B: We are in a trap, which is expanding everywhere we cannot see; it threatens to engulf us all.

A: But we are buoyant, and inflated.

B: Blown and congealed by our own futile conversation.

C: Only our loose breath can save us from the trap which we have laboured, by our speech, to bring upon ourselves, to imprison it and, in so doing, imprison ourselves.

A: Then we can be left peacefully with our reminiscences.

B: I always felt that some part of me was being sucked away, destroyed by redevelopment. All our talk must have had some effect on the overall temperature of the area: speculation about the outside interiorises the outside by heating it and stifling it.

(Enter narrator, carrying a shovel)

Narrator: This mess is driving me mad. I’ve got to clean it up a bit (he starts shovelling)

A: I wish we had kept our traps shut.

B: All those lights in the distance look a different colour now. For all we know, they may be coming through holes in a newly-built wall.

C: Mirrors may grow up, rear up, be dug out of the ground.

B: I think we’ve really messed ourselves up by getting so absorbed in this ambience.

(The Narrator goes on shovelling, half-burying himself in the process.)

B & C: There’s no-one else trying to burst in.

Narrator: There’s only me, and I think I’m throwing everybody backwards.

B & C: Our last hope is to try burrowing. The soil seems reasonably loose. We might not be able to penetrate the tangled roots – but unless we can do so, we’ll be really strung up. Our progress will be halted, and there’ll be nothing to show for all our efforts except some piles of discarded, inverted boots, which had to be kicked off when the first real subterranean area was reached.

Narrator: That idea was conned from Samuel Beckett.

A: so put that in your reminiscences and smoke it.

(They plough off through the rubble, leaving their boots behind them. The stage is plunged into total darkness. There is a brief flash of the sedentary Watchman, then darkness returns.)