Subversions

SUBVERSIONS PLAYING WITH HISTORY IN WOMEN’S THEATRE

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Contents

Introduction

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Walking on Peas Erika Block

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Bloody Mary and the Virgin Queen Deborah Barnard Jill Dowse Kate Hale Cath Kilcoyne

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Mrs. Beeton’s History of the World Julie Wilkinson

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Notes on Contributors

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Introduction Gabriele Griffin and Elaine Aston

Subversions: Playing History in the 1990s

Since the Second Women’s Liberation Movement feminists have increasingly taken issue with the absence of women from history (see, for example, Bonnie S.Anderson and Judith P.Zinsser A History of Their Own, Penguin, 1988). Writing history from a feminist perspective has involved re-telling the past in a way which takes account of women’s lives which were previously undervalued, or, as Sheila Rowbotham has argued, ‘hidden from history’ (Pluto, 1973). In the 1980s and 1990s this has developed into a complex, inter-disciplinary field of feminist cultural history which resists the positivist concept of historical ‘fact’. The performing of feminist history has emerged as a strong tradition in women’s theatre. In her American study of Feminist Theatre Groups Dinah Luise Leavitt noted that ‘women’s history plays’ offer dramatisations ‘ranging from panoramas of whole periods to biographies of real or imagined women’ (McFarland, 1980, p. 95). Early examples of these from a British context include Monstrous Regiment’s production of Scum (1976) by Claire Luckham and Chris Bond, a ‘musical celebration’ of the lives of the women in the Paris Commune of 1871, and Pam Gem’s Queen Christina (1977), which de-mythologised the (post-Garbo) image of the Queen of Sweden. Working through history and uncovering the ‘hidden’ lives of women—whether, by dramatising the idea of communities of women, as in Caryl Churchill’s dinner scene in Top Girls (1982), or by focusing on a single figure, as in Liz Lochhead’s Mary Queen of Scots Got Her Head Chopped Off (1987)—has continued to attract feminist dramatists and groups.

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It is not just the ‘greats’, however, which feminist history and theatre has sought to represent. Feminist study has also been concerned with the lives of ordinary women which history books have simply left out. Finding out about the ‘lost’ lives of ordinary women has meant conducting different kinds of historical research: for example, asking women about their lives in wartime, or finding out about different communities of women through local history and archives. Devised work by women’s theatre groups and feminist dramatists have included this kind of research in re-creating history for feminist performance. The devised play Time Pieces (1982) by the Women’s Theatre Group and Lou Wakefield, for example, involved the company in oral history research to create their Brechtian montage of snapshots of women’s lives in the twentieth century. Later in the 1980s, Sarah Daniels’s The Gut Girls (1988) brought local history to the Albany Empire in its examination of a community of working-class women working in the gutting sheds at Deptford at the turn of the century. In pointing to the ways in which women have been historically represented (or left out altogether) and the reality of women’s lives, feminist performance makes the histories, lives and desires of women visible, as illustrated in this volume of plays from the 1990s. In Walking on Peas Erika Bloch takes the ‘hidden’, unknown, historical lives of women who cross-dressed and joined the army as its subject. Her dramatisation of women from the ‘past’ who refused the ‘feminine’ for adventures in the ‘masculine’ world of soldiering, unfixes the boundaries of gender roles and identities which continue to ‘trouble’ us in the present. Foursight Theatre have made looking at history through, as their publicity states, ‘the eyes of women such as Eva Braun, Pope Joan, Mae West and Ulrike Meinhof’, a key focus of their work. Their group devised one-act play on Mary Tudor and Queen Elizabeth I, Bloody Mary and the Virgin Queen, shows the continuing tradition of feminist collaborative scripting in a piece whose comic and stylistic elements re-figure the power-play of the two queens as sisterly rivalry. Julie Wilkinson’s Mrs. Beeton’s History of the World fuses the ‘great’ and the ‘ordinary’ by re-presenting Mrs Beeton in juxtaposition with the figure of her working-class maid, Caroline. In a play which uses comedy to take a look at history through a recipes-through-the-ages framing device, mistress and maid re-vision their lives as middle- and workingclass women in the nineteenth century. The historical focus is shared by all three plays in this volume, as is the stylistic challenge which they offer to the malestream version of history. In the interests of subverting historical ‘truth’ these feminist plays make

INTRODUCTION 3

use of two-hander role-playing, comedy, non-linear structures, the mixing of styles, registers and techniques, and a language of performance other than the linguistic. As history is played and re-visited through the agency of feminist performance, questions of gender, class, and power come under scrutiny. The insistence on playing and role-playing, a dominant motif in all three plays, de-stabilises ‘fixed’ identities. The geography of performance space and body space/s resists the ‘factual’ mapping of an historical reality through refusing to be contained by that history As (sub) versions of history these plays reflect, or rather contribute to, feminist cultural history in the 1990s. Walking on Peas (1993–5)

