A Long Silence

Scene a room; which room the director of the performance must decide.

A man and a woman, Don and Rebecca, are seated in whatever is provided from the props department for them to sit. Dressed in whatever the costumiers can provide. Don rises and moves slowly to the window. Yes, there is a window. A mock window or a real window, it is impossible to see from the audience area. It may be a rose window or a bay window or a sash window or a leaded window or a louvred window – with or without Venetian blinds. (No, on second thoughts, it must have Venetian blinds with what they call a Juliet Balcony outside just visible.) With or without light coming in or going out, dependent on the time of day chosen by those in charge of this performance.

There are long silences involved in the following speech-rhythms… and the characters’ meaningful glances at irrelevant props specially chosen to be irrelevantly relevant in this way.

DON: Have you ever taught one’s lungs to breathe in such a way that they continue breathing after you are dead. Shakespeare did it apparently. And I guess he breathes on, still, with the speech-rhythms of his groundbreaking wordplay.

REBECCA: How can you tell you have been successful in having trained your lungs in this way, after you are dead? And also, in a coffin, is there air to breathe?

DON: We breathe easily in this room 

REBECCA: From the window?

DON: Yes, but not only from the window.

REBECCA: You mean if you go outside you can’t see it?

DON: (longer silence than ever at this apparent non-sequitur)

REBECCA: The rose garden is only there if you see it through the window?

(Enter another man, Steven, breathing heavily, indeterminately older than Don).

STEVEN: I really feel tired today. (He sits under a standard lamp) The bedroom is too noisy and I’m worried about too many things.

REBECCA: What you worried about?

STEVEN: Well, about you two for a start? Then there’s the pigeon loft. Nobody’s been there for ages. Not to speak of the way we’re all treated here. What a performance! Nothing is definite. Nothing is settled. We have to keep making decisions. We didn’t come here to make decisions. We came here to enjoy ourselves. That was the only decision.

DON: Rebecca and I needed a break. We were getting stale.

REBECCA: Come away from the window, Don. You never know who may be out there… By the way, Steven, why are you worried about us two?

STEVEN: I don’t like to see two friends like you so, how shall I put it, so unfriendly.

DON: Husbands and wives are not meant to be friendly.

STEVEN: No, I meant unfriendly to me. You both brought me along, as your guest, like … a family friend, but then you treat me as if I am a stranger.

DON: That was your decision.

STEVEN: My decision?

DON: Yes, it was you who wanted to keep at arm’s length. Separate tables and all that.

STEVEN: Only to give you two some … space … some area for you to lock horns …(laughing) and then kiss. Some air for you both to breathe, before you went on stage as Romeo and Juliet.

DON: You said you preferred to be on your own for meals. No mention of giving us space for learning our lines. Didn’t he say that, Rebecca? It was Steven who wanted to act the stranger. 

REBECCA: Don’t bring me into this. I don’t know what a stranger is. Nobody is a stranger. The world is full of people, but none of them are strangers … in the true sense. Aliens from another planet. They’d be proper strangers. I saw them on the balcony that the backstage boys have built, 

STEVEN: Yes, I know they are proper strangers. What are you looking at, Don?

DON: I’m looking through the window.

STEVEN: Yes, I know but what are you looking at through the window?

DON: The rose garden.

STEVEN: Can you see it?

(Enter another woman, Paula, indeterminately older than Rebecca)

PAULA: I was just outside and I couldn’t see it.

DON: You couldn’t see it?

PAULA: No. But you know me … I often don’t notice things. I wasn’t even looking for it.

STEVEN: Paula, can I introduce you to Don and Rebecca, old friends of mine.

DON: Not so much of the old!

STEVEN: You know what I mean. Paula is visiting me for the day. She is a friend but she is also from one of the authorities.

REBECCA: Which authority?

PAULA: Don’t worry, I don’t think it’s important. I just make visits to see if my customers … friends, are doing OK. 

STEVEN: Paula is a friend and someone who is visiting here to make out a report. She needs to check on my progress. She kills two birds with one stone. She is my friend, and is the person who reports on me.

PAULA: Not so much reports on you, Steven, more a way of caring for you. But I didn’t see the rose garden, getting back to what you were talking about. It would be good to help your breathing if there was truly a rose garden out there.

DON: I can’t see it today, but I can only see it from the window, when I do see it.

(Don tugs the slats of the Venetian blind together and walks to stand by Rebecca. There is an outside balcony just beyond the glass.)

REBECCA: Paula, I don’t think we need humouring about the rose garden, you know.

PAULA: I wasn’t humouring you. If I were humouring you, I would have told you that I did see the rose garden when I was just outside. It’s getting dark, anyway.

STEVEN: Dusk. The best time of day. Not one thing or another. By the way, Paula — Don and Rebecca have been friends of mine for years. But they are not visiting me here. They are staying here, too. Just in case you were under any misapprehension.

PAULA: Staying here or visiting here, it’s all the same to me. I’ll probably stay tonight, myself. I’ve arranged a room here … above the restaurant. It’s getting too dark to travel back tonight. The fog in the lanes and even in the hard shoulder… not a breath of wind to speak of.

DON: No lights on your car?

