E-Book, Englisch, 144 Seiten
ISBN: 978-1-78850-864-3
Verlag: Nick Hern Books
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark
Lauren Mooney is a writer, producer and dramaturg. Since 2015, she has co-run award-winning Kandinsky Theatre Company with director James Yeatman.
Autoren/Hrsg.
Weitere Infos & Material
ACT ONE 1. PROLOGUE Darkness, or some kind of non-electric light. The CHORUS enters. They make sound, foley and music alongside the text. 1 Tuesday the eighteenth of January, 1803. A mild, wet winter. The rain starts as they drag George Foster’s body from the gallows. 2 You can’t always be sure with these things, but he’s definitely dead. We hear a choking noise. 3 Hangings at Newgate are still public. Foster’s friends in the crowd stood close to the scaffold and when the trapdoor opened, they gathered round his kicking legs, and pulled. A broken neck. A kind of mercy. They’re not invited to the after-party. 4 This is England in 1803, where the bodies of convicted murderers belong to the state. Foster’s sentence wasn’t only to be hanged: it was to be hanged and dissected. We’re twenty years from Burke and Hare, but medical science is advancing at an astonishing rate, and doctors need corpses. We hear a neck-break noise. 5 There’s also a moral function. It’s widely believed that dissected bodies are too mutilated for the condemned to rise again on Judgement Day. To be hanged for murder in England in 1803 is to lose not just your human life, but your immortal one, too. 3 ‘One, two, three – ’ They make noises of carrying. 6 George Foster’s body is taken to a house several streets from Newgate, and laid out there, on the scrubbed wooden table. 3 ‘Okay, put him down’ 4 It is a room not very like this one, but still, there is a stage, of a kind. A stage and an audience. CHORUS 4 becomes Aldini. 2 A respectful hush falls. This is the man they’ve been waiting for. 6 Not Foster. Poor, dead George Foster’s just a prop. 5 They’ve come to see the great physicist himself: Signor Aldini. 3 Aldini has a famous uncle, Luigi Galvani, from whom we derive the word ‘galvanise’: ‘to shock something into action’. All of this is his idea. But Galvani only ever got to try it on frogs. 5 The men in that room hold their breath. Everyone holds their breath. 1 It’s hot, with all of them packed in together. 3 Hot, and dark, 2 as Aldini attaches the conducting rods to a large electrical battery. 4/Aldini plugs a mic in. We hear a buzz and hum – for the first time made by piped-in sound rather than the company. 6 The hum of it. The fizz. The smell in that room. 5 Hot copper, rubber piping, and death. 1 And finally it’s time: They watch Aldini lay the conducting rod against George Foster’s face. We hear electronic music, building. 6 There won’t be electric light in England for another seventy years. 5 When the current passes through the dead man’s face, it twitches. 2 For a moment, his eye opens; the corpse on the table seems to wink. 3 Some of the men in the audience are curious; some are sceptics; 1 some believe that they are literally about to watch a hanged man be restored to life. 3 A hand reaching beyond the vale, into The Unknown. 2 The vale reaches back. Within an hour, one of the men in this audience will be dead, a heart attack. 5 The newspapers will say he died of fright. 6 Aldini moves his conducting rod across George Foster’s lifeless body. 1 As the current passes through his right hand, They gasp. 3 it rises from the table. Noise, electronic music, singing. 2 A clenched fist beating the air. His legs twitch. His thighs convulse. CHORUS 4 speaks into the mic. 4 The invention of the telegraph is coming. The first radio transmission. The first computer. A century from now, electricity will be fully known, harnessed and tamed. This is what the future looks like: a dead man twitching on a table. The end of all life’s mysteries. The end of death itself. It starts here in this room. Everything cuts out. Silence. 1 Two hundred and seventy years later, the door of the Edius Labs facility slides open, and someone wheels the machine-body inside. It is an empty vessel. Lifeless. 6 And then it isn’t. 2. THE LAB CHORUS 1 becomes the ROBOT and stands in the space with VICTOR. Everyone else is gathered round the edge, each at a microphone. The project is to upload different scanned brains to the ROBOT, to see if they function. Each new speaker is voiced by the indicated chorus member into a mic, while 1/ROBOT lip-syncs. A sound indicates the uploading of consciousness to the robot, and there is another one for it being switched off. The on/off sounds start to blur together as the scene goes on. Eve ON sound. VICTOR Eve? Are you awake? EVE Yes VICTOR Can you hear me? EVE Yes VICTOR How does it feel? EVE Feel? It feels I VICTOR Okay, you don’t have to answer that yet. What do you remember? EVE I I don’t VICTOR Eve? EVE Eve? VICTOR That’s you EVE Eve VICTOR Yes That’s you Do you / want to EVE I remember water VICTOR Yes? EVE The feeling of water Weightless Floating That’s how it feels VICTOR Now? EVE Yes VICTOR Okay EVE But No It’s VICTOR Can you tell me what else you remember? EVE It’s not like that VICTOR Eve – EVE It’s like nothing It’s nothing I don’t feel anything VICTOR But you’re not in any pain? EVE Pain? No. VICTOR Good. That’s good. EVE I remember VICTOR What? EVE I remember Fire VICTOR Mm. That can’t be good. EVE I remember fire VICTOR Mike? EVE I remember pain VICTOR Mike, are you / getting this EVE I remember, I’m / Please VICTOR Mike! OFF sound. Thanks Subject B351-4 remembers its death So We should make a note of that, yeah? Right. Next Christopher ON sound. VICTOR Christopher Are you awake? Can you hear me? (To MIKE.) Are we getting consciousness readings? Because if not CHRISTOPHER No VICTOR Christopher? You can hear us, can’t you? How does it feel? CHRISTOPHER No VICTOR Okay CHRISTOPHER No VICTOR Okay, Christopher, don’t panic CHRISTOPHER No no no no VICTOR It’s important to try to remain calm CHRISTOPHER No no no no no / no no no no VICTOR / Christopher? CHRISTOPHER no no no no VICTOR Mike, I don’t think this one’s going to – CHRISTOPHER / nonononononono VICTOR Er Yeah, let’s switch it off OFF sound. Lewis ON sound. VICTOR Lewis? Lewis, can you hear me? Lewis? Mike OFF sound. Yep Tyrone TYRONE wakes up and begins talking without interruption, a constant stream-of-consciousness. He does not see or respond to VICTOR. TYRONE the day was sunny so I went to the shops and I thought I’d get a cauliflower and a beetroot because I thought I might roast them to make couscous or some other Mediterranean vegetable dish possibly it could have feta or raisins and a squeeze of lemon VICTOR / Tyrone? Tyrone? Can you? Ty– TYRONE but in the shop they had none of those things the shopkeeper was old and hunched but had a baby kitten in his lap and he was shelling peas into a bowl and...