Walking on Peas, first toured by the women’s theatre company Dorothy Talk in 1991, addresses the complexities of gender roles and identifications which in the 1990s have become the staple of, among others, queer theory and queer performance (see, for instance, Judith Butler, Gender Trouble, Routledge, 1990; Jill Dolan, Presence and Desire, University of Michigan Press, 1993; Lynda Hart and Peggy Phelan, eds, Acting Out: Feminist Performances, University of Michigan Press, 1993). It takes its title from one of the supposed methods of detecting cross-dressing in women: while men will walk firmly over peas, women will fall…The play’s focus is on women through the ages who have cross-dressed to join the male domain of the army. Erika Block, the playwright, expressly acknowledges the work of Julie Wheelwright and of Rudolf Dekker and Lotte van de Pol (see selected bibliography for details) who have researched the histories of women from the Middle Ages onwards who cross-dressed and lived as men. Based in part on historical material, Walking on Peas conjoins three cross-dressing women whose lives have been historically documented with one ‘invented’ figure. This juxtaposition raises immediate questions about the nature and status of history. Walking on Peas is not concerned with historical accuracy; rather, it provides an exploration of what motivates women to cross-dress with how the transition from appearing to be a woman to appearing to be a man affects these women and their relationships. Because Walking on Peas does not aim at historical accuracy, it does not present itself as documentary realism with a linear, chronologically determined narrative that details a sequential development. Instead it explodes boundaries of time, geography and identity to suggest the artificiality and constructedness of these categories and to indicate the possibility of subverting such boundaries. In doing so, it borrows from Brechtian theatre techniques, presenting a series of short

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scenes, made possible through minimal props, with devices such as actresses changing roles and turning into women on stage in front of the audience. However, it goes beyond Brechtian theatre in that it utilizes techniques of physical theatre in a series of scenes which foreground physical skill as part of the identity of the women as military men. This mixing of performance registers is also signalled through the use of two skilled onstage musicians, an opera singer and a viola da gamba player, who musically support the action, as well as representing one of the characters. This technique of mixing elements from different kinds of cultural production, a theatrical strategy increasingly common in the postmodern late 1980s and 1990s, raises questions about what it is that the audience is actually seeing, a question pertinent both to the style and the content of this play. Initially, the stage appears to be peopled by men but as the signs of masculinity are comically exposed as false—shoulder padding and moustaches keep slipping—the audience is made aware that all the characters are women dressed as men. Walking on Peas explores a variety of reasons for why women might choose to cross-dress, from being ‘bored southern belles’ out for a little adventure to following a man one has fallen in love with into war, to desiring life in a sphere which is different from the domestic one assigned to women, to feeling ‘more comfortable’ in men’s clothes. The initial reasons for cross-dressing are almost banal and certainly do not immediately suggest a lesbian identity. ‘Beauty and romance and fantasy’, the stuff that much popular culture aimed at a female audience is made of, persuaded Kati, for instance, to become Djamal. However, the play spends little time exploring the initial impetus behind cross-dressing; rather, its central concern is how the women carry this change off and how it affects them. The three characters who cross-dress all learn about the world of men and profess to ambivalent and contradictory responses. Thus Djamal, the character who comes closest of all three to producing a linear narrative about his/her life, often told directly to the audience, reveals: ‘It is terrible to see the man of your dreams betray the image you’ve created of him. Terrible to learn that your romantic hero is, in reality, obsessively practical’ The focus on the subjectively created image is pertinent here, as much of the play is about the interplay between ideas of appearance and ideas of essence. The theatre as the space of performance enables the overt play with the audience’s projections, testing assumptions about people gleaned from appearances against assumptions built on essences. How do you know that what you see is a woman or a man? And how do you know if

INTRODUCTION 5

the person ‘really’ is a woman or a man? What will you do when you discover they are not what you expected them to be? Djamal may fall out of love with his/her original hero but s/he falls instead for Helja, the one onstage female, an opera singer speaking Finnish. Helja represents the notion of disturbance and desire in the play. She moves about the stage taking, according to the stage directions, what she wants (as opposed to what is hers), violating the rules of battle engagement so that she has to be rescued (against her will!) on several occasions, and overtly expressing her desire for Bunk who, however, has fallen for Djamal. Helja cannot be understood; her singing and the fact that she speaks in a language which is alien for an English-speaking audience moves her into the realm of the pre-symbolic associated, according to the French theoretician Julia Kristeva (Desire in Language, Blackwell, 1980), with the maternal and the feminine. Helja embodies desire both by being desired by Djamal and through enacting her own desire for Bunk. She is also the unknown which the audience desires to understand, which Djamal wishes to possess and Bunk is afraid of. Femininity as desire becomes the major disruptive force and the guiding principle of Walking on Peas for the play focuses, after all, on four women all following and enacting their desires. It could be argued that Helja functions as a symbol for the notion that desire, located in the unconscious, cannot be understood. This, in any event, is what the characters in this performance piece have to come to terms with. Initially they all seem very clear about the boundaries of their gender roles. Once they were women; now they are men trying to behave in a manly way. But the performance is always imperfect, the padding appears, the body betrays a sex different from the gender suggested by the garb. However, cross-dressing affects not only the appearance but also the mind. Having become ‘men’ the women are confronted with new desires and ones different from what they felt before. They all either fall for another woman (Djamal for Helja) or another man (Bunk for Djamal; Helja for Bunk) and in the style of romantic comedies, none fall for those who are in love with them. There is no initial reciprocity. The characters’ changes in objects of desire invite questions about how we come to desire; are we culturally conditioned by our and others’ attire to choose what is deemed appropriate for us, or is desire beyond such regulation? Much of the final scene is given over to exploring this question, with Bunk, for example, initially refusing Djamal when, having fallen in love with Djamal as a man, he realizes that Djamal is the woman he once flirted with. The ability to move beyond fixed gender identifications, diversely difficult for the characters in Walking on

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Peas, demands the renewed investigation of what shapes desire when gender is no longer the determining category. Bloody Mary and the Virgin Queen (1993)