PAULA: Well, err, I don’t like night driving at the best of times or, rather, my eyes don’t like night driving.

REBECCA: Does the room they’ve given you overlook … the rose garden?

PAULA: I’m not sure. But I’m sure they’ve given me a room with some sort of view, as I am from the … authorities, as you say. But I don’t like to pull rank to get a good room. A view of the backyard would be Ok, especially as it’s getting too dark to see anything at all. But it would be nice to know that my window looks out on the rose garden even when it’s too dark to look at anything at all through the window. A view is always a view, even at night, when you can’t see it. Gives a sense of space and I can’t stand being closed in.

REBECCA: Our room doesn’t have a view at all.

PAULA: Doesn’t have a view?

REBECCA: No, doesn’t have a view at all.

PAULA: No window, then?

REBECCA: Yes, it has a window.

PAULA: Must be some sort of view, then?

DON: What Rebecca means, Paula, is that the view from our window is not worth talking about.

STEVEN: Not worth writing home about. You know, my view from the room they gave me isn’t much to write home about, either. Makes me cry. I sit up in bed, looking towards the window, imagining a clifftop and waves crashing on rocks and seagulls and a sun that plays hide and seek with the clouds off the Atlantic. Makes me cry. I’m nearly crying now thinking about it.

PAULA: Why does no view make you cry, Steven?

STEVEN: Nobody can account for tears. I think of my Rachel. She died you know. Jumped off such a cliffview. Said she had gone for just a bit of air.

PAULA: Your wife? How long ago?

STEVEN: She jumped, yes, she jumped, I think she suddenly stopped breathing … I think it was about ten years ago, dashed herself on to the rocks…

PAULA: So why does no view make you cry?

STEVEN: No view … well, I love views. And I loved that clifftop view, until… that day ten years ago.

(Don and Rebecca point to the outside through the window and silently leave the room together. The room is somehow bigger and airier without them. This is difficult, but each performance management must decide how to accomplish this special effect.)

STEVEN: Good night.

PAULA: They can’t hear. They’ve gone. Surprised they left without…

STEVEN: It’s like that here. Come and go, without bye or leave. They’ve got lines to learn. The theatre world is much harder during this period of ventilators and lockdowns, indeed much harder than when we played in Macbeth in those days before it all happened.

PAULA: Where they’ve gone? To learn their lines?

STEVEN: This time of day, you probably find them wandering around outside.

PAULA: In the rose garden?

STEVEN: Well, if this were a dream or a story, instead of real life, the answer would be clear. They’d find the rose garden and enjoy the folded-up petals. Blooms in dusk are at their best. Gives a dark edge to their beauty, whilst retaining a rosy tinge at their hearts.

PAULA: Nice words. If you had words to express about Rachel and her accidental fall from the cliff, what words would they be? Words give perspective … and, eventually, comfort.

STEVEN: Does coming here authorise you to counsel me, Paula? It sounds so official, drawing me out like this, as if you want me to treat you like a – what shall we call it? – a shrink. 

PAULA: I’m a friend, Stephen, not a counsellor, but if I can help like a counsellor, where’s the harm in that? One does not exclude the other.

STEVEN: I can’t think of the right words to talk about Rachel’s accident.

PAULA: Perhaps you should look out of the window, open the blinds again, whilst you think. You might be able to see Don and Rebecca in the … in their rose garden.

STEVEN: Humouring again? You’re full of tricks, Paula. Word games. It’s too dark even for dusk to call itself by that name. Words are just names for things. I used Rachel as my word for something so intangible. Not even a memory. It’s more a yearning for something I never had. Like Heaven. Not God in Highest Heaven, but God in Highest Rachel. With her mild eyes.

PAULA: Keep talking. Disentangling the past is like trawling for a catch in the clarified sea of the future. The future is always clearer than the past. The past represents the uncharted waters. The future is mapped out for navigation.

STEVEN: The future is always clearer than the past, true, but only from the perspective of now. More wishful thinking than that undoubted reality which is the future. 

OFFSTAGE ASIDES…

DON: Those two talk out of their arses!

REBECCA: The masks on their mouths don’t help, I guess. They make for a lot of long silences with nonsense between.

(Whilst talking, Steven has walked over to the window and opened the blinds. Unseen, Don and Rebecca re-emerge from a different door to the one from which they originally exited. Unseen, in the sense that the audience are unable to see them, but Paula is aware of their return. Steven still stares through the window, his back to the proceedings. Paula beckons to Don and Rebecca to come further on-stage…)

PAULA: Come on, you two. You must be cold. Come closer to the roaring fire, Rebecca. And Don.

STEVEN: Who you talking to? Our friends have found their rose garden, I see. The darkness is tinged with pink and red and white smoke, as if the flowers themselves are smouldering, I imagine. Being awake makes dreams more real, makes them more – what’s the word? – decisive.… I see their two shadows moving together, lips joining … merging in passionate embrace. Smouldering, a lovely word, that, for the colour of roses at dusk. I am sure you are my Rachel in an invented mask disguise. Let’s stand on the very last balcony together.

(Curtain falls on this last History Play. Audience applause sounding like aliens stifling in Earth’s air. A lung silence.)