Coburn Citysong and other plays

1. Auflage 2019
ISBN: 978-1-78850-188-0
Verlag: Nick Hern Books
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 120 Seiten

Reihe: NHB Modern Plays

Late-night taxis, teen discos, home nurses, Jewish launderettes, vigilantes, babies, immigrants, seagulls. Citysong is a play, a poem and a chorus of voices showing three generations of a Dublin family on one day. Intimate and sweeping, joyous and ridiculous, it's modern-day Dublin's Under Milk Wood via Metamorphoses (not the book about the cockroach). It's different things at different times, which makes sense seeing as it's about change. Carys D. Coburn's Citysong was winner of the 2017 Verity Bargate Award, and premiered at the Abbey Theatre, Dublin, in May 2019, before transferring to Soho Theatre, London. The author was named Most Promising New Playwright at the 2020 Off-West End Theatre Awards for Citysong. This edition also contains the plays Boys and Girls, which won the Fishamble Best New Writing Award at the Dublin Fringe and was nominated for the Stewart Parker Trust Award, and Drawing Crosses on a Dusty Windowpane.

Carys D. Coburn (they/them) is a writer and theatre maker based in Dublin. Their plays include: BÁN (Abbey Theatre, Dublin, 2025, nominated for the Susan Smith Blackburn Prize); Absent the Wrong (Abbey Theatre, Dublin, 2022, as part of the Dublin Fringe Festival); Boys and Girls (Dublin Fringe Festival 2013, winner of Best New Writing Award, nominated for the Stewart Parker Trust Award); Drawing Crosses on a Dusty Windowpane (Dublin Fringe 2015); Citysong (winner of the Verity Bargate Award; Abbey Theatre Dublin and Soho Theatre London 2019); Briseis after the Black and Blackcatfishmusketeer (Dublin Fringe 2016); and This is a Room (Dublin Theatre Festival 2017). They are a collaborating writer with MALAPROP Theatre, with whom they have co-written JERICHO (Bewleys Cafe Theatre, 2017), Everything Not Saved (Dublin Fringe, 2017), Before You Say Anything (Dublin Fringe, 2020), Where Sat the Lovers (Dublin Fringe, 2021) and HOTHOUSE (Dublin Fringe, 2023). Carys D. Coburn was formerly known as Dylan Coburn Gray. Author photo by Evanna Devine

Autoren/Hrsg.

Coburn, Carys D.

Leseproben

ONE

VOICE. Let’s leave him, there and then, as the sun swells pregnantly from segment of a mandarin to half of a Jaffa Cake, at that moment when John and Fiona have taken off to take off their clothing.

Let’s move four and nine miles and months in space and time without leaving now, as they make love in an apartment, to a hospital that throbs like a heart despite the hour.

Let’s look instead, in this beginning instant, to this place in the centre, this place of infant’s first world-entries with placentas like parachutes, where the dawn chorus shrills and blinds as the sun, over and past outside’s smokers and the blinds, like a coldhanded doctor pokes the first fingers of greeting.

Who are the birds who sing here? They’re not, save vernacularly, they’re women, they’re pregnant, they’re wrecked and they’re spectacularly pissed off with everything.

This is not motherhood meek and mild but wild animals and viscera. High-definition and in the glistening hues of post-lion, wide-open, xylophone-ribbed zebras, but this is an extremity much extremer than that of those latter half of the alphabet letters.

What good if the doctor’s saying –

DOCTOR. That’s good, we’ve got four centimetres!

VOICE. Because –

BIRD 1. THAT’S FUCKING NOTHING

VOICE. Or –

DOCTOR. Push!

VOICE. Because –

BIRD 2. I AM FUCKING PUSHING.

VOICE. Or –

DOCTOR. You’ve still to deliver the placenta!

VOICE. Because –

BIRD 3. WHY DON’T FUCKING DELIVER THE PLACENTA.

VOICE. The prayer and naysayers alike are saying prayers in their sixth hour of their second day of need or desperation, making requests like –

BIRD 1. Just don’t let me poo

BIRD 2. Just don’t let me die

BIRD 3. Just let it be over soon

BIRD 4 ().

BIRD 1. Just don’t let me poo

BIRD 2. Just let the baby live and not not be able to breathe because she’s umbilically tangled or strangled

BIRD 3. Just don’t let me need a procedure with scalpels or to be given a huge fucking spinal needle

BIRD 4 ().

BIRD 1. Just don’t let me poo

BIRD 2. Just let it be done

BIRD 3. Just let the fucking baby come.

BIRD 4. JUST DON’T LET MY VAGINA RIP AND BECOME ONE WITH MY BUM.

VOICE. New men and old men are new dads alike, the former pom-pom-lessly cheerleading witnesses, the latter pompously or nervously or disinterestedly distant.

The new men are there with their sweaty hair and facedly swearing partners. They can’t carrry their carrier’s burden for them but they can coax them from exhaustion and back into motion with their voices choking on their burgeoning emotions in loving words like –

INDAD 1. You’re doing great!

BIRD 1. FUCK YOU

INDAD 2. Just push!

BIRD 2. YOU CAN FUCK OFF

INDAD 3. Nearly there!

BIRD 3. FUCK YOU

INDAD 4. Squeeze my hand!