Bloody Mary and the Virgin Queen was devised and toured by the allfemale company Foursight Theatre in 1992/3. The play focuses on two female figures from history. One is well known, indeed as the character herself, Elizabeth I, reminds the audience, she is part of the National Curriculum. The other, Mary Tudor, is rather less famous, a fact humorously attributed in the play to her not having died a violent death. However, as one might expect from a feminist play, the piece does not set out to present history as we know it, that is as it has usually been constructed and is taught in schools; instead history is opened, like a toy box, and rummaged in, not, in this instance, for the purposes of finding something new, but in order to play with it, to question its assumptions and to suggest that history can be told in different ways. The simile of history as a toy box is theatrically and semantically important. The set, two boxes for the queens to rummage in, pop up from or disappear behind (like so many Jacks-in-the-, or rather, Jills-in-theboxes), establishes the idea of a childlike playing and of a performance. As the play unfolds it is made clear that the two women were, to some extent, others’ toys. As Mary puts it: ‘from the day I was born political pawn’. Both are pawns in a multiplicity of ways: as women dictated to by men who, like John Knox and Martin Luther, did not credit them with the ability to think or who, like Henry VIII, did not want women to reign; as royal heirs whose fates were intertwined with that of their countries; as historical figures whose lives would be written (about) in numerous biographies. Framing them as Jills-in-boxes therefore underwrites the puppet-style lives against which they strove to assert themselves. The nursery or playroom style setting is reinforced by the way in which the characters interact. They do what children do: sing, play games such as truth or dare, call each other names and goad each other, have mock fights, produce ditties defaming each other, talk about their father (they are, historically, possibly half sisters) and mothers, discuss cruel events in ways which suggest a certain amorality or inability to empathise with their victims but also support each other in distress. This mock infantilization of the two characters can be read in a variety of ways. For one thing, it underscores the figures’ status as dependent and as puppets. More importantly, perhaps, it enables the questioning of history as truth by suggesting a zone free from the tenets of malestream history such as linearity, progressivity, chronology, objectivity,

INTRODUCTION 7

monolithics and causality. It points to the use of nursery or playroom style settings in recent feminist cultural production (one need only think of some of Paula Rego’s or Dorothea Tanning’s paintings, Liz Lochhead’s 1984 play Blood and Ice or Caryl Churchill’s 1994 The Skriker) where, as in psychoanalytic prescriptions, such contexts function as a means of surfacing the private and personal world of the psyche, its terrors and phantasies. The historical figures Elizabeth I and Mary Tudor are dead and therefore only exist as cultural memories, as fragments in our minds. Both characters are given an awareness of the fact that materially they are dead, that they have a history and have become history and that their stories, for that is what remains, contain unanswered questions. In the play Elizabeth and Mary get to ask these questions of each other (e.g. Was Elizabeth a virgin?’) but no direct answer is provided. The two figures thus become commentators on their own stories, enacting the split consciousness: the awareness of oneself as both subject and object of knowledge. By not answering the questions about their lives, the two women reinforce the notion that history is story, that the truth is not recoverable and that it is not possible to access knowledge in straightforward ways retrospectively. The play proceeds associatively, suggestive of children’s supposed short attention span (let’s s get on to something new). As girl children are expected to, both characters focus in the main on their personal relationships and their fears and delights, interrupting their narratives and mutual revelations with bits of play(ing). In their exchanges, presented as a ‘private’ conversation, personal and public agendas become blurred, suggesting the indivisibility of the two. This is reinforced through both women’s recognition that their specificity, the fact that they were women as opposed to men, determined much of their lives and others’ expectations of them. The two women are presented as ‘friends’, knowing each other very well (enough to goad and console each other effectively), and able to discuss their differences. In this respect the play picks up two key issues for feminism in the 1990s: the question of sisterhood and whether or not it transcends all boundaries (including here, of life and death), and difference and how you negotiate it. Where Elizabeth I has entered mainstream history as a major player in the construction of England, Mary Tudor is a marginal figure, aware in this play of her marginality. In this piece, the characters are given equal status, equal ability to manipulate each other. Their differences are thus not presented as a source of feud between them but as objects for their contemplation. They are also constructed as not being as ‘great’ as all that. Both queens did

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not produce off-spring, both were betrayed by their men, both had problematic relations with their father and mothers, both killed in order to survive—or so it seemed at the time. Both are themselves dead. They are a story. Foursight’s comedy (‘a glorious, irreverent romp through the Tudor period’, Guardian, 5 July 1993) culminates in a mock duel between Mary and Elizabeth. As the two ‘dead’ queens try to ‘kill’ each other, the play parodies the dramatic convention of death as closure. The ‘tragic’ (male?) fight to the death, acted out to the lyrics of ‘Born Free’, suggests the idea that women’s desire for freedom, for autonomy, may be merely an illusion which is only as ‘real’ as the theatrical playing of the staged moment. More optimistically, this scene can be read as part of a continuous playing in an imaginary world where death is as ‘rea’ or ‘unreal’ as the possibility of the resurrection of these queens. Mrs. Beeton’s History of the World (1990)

Mrs. Beeton’s History of the World, a ‘cuisine of social history’, was toured by the East Midlands theatre company New Perspectives in 1991. Presenting the history of the world through the Victorian kitchen of Isabella Beeton is Julie Wilkinson’s playful way of revisioning history through the domestic. As Isabella, role-playing Lucrecia Borgia, tells her maid Caroline: ‘Miss Borgia exercised her power through her pots and pans, in the only domain entirely under her sway—the kitchen’. Mrs. Beeton’s History of the World, however, does not belong to the kitchen sink dramas of domestic realism. Instead, Julie Wilkinson’s comedy uses a number of strategies to resist the playing of a Victorian past as oppressive to the modern, feminist spectator. Like Elizabeth and Mary, Isabella and her maid are already dead before the play begins. They have come down to earth, ‘brought back by popular demand’, for Isabella to follow up her success to Mrs. Beeton’s Book of Household Management with a sequel volume on the history of the world through cooking. During their acting out of history through recipes and cooking tips we are constantly reminded of the collision of past/present worlds which Julie Wilkinson exploits as a source of comedy. The Victorian kitchen set, for example, contains modern appliances such as a microwave which Isabella has never seen before and does not know how to work. Dishes from the past have to be improvised with substitute modern ingredients, and so on. The fun begins in earnest as Isabella discovers there is no copy of her first edition of Beeton’s Household Management (1861) available, and she is forced to rely on memory, improvisation and the revised version of

