Wertenbaker Timberlake Wertenbaker Plays 1

New Anatomies; Grace of Mary Traverse; Our Country's Good; Love of a Nightingale; Three Birds Alighting on a Field
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ISBN: 978-0-571-31829-2
Verlag: Faber & Faber
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 464 Seiten

New Anatomies, Grace of Mary Traverse, Our Country's Good, Love of a Nightingale & Three Birds Alighting on a Field

Timberlake Wertenbaker's plays include New Anatomies (ICA, London, 1982), Abel's Sister (Royal Court Theatre Upstairs, 1984), The Grace of Mary Traverse (Royal Court), which won the Plays and Players Most Promising Playwright Award in 1985, Our Country's Good (Royal Court and Broadway), winner of the Laurence Olivier Play of the Year Award in 1988 and the New York Drama Critics' Circle Award for Best New Foreign Play in 1991, The Love of the Nightingale (RSC's Other Place), which won the 1989 Eileen Anderson Central TV Drama Award, Three Birds Alighting on a Field (Royal Court), which won the Susan Smith Blackburn Award, Writers' Guild Award and London Critics' Circle Award in 1992, The Break of Day (Out of Joint production, Royal Court and tour, 1995), After Darwin (Hampstead Theatre, 1998), The Ash Girl (Birmingham Rep, 2000), Credible Witness (Royal Court, 2001), Galileo's Daughter (Theatre Royal, Bath, 2004), Arden City (NT Connections, 2008) and The Line (Arcola Theatre, 2009). She has written the screenplay of The Children, based on the novel by Edith Wharton, and a BBC2 film entitled Do Not Disturb. Translations and adaptations include Marivaux's La Dispute, Jean Anouilh's Leocadia, Maurice Maeterlinck's Pelleas and Melisande for BBC Radio, Ariane Mnouchkine's Mephisto, adapted for the RSC in 1986, Sophocles's The Theban Plays (RSC, 1991), Euripides' Hecuba (ACT, San Francisco, 1995; BBC Radio 3, 2001) and Hippolytus (Riverside Studios, 2009), Eduardo de Filippo's Filumena (Peter Hall Company at the Piccadilly Theatre, 1998), Pirandello's Come tu mi vuoi, Gabriela Preissova's Jenufa (Arcola Theatre, 2008) and Racine's Brittanicus (Wilton's Music Hall, 2011).

Autoren/Hrsg.

Wertenbaker, Timberlake

Leseproben

SCENE TWO

Anna,

Anna And then the children … They won’t stay.

Antoine

Isabelle Antoine. Don’t let him frighten you.

Antoine () Drunken tyrant.

Isabelle Let’s dream.

Antoine He threatened to hit me. Brute. I have to go away, now.

Anna () First Nicholas, not a word … He must have come to a bad … Too many anarchists in the house. It’s a bad influence on children.

Isabelle Oh yes, let’s go away. We’re in Siberia. The snow is up to our knees, so hard to move. Suddenly, look, shining in the dark, a pair of yellow eyes.

Antoine I have no choice. I’ll have to run away and join the army.

Isabelle I’ll come with you, we can take Mama.

Antoine The army’s only for boys.

Isabelle We can’t leave Mama.

Antoine I wish I was a girl. He doesn’t treat you that way.

Isabelle I’m strong.

Antoine He’ll kill me.

Anna If only Trofimovitch had allowed some fairy tales, even Pushkin … not all these Bakunin pamphlets at bedtime.

Isabelle It’s snowing again. Darkness. Another pair of yellow eyes, glistening. Another. We’re surrounded. Are they wolves?

Antoine () No, those are the eyes of our enemies.

Isabelle You’re shivering.

Anna And now Natalie …

Antoine I’m cold. It’s too cold up there. I want to go further south.

Isabelle The Crimea, lemon groves.

Antoine ‘Knowst thou the land, beloved, where the lemons bloom …’ No, I want to go further south. Far away. The Sahara.

Anna And Natalie’s so good with …

Isabelle Our camels are tired.

Antoine That’s the sort of thing Natalie would say.

Isabelle () The transition from Siberia was too sudden. I haven’t acclamitated.

Antoine Acclimatized.

Anna It’s all so difficult.

Isabelle This stillness.

Antoine Dune after dune, shape mirroring shape, so life … weariness.

Isabelle How rapidly the sun seems to plunge behind the dunes. This stillness.

Antoine Let us rest, my beloved.

Isabelle I’ll build our tent. There’s a storm coming, I can see the clouds.

Antoine There aren’t any clouds over the desert.

Isabelle That’s what Natalie would say.

Antoine You don’t understand, the corners of a dream must be nailed to the ground as firmly as our tent: no rain in the desert.

Isabelle A wind then. Listen, the wind’s galloping over the dunes.

Antoine It’s a sandstorm.

Isabelle Quick. Where are you? I can’t see you.

Antoine Here, come here, my beloved.

Beloved.

Anna Natalie mustn’t … she’s too good with () Antoine, I’m not sure you should … with your sister … like that.

Isabelle We’re playing, Mama, we’re dreaming.

Anna Are you too old? I don’t know. The poets … But Natalie …

Antoine Wants us to behave –

Isabelle Like Swiss clocks. Tick tock.

Antoine Tick tock.

Anna You mustn’t … She is sometimes a little … but she’s the only one, she’s so good with dust. I don’t seem to manage very well. There’s so much of it and it’s complicated finding it. I wasn’t brought up to … But this new world of Trofimovitch, where it’s wrong to have servants, well yes, but what about the dust? I suppose when the revolution comes, they’ll find a way, deal with it.

Isabelle We don’t mind.

Anna Natalie … wants to leave us.

Antoine Even Natalie can’t take the beast any more.

Anna Isabelle, she’s always been very fond … Tell her she absolutely mustn’t …

Isabelle She’s free.

Anna But Trofimovitch …

Natalie

Natalie, I was saying … to abandon your home …

Natalie How can you call this pigsty a home?

Anna Darling, a young lady’s vocabulary shouldn’t include … Your family …

Natalie Family. (Looks around at them.) In a family you have first a mother who looks after her children, protects them, teaches them …

Anna Didn’t I? You knew several poems of Byron as a child.

Natalie A mother who teaches her children how to behave and looks after the house, cooks meals, doesn’t let her children eat out of a slop bucket –

Anna Trofimovitch says meals are a bourgeois form of … But don’t we have …

Natalie When I cook them. And secondly in a family a brother is a brother, a boy then a man, not this snivelling, delicate half girl. You’ve allowed him to be terrorized by that drunken beast.

Anna Natalie, his mind, philosophy …

Natalie Philosophy, don’t make me laugh. Yes, and finally in a family you have a proper father, not that raving peasant, who’s driven us to this misery and filth, who’s now trying to get into my bed at night.

Anna He’s not always very steady at night, he must have thought … He didn’t notice it wasn’t his …

Natalie (exploding) And you defend him. My mother defends the man who’s ruining all of us, you defend the man who’s trying to seduce your own daughter. You won’t leave that filthy lecherous drunk, you prefer to ruin us.

Anna Leave him … go … where?

Isabelle Natalie, love forgives.

Natalie Love, that spittle of stinking brandy. Love?

Isabelle () ‘Love has its reasons …

Antoine … which reason cannot fathom.’

Natalie The two of you with your books!

Anna () Isabelle is right … She doesn’t mind …

Natalie At her age you love anybody, even beggars, even a snivelling brother, () I’ll come back and get you later, then you can come live with me in a real home, with a real family,...