BIRD 4. FUCK YOU YOU MOTHERFUCKER YOU DID THIS TO ME.

VOICE. And the old men – regardless of age – are outsidedly timebiding, only arguably hiding but one-hundred-per-cent absent. They smoke with white knuckles until the pub over the road opens, but one-hundred-proof absinthe couldn’t stop them from thinking about all the gore and wrackedness that’s happening without them, so they chit-chat distractedly but more and more often just lapse into silence.

OUTDAD 1 (). It’s probably quite tense in there.

OUTDAD 2. Oh no doubt.

VOICE. Look, here.

As the sun clears the horizon as roundly as the crown of a purple white and greasily shining baby, this woman is handed hers and he’s breathing as easily as she isn’t, as calm after his first grizzle as a stormless teacup and he and eggshell porcelain are equally frail.

She holds him and she traces his wrinkles like braille and for her at least it balances, the alms-less-ness of labouring with her palm now cradling her tiny pink Yorick, the balm of this night’s morrow’s daylight with that endless burning dark.

This is her son and her son’s vernal equinox, with his sleekly blackly vernixly slicked-back thick black locks of hair that she smooths, so so carefully and so so calmly, from his perfect face as scrunched as imperfect origami.

He’s healthy, he’s alive, got four limbs and four sets of five on the end of them.

KATE. And thank fuck for that

VOICE. She breathes.

Her name is Kate, and her partner who’s waiting for a squeeze of the baby by the bedside is Rob. This is their first kid in their late and early thirties respectively, unmarried eight years in and still not expecting to be, living in sin their parents’ peers if not their parents would have called it, despaired of, tutted at, or policed, but these days who cares, really?

They’re both teachers, like her father, which is a respectable profession at least, and Rob looks out the window to the streaky bacon East and thinks

ROB. The alarm went off an hour ago and no one was there to snooze it, no one toasted toast or ground grinds and around this time we’d cruise down the motorway to school, early enough to beat the rush and have a staffroom cup of tea, but we didn’t today and someone else will have to call the roll for 3B and deal with all of the –

ROLL-CALL. Yetunde Mulcahy?

3B1. Yetunde’s absent she’s pregnant

YETUNDE. Fuck off I’m not absent or pregnant but

3B1. Ah but you’re pregnant but

YETUNDE. Ah but fuck off but

VOICE. And how much better is it being here, now, holding his son for the first time, even if he’s shit scared and thinking –

ROB. Just don’t stop breathing and we’ll be fine. How are you?

VOICE. He asks her, and she’s got so many answers –

KATE. I feel like a cored apple or an ironing board with a face-down iron burning a hole in it or a chased-down and wolfsavaged deer or a dropped and cracked beer glass or a chipped sink or an iceskaters’-iceskatesedly lacerated icerink or snapped icecream wafer or a mousetrap full of brokenbacked mice or a holepunched piece of paper or floorfallen piece of meat you’d feed a stray cat or cat that’s been hit by a truck and tiretrackedly flattened to the point of bursting and the worst bit’s its visible guts on the tarmac, that’s how I am.

VOICE. But she just says –

KATE. Tired.

VOICE. And takes the baby back, and dozes like her mother does right this instant, alone in her home in Donnycarney by the church she’s never gone to.

Kate naps like her mother did in the 1980s, having just had her, her fourth of four otherwise all male babies –

BRIGID. Thank god all still living

VOICE. And all born if not in this room then at least in this building.

Her name is Brigid, for the saint, her husband Frank, for his father, but he’s two years gone, or late, or departed, and never again will he be coming home early.

He still stares out of mantelpiece pictures that span the wall and nearly half a century, from their black-and-white wedding in his borrowed suit finery, the both of them as unlined as their clothing and smiling as widely as they were able, to their crumpled colourlessness in later colour, their hair as white as once it was sable.

She doesn’t know about Kate’s baby, not yet.

But if she did, in this moment as the church throws its silhouette butterfly-net-like in the window and onto their photographed faces, the dozens of the between two and five of them in different sizes, times, and places, she’d be thinking about their births –

BRIGID. Michael, then two years, Stephen, then three years, Seán, then five years later Kate.

VOICE. Ten years of pregnancies and as fearful or more so at the end as at the start, once again gowned and hobbling in the arterial throb and hum of the hospital and once again thrummed by contractions like an on-the-verge-of-snapping guitar string, waiting on Kate to come and so once again praying –

BRIGID. Just let it not hurt too much and let it be a girl because I’ve had enough of boys, sons and their father, and don’t let me die from poison in my blood or endless bleeding like poor Mrs Whelan, god rest her, or even be invalided like poor Mrs Cahill who – slow as a Roman slave in in shackles – shuffles in her slip-on shoes – because she can’t face bending for laces – to Black’s shop and back every day for the messages in a daily Gethsemane’s-worth of agony, world without end, from here on earth into eternity. They say she says she saw he had a saw and even the nurse screamed.

Just let me live, healthy, let the baby live, healthy, not like the Nolans who went in the two of them and came out the two of them and probably the two of them never even got to see him.

VOICE. She can and could imagine what that was like, somewhat at least, having lost. Before Kate and after the boys she’d been pregnant, till on the cusp of crossing the cusp of first and second trimesters, she bled, not much, but more than enough to make her...