INTRODUCTION 9

her work, Mrs. Beeton’s Everyday Cookery, which is the only one available, for her recipes. The absence of Household Management is significant. Isabella’s 1861 volume was taken up as the ‘bible’ by which middle-class women were to organise and run their homes. Household Management was more than a cookery book; it gave practical advice on everything a woman needed to know to run her middle-class home. As Janet Horowitz Murray summarises: Mrs Beeton advised her [the middle-class housewife] on how to accomplish this [manage the household] with recipes, meal plans, etiquette suggestions, and specific directions for the performance of all household chores. Her book gives us a picture of a woman at the head of a complicated enterprise who nevertheless preserves the decorative pursuits of idleness; a woman who knows how to scrub a grate but spends her time practising the piano. (Strong-Minded Women, Penguin, 1982, p. 80)

Or, to quote Isabella Beeton herself: As with the Commander of the Army, or the leader of any enterprise, so it is with the mistress of a house. Her spirit will be seen through the whole establishment; and just in proportion as she performs her duties intelligently and thoroughly, so will her domestics follow in her path. Of all those acquirements, which more particularly belong to the feminine character, there are none which take a higher rank, in our estimation, than such as enter into a knowledge of household duties; for on these are perpetually dependent the happiness, comfort, and well-being of a family… (Quoted in Murray, Ibid., p. 84)

The absence of Household Management, therefore, signifies the overturning of the rigid codification or regimentation, as the military language of Isabella Beeton’s writing suggests, of middle-class women’s lives in the home. Moreover, Household Management represented the ideal rather than the real version of middle-class domesticity. Julie Wilkinson challenges the myth of the Victorian ‘angel in the house’ by introducing details from Isabella’s own life which give an indication of the hardships which women faced. In the course of Mrs. Beeton’s History of the World, for example, we learn how Isabella lost two babies, her first child dying of croup when only three months old, and how she herself died young of puerperal fever, caused, as Caroline explains directly to the audience, by the doctor who delivered her last baby having dirty hands. It is by insisting on the reality of women’s lives that Mrs. Beeton’s History of the World resists the bourgeoisification of Victorian

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domesticity. This is centrally critiqued through the mistress and maid relationship between Isabella and Caroline. The two-hander comedy duo works by assigning Isabella the ‘straight’ role which ‘feeds’ Caroline’s comic play. As Caroline constantly interrupts and disrupts Isabella’s account of the idealised Victorian manager of the household, it is not just gender but also class oppression which is exposed. Isabella is appalled to discover that in the revised version of her work there is no information about etiquette (‘Where does the respectable middle-class woman turn to discover what to do with her boa when paying a morning call?’), or about the management of servants. The fact that the text which includes advice on the status rituals between mistress and servants is missing empowers Caroline to subvert their unequal power relations. Isabella’s insistence on reinforcing Caroline’s servant status in their recipe-role-playing through history is undermined as Caroline withdraws her labour. Unable to cope on her own, Isabella has to concede to Caroline’s terms. As they continue to play through history, Caroline uses historical examples, such as cooking ‘boiled ‘ead’ in the French Revolution, to interrogate class relations and to critique Isabella’s ‘history of the well-fed’. She is also the one who insists on inserting the personal details of their lives into the historical narrative. Caroline’s questioning of class oppression leaves her wondering how it is that Isabella got to heaven and she ended up in Purgatory. Isabella explains her reward of a place in heaven as a consequence of her benevolent actions; her cooking (which was actually Caroline’s cooking) for the hungry, poor, and needy. Caroline’s making of ‘Useful Soup’ which she feeds to the audience to secure her place in heaven, however, is not enough. In our modern times, ‘charity is no longer a qualification for entry into heaven’: it is no longer enough to make the soup, you also have to make a profit Finally, acknowledging the debt to her ‘servant’ (although her parting comments comically reveal that she still has much to learn on the subject of exploitation), it is Isabella who projects a future of the two women together by opting to join Caroline in Purgatory. ‘History’ Isabella claims in the closing moments, ‘will have to be corrected’.

WALKING ON PEAS Erika Block

Cross-dressing by men as well as women emerges regularly in fairy tales and legends from India to Ireland, and from North America to Oceania…Cross-dressing serves as a strategem in war, or a trick to seduce women. Women don men’s clothing to take the place of husbands killed in battle or to avenge their fathers. …It is revealing that while there are only a few tricks listed [in Stith Thompson’s Motif Index of Folk Literature] to unmask men in women’s clothing there are a great number to expose women in men’s clothing. A few examples follow: place a spinning wheel nearby: the woman is interested, the man is not; throw a ball, a woman spreads her legs to catch it, the man does not; scatter peas on the ground: the man has a firm step, the woman falls…the notion that one must be more on the alert for disguised women than for disguised men was deeply rooted in many cultures. Rudolf M.Dekker and Lotte C.van de Pol

Walking on Peas, Copyright © 1993–95 by Erika Block. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. All inquiries regarding performance rights should be addressed to: Walk & Squawk Performance Project, 122 East Mosley, Ann Arbor, MI 48104 USA; (313) 668–0407. Professionals and amateurs are hereby warned that performances of Walking on Peas are subject to a royalty.

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ABOUT THE PLAY

Isaiah Bunk and Prince Djamal are drawn from the stories of countless women who fought in Western Europe, South Africa and North America from the 17th through 20th centuries. Milton Matson’s story, as presented here, is true. He was “discovered” in 1895 in San Francisco. I am indebted to Julie Wheelwright’s Amazons and Military Maids and Rudolf Dekker and Lotte van de Pol’s The History of Female Transvestism in Early Modern Europe for leading me to these stories. Originally produced by Dorothy Talk Theatre Company, Walking on Peas opened in October 1991 at the Edinburgh Theatre Workshop, under the direction of Sarah Harper. Walking on Peas was developed in collaboration with Dorothy Talk and owes a great deal to the style and inspiration of Hilary Ramsden and Jude Winter. The script was developed with the support of the Michigan Council for the Arts, the Ludwig Vogelstein Foundation and the Money for Women/ Barbara Deming Memorial Fund. THE CHARACTERS

Helja dressed in androgynous rags; mud streaked and messy, as if she’s been travelling for years through rough terrain; she speaks only in Finnish Lieutenant Isaiah Bunk a flamboyantly mustached, highly decorated soldier dressed for battle Milton Matson a retired military officer, also highly decorated, in black tails and slicked back hair; always on display Prince Djamal a young and slightly cocky soldier dressed for battle THE SETTING

A timeless world of battlefields and military camps, with flashbacks to fancy dress balls and luncheons. We could be in any country, during any time from the 17th through early 20th centuries. Anachronistic props and set pieces are encouraged and the soldiers are dressed in uniforms from different eras. The set is minimal, emphasizing the distorted hobby horses which hang irregularly on stage. A single cloth functions as tent, table, dance floor and cloak (two different sides—one solid, the other patterned as a flag or map—create different textures). Matson’s viola da gamba may be substituted with a similar instrument.

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Three oversized, distorted hobby horses hang on meat hooks at the end of ropes. Two additional hooks are empty. Another rope, without a hook, hangs down to the ground. A cloth-draped platform, covering what appears to be a statue, is also on stage. 1.

A bold, soprano voice sings II Tradito Amore from off; the sound moves closer. Isaiah Bunk and Prince Djamal enter on horseback, as if on parade. Sounds of clip-clopping. Bunk greets the audience. They hang up their horses. Helja enters, dressed in rags, still singing II Tradito Amore, looking at a distant point through binoculars. She crosses slowly until she reaches the end of the stage and exits; the singing moves further and further away. As Helja crosses, Djamal unveils the statue, which is Milton Matson. Matson sits stiffly on a chair, holding two coconut shells. His viola da gamba rests at his side. The platform is actually a cart on wheels. Djamal polishes Matson’s medals, shoes, etc.—preparing him for display. Matson remains motionless but not ‘frozen, slightly uncomfortable. Bunk watches to make sure Djamal is doing his job properly. He notices a spot Djamal has missed and flashes a disapproving look. Djamal rushes to take care of it. Helja continues to sing from off; the sound moves further away. When Bunk approves Djamal moves the cart into a final display position and hangs a sign on Matson: a crudely written “10¢” 2.

A piercing whistle cuts off Helja’s distant song as Bunk tosses a rucksack and sword to Djamal. They begin an off-kilter version of military calisthenics. Djamal is having a hard time; Bunk is enjoying himself. BUNK: Where’s your muscle, boy? (Beat.) You call yourself a soldier? (Beat.) I asked you a question, boy. DJAMAL: Absolutely, sir. BUNK: Absolutely what, soldier? DJAMAL: Absolutely a soldier, sir.

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BUNK: Show me. DJAMAL: Yes, sir. BUNK: Are you running out of steam, soldier? DJAMAL: No. BUNK: No what? DJAMAL: No, sir. BUNK: No sir what? DJAMAL: No, sir. I am not running out of steam, sir. BUNK: It’s not over yet, Djamal. Your favorite part is coming up.

They drop their rucksacks, turn and go down, as if to do push-ups. 3.

Bright lights on Matson, in a stiff pose, as Bunk and Djamal stop moving (not quite a freeze). MATSON: There’s no way out of it now, and I need to make an honest dollar or two.

He signs a check, tears it out of the book, drops it on the ground. He finds another pose. 4.

Bunk and Djamal set up camp for the night. Matson plays in the background (improvisation on G major arpeggio.) Djamal pulls a large piece of fabric from his rucksack and struggles to hang it between two of the meat hooks. Bunk is too absorbed in the camp atmosphere to realize Djamal could use a hand. BUNK: (As Djamal works.) You think this is rough, don’t you, Djamal? Have I told you about the campaigns in the Great Desert of the Sahara? Fighting with a broiling sun overhead. Immense whirlwinds of sand moving across the plain between heaven and earth. Red dust clogging our throats…. That’s what I call rough.

When Djamal finally gets the cloth up we realize it’s a tent. He stands at attention behind Bunk, rolling his eyes at the story he’s heard many times before.

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5.

At camp: Djamal finds a piece of padding hanging from his sleeve and can’t figure out what it is. His alarm grows as he finds more padding and realizes what is happening. He dashes into the tent; at the same time, Bunk enters the tent from the opposite side. After a moment’s confusion, both come out simultaneously. Djamal stands at attention; Bunk takes a moment to regain his composure. BUNK: At ease, Djamal.

They move away from each other. Djamal secretly puts his padding back in order. Bunk turns away and takes out a small mirror and scissors to trim his mustache. He takes his time, carefully considering the position of each snip, executing a single cut with military precision. When Djamal has finished with his padding, he watches Bunk from behind, fascinated by this fastidious ritual. DJAMAL: You missed a hair. BUNK: I did not. DJAMAL: Right there. BUNK: (Moving away from Djamal’s pointing finger.) I’ve just checked, Djamal. And everything is perfectly in order. DJAMAL: You’re obsessed with that mustache. BUNK: Perhaps if s you who’s obsessed with not having one, young man.

(Djamal is startled.) Don’t worry. It’ll grow. You’ve plenty of time for mustaches. Djamal relaxes. He lights a cigarette and offers it to Bunk, who declines. DJAMAL: Let’s play for your locket. BUNK: No. DJAMAL: Come on. What else do you have worth winning? BUNK: Let’s play for pleasure—no stakes. DJAMAL: That’s what makes it pleasurable. The locket or nothing. BUNK: All right. Without what’s in it. DJAMAL: That’s what makes it valuable. BUNK: What do I get for winning? DJAMAL: First we negotiate the locket. BUNK: It’s solid gold. The stuff inside stays with me.

16 ERIKA BLOCK

DJAMAL: My pocket watch. It’s kept time for five generations of Russian history. It even has a nick from saving my grandfather’s life in the… DJAMAL:…Battle of Irmsk. BUNK:…Battle of Irmsk. BUNK: This locket has been with me since I left Germany in 1701. It’s survived without a scratch. DJAMAL: What about the watch for the contents of the locket? BUNK: Another time. Gold for gold. Best of 162 rounds. DJAMAL: When do we play for the secrets inside? BUNK: Next war. Something to stay alive for, eh Djamal? 6.

Matson’s music escalates the tension of their wager. Bunk and Djamal begin to wrestle; it’s clear that they’ve done this many times before. Matson shifts to Care Charming Sleep, which turns the wrestling into a slow-motion sequence of exaggerated holds and moves. Helja enters, singing Care Charming Sleep, dragging a wooden box. She sees the campsite and looks around. Engrossed in their wrestling match, the soldiers don’t notice her. She goes into the tent and comes out with a sock. She decides that she wants the tent and begins to unhook it. Bunk and Djamal discover her. BUNK/DJAMAL: What are you doing?!

The music stops abruptly. The soldiers grab their swords and back her into a corner, ready to defend themselves—until they realize that she’s harmless. HELJA: Ala koske minuun, senkin moukka! DJAMAL: We mean you no harm.

They sheath their swords. BUNK: We’re friends. HELJA: Keita te olette? Mita te tahdotte miunusta? Mika tama paikka on? Missa moottoritie on? Olenko mina joku vanki? Onko tama Tiibet? Missa mun nuotit on? Mun taytyy paasta pois taalta. Aikani alkaa jo loppua. Olenks ma joku vanki? Minulla on tehtava suoritettavana.

BUNK/DJAMAL:How did you get here? We mean you no harm. Je ne comprend pas, Mademoi selle. Parlezvous français? ¿Se habla español? Ich heisse Prince Djamal. My intentions are noble. Je m’applle Lieutenant Isaiah Bunk, a votre service. ¿Que quieres? Was wollen Sie hier? We

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can’t help you if we don’t understand what you’re saying.

They build to a cacophony of different languages. Matson, unable to bear the noise, bangs loudly on the platform, surprising everyone. They stop speaking and look at him, expectant. MATSON: (To audience.) You don’t really expect me to translate that, do you?

(Beat.) Do I look like a forger? Helja retrieves her box. Bunk and Djamal put Matson’s face back into the position they had originally set up. 7.

Helja starts rummaging through the box, which is filled with sheet music and maps. She glances at the maps and music, throwing them out. Bunk and Djamal aren’t sure what to do. They try to return some of her papers but Helja is oblivious to them. She sings phrases of songs as she finds the music to them. As he watches her, Djamal is falling in love. Bunk is baffled and growing frustrated. HELJA: Bulgaria; Azerbaijan; Nairobi, Aberdeen: Queen of the Night;Shanghai; Konstantinopoli; Kairo; Jerusalem; Persia; Taiwan; La Vie en Rose; Unkari; Firenze; Lissabon; Rooma; Verona; Koln; My Way; Etiopia; Oporto; Rarotonga; Santa Fe; Uruguay; Buenos Aires; Guantanemera; Mongolia; Varsova; Siperia; Amsterdam; Chile; Boston; Birmingham; Timbuktu; Innsbruck; Cipoleti; Titicaca; Bulgarian Chanting; Jyvaskyla; Kuala Lumpur; Galapagos; Tokyo; Michigan; Toronto; Vancouver; The Sound of Music; Helsinki; Tampere; Juupajoki; Oulu; Madame Butterfly… BUNK: (Overlapping Helja’s list.) We need to do something, Djamal…We can’t just watch her throw sheet music and maps out of a box…Djamal?

When she finds the music to Madame Butterfly she begins to sing Un bel di. Djamal swoons. Bunk catches him as he begins to fall over. He places Djamal upright. Djamal swoons again; Bunk props him up. Djamal falls to the ground, landing on his elbow.

18 ERIKA BLOCK

Mesmerized by Helja, he is oblivious to Bunk, who tries to bring him around. HELJA: (She cuts off the aria in disgust.) Ei. Taas, ei! Ei ikina, ei ikina, ei ikina! Jos mulla vain olis Tiibetin kartta! DJAMAL: (Overlapping Helja.) That’s my favorite aria. BUNK: Djamal! HELJA: Ei ikina, ei ikina, ei ikina!

Helja storms off. 8.

DJAMAL: I’m going after her. BUNK: What?! We’ll be separated from the regiment Sought for desertion. DJAMAL: I don’t care. BUNK: Don’t be ridiculous; you’ve got a job to do. DJAMAL: You don’t own me, Bunk. BUNK: No, but the army does. And I’m your commanding officer. DJAMAL: Always a soldier. Every breathing moment. Never off duty— BUNK: Get a move on, Djamal. DJAMAL: Day and nightBUNK: That’s what you’re paid for. DJAMAL: Where are we going? BUNK: We need to find supplies before it gets dark. DJAMAL: Yes, sir. 9.

Bunk and Djamal mount their horses. Something is wrong. They look at Matson. Matson crosses his arms in a gesture of defiance. The horses look at Matson. Matson reluctantly gives in and picks up his coconut shells. He begins clip-clopping the shells together. Bunk and Djamal set off on a scavenging expedition. When Matson gets tired, he puts down the shells. The soldiers stop riding. Matson decides to play “magic show” theme music. Bunk and Djamal hang up their horses and set out on foot. A hand shoots out from an upstage wing holding a bunch of sticks. Bunk finds them. The hand returns with a bicycle pump, which Djamal finds. Bunk produces a bungie cord, out of nowhere. Djamal finds a blue fish. This is a show. They produce the objects with the overkill of cheesy magicians and line them up on a box.

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Djamal decides to build a fire with the sticks but has trouble getting them to stand up. Bunk finds a flower. Then he notices that Djamal is having trouble and helps out by binding them with the bungie cord. Matson goes back to his earlier campfire music. 10.

Bunk tries rubbing two sticks together to start a fire; no matter how fast he rubs, it won’t work. Meanwhile, Djamal lights a cigarette with a lighter. Smelling the cigarette, Bunk turns to him with a flash of amazement, perhaps a threat. Djamal quickly holds the lighter under the sticks, blowing on the flame. But it won’t catch. Bunk discovers that he can use the bicycle pump as a bellows and the fire starts. It gets very smokey and they start to choke. When the smoke settles down, Djamal holds the fish by the tail and dangles it over the fire. The fish gets too hot and he tosses it to Bunk who tosses it back. Bunk picks up a stick and skewers the fish. He and Djamal each hold an end of the stick and turn it around over the fire, as if roasting the fish on a spit. The fish sizzles and sputters. The aroma wafts into their nostrils. 11.

Helja enters, singing An Evening Hymn, carefully dropping a trail of potato chips (crisps) behind her. The soldiers watch. Bunk is dumbfounded; Djamal is clearly in love. Helja moves toward Bunk and offers him a crisp. Bunk declines, but she insists, finally dropping the crisp into his jacket. BUNK: Who is she? DJAMAL: Shh! BUNK: Who sings at the front like that? DJAMAL: Shh! BUNK: Djamal. This is crazy. DJAMAL: Listen. BUNK: What is she doing here? DJAMAL: Will you be quiet?!

Djamal swoons as Helja hits a particularly moving note. Bunk tosses the roasting fish away as he catches Djamal and holds him upright. Helja catches the flying fish.

20 ERIKA BLOCK

HELJA: (Breaking off.) Ei, ei, ei!

(Eating the fish.) DJAMAL: Excuse me…Miss… Are you lost?… Can I help you? HELJA: (Ignoring Djamal; eating the fish.) Mua vasyttaa. Haluan Levata. Syoda taffelchipseja ja juoda vissya. Laulua laulun peraan. Mun jalkoja sarkee. Taytyy olla olemassa parempi tapa. DJAMAL: (Overlapping Helja.) What’s wrong? You were brilliant.

(To Bunk.) Tell her she was brilliant. BUNK: Very good. I enjoyed your performance. Can we have our fish back now? DJAMAL: Isaiah! BUNK: Djamal! DJAMAL: Saving helpless women is our duty.

Helja sees a horse she likes and unhooks it. MATSON: Perhaps I shall even sell my photo. It has been suggested to me… It is a horrible idea. BUNK: (To Helja.) What are you doing?… You can’t take that horse! 12.

Helja, on horseback, sings La Maja Dolorosa. Matson accompanies her. BUNK: Djamal! Help me out here. DJAMAL: Let her have it. It’s only a horse. BUNK: Only a horse! You can’t fight without horses! DJAMAL: A lot of men do it. BUNK: You want to be a simple foot soldier? DJAMAL: It’s just one horse.

Helja dismounts and cradles the horse in her arms, as if it’s an oversized baby. BUNK: What is she doing with that horse? MATSON: It seems outrageous that a man cannot have any peace, but must be badgered to death by reporters. BUNK: Who sings at the front like that? DJAMAL: The perfect woman. BUNK: Don’t overdo it, Djamal.

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DJAMAL: Would you please listen?! BUNK: There’s no such thing as the perfect woman. DJAMAL: Be quiet. BUNK: And even if there were—just look at her. DJAMAL: Shut up, Isaiah. HELJA: (Stops singing in mid-phrase.) Ei! Taas, taas ei! DJAMAL: What is it? What’s wrong?

(To Bunk.) See? You’ve disturbed her. Helja exits on horseback with a shout that could be a battle cry…or the beginning of a temper tantrum. 13.

BUNK: She’s a horse thief. We know that much about her. DJAMAL: We can’t just let her go off. BUNK: She’s already gone. DJAMAL: We can catch up with her. BUNK: She should be arrested. DJAMAL: Please, Isaiah. Let’s follow her. BUNK: She doesn’t want you, Djamal. Don’t make a fool of yourself. DJAMAL: She doesn’t know me, yet. BUNK: We have our orders. DJAMAL: You don’t understand anything quixotic, do you? BUNK: I’m a military man. A pragmatist. DJAMAL: There’s beauty and romance and fantasy-

(To audience as he and Bunk lay down the tent, which becomes a dance floor.) Look at him…How can he be so…All right. I did want him—once. Before I learned what he’s all about…I wanted to love him. MATSON: It does get tiresome up here. DJAMAL: (To audience.) We met at a debutante ball in Savannah. Just before the Crash of ‘29…Maybe it was before the French Revolution…You know, it could have been after 1812. Or the Treaty of Versailles…But it was definitely a debutante ball in Savannah…I put him on my dance card. He was different.

Matson begins to play Smoke Gets in Your Eyes. Helja joins him from off stage. Bunk and Djamal step onto the dance floor. Two men in uniform. They circle, trying not to notice one another as they greet imaginary dancers.

22 ERIKA BLOCK

They move closer together until they can no longer avoid one another. They lock eyes. They move into each other’s arms and dance. Bunk leads. Helja enters in the background, dancing with a horse. BUNK: It’s a beautiful city you have here, Princess. DJAMAL: Not much like home, Lieutenant, but it’s not a bad place to be an exile. BUNK: An exile? I know something about exiles myself, Princess. DJAMAL: (To audience.) He knew how to move and his manners made me think of home. Not like those awkward southern boys.

Helja drifts offstage as the music fades. DJAMAL: (Continuing.) I was intrigued. 14.

Suddenly, in the field: BUNK: Dammit, Djamal! Where are you?! There’s a message…They’re in retreat! The battle isn’t over! DJAMAL: What about her? BUNK: Forget about her. We need to get back to camp. DJAMAL: (To audience.) Did I say I was intrigued? BUNK: (To audience as he folds up the dance floor, preparing to leave camp.) What kind of soldier is he? For a woman like her. Dressed like that. DJAMAL: (To audience.) He can move well… 15.

DJAMAL: (Continuing.) The next day we met again.

He begins to undress as he speaks. DJAMAL: (Continuing.) Some might say it was coincidence. But I don’t really believe in coincidence…A luncheon at my cousin’s house. There was a whole community of expatriate Russian gentry in Savannah, Georgia. Something about the name of the place seemed familiar. We hit it off with the local plantation owners and had sumptuous luncheons together every weekend. Vodka drinkers at one end of the table. Sour mash drinkers at the other. Teetotallers in the middle…

Bunk has handed one end of the dance floor/cloth to Matson. He holds the other end and pulls it taught to create a long dining table. DJAMAL: (Continuing.) I don’t think I was surprised to find Isaiah seated across from me in the teetotallers’ section…There was some thing religious

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about him…He hit it off with the old time locals. Talked about the War Between the States as if he’d been there. Very smooth. Of course, I later found out that he had been there and in the Russian Revolution, the Napoleonic wars and the Prussian campaigns, to name a few. But that’s another story. At this point I only saw an intriguing soldier seated across from me, managing to maintain his elegance as the platters of blinchiki and fried chicken flew past him.

Djamal has by now transformed into a woman—Princess Dadeshkeliani—and she joins Bunk at the table. BUNK: I have heard about Bull Run. Glorious moment for the South, wasn’t it? Abe Lincoln? Well, he got what he deserved…Why, I’d love some of your fresh buttermilk, madam. It’s a particular favorite of mine. Thank you kindly… Can I offer you a glass, Princess Dadeshkeliani?

Bunk magically produces a glass of buttermilk, as if from the air. DADESHKELIANI: No, thank you, Lieutenant Bunk. I’ll stick to my lemonade.

During this conversation Bunk and Dadeshkeliani take turns moving around the table. They gracefully hand the end of the cloth to one another, keeping it taught as they move. An ever-stoic Matson holds the other end. BUNK: You must call me Isaiah. It sounds so much nicer than Bunk on a lady’s lips. DADESHKELIANI: How can you speak of ladies’ lips so knowingly, Lieutenant, when you spend so much time in the field, among men? BUNK: Princess, have you ever considered what men think about during all those hours we spend waiting for battles to commence? DADESHKELIANI: I try not to think about what goes through men’s minds, Lieutenant. BUNK: You might find it quite harmless. I, for one, have often wondered what it would sound like to hear my forename spoken by a princess. Would you be so kind as to put an end to this uncertainty? DADESHKELIANI: Then what would you have to think about when you’re in the field, Lieutenant? BUNK: The imagination is a wondrous thing, Princess. No sooner have you answered one question than it generates another and another and another. Don’t you agree? DADESHKELIANI: Well spoken, Lieutenant. And in return I shall call you Isaiah, if you will call me Kati. BUNK: But your title! Surely we can’t be allowed to forget your position.

24 ERIKA BLOCK

DADESHKELIANI: I assure you, my dear Isaiah, I shall never let anyone forget my position. That is why I insist you call me Kati. BUNK: As you wish, Princess…Kati. DADESHKELIANI: (To audience.) He was interested. And so was I. It could have been a marvelous love affair-

She drops the table and leaves Bunk holding the wilted cloth. 16.

Matson begins to play a tango, Kiss of Fire. Alone a spotlight, looking into a mirror, Dadeshkeliani changes her clothes again and becomes Djamal. The transformation is in sync with the music. She darkens her face with dirt. She flattens her breasts. She shifts her posture, drops her pelvis, swaggers. She picks up a sword and throws away her skirt. 17.

A battle begins. Explosion, smoke, gun fire. The music gets louder. Bunk is alone, centerstage. He controls three horses while fighting off the enemy singlehandedly with his sword. Djamal meets Bunk on horseback and they move in formation—almost a dance—to the tango. BUNK: I didn’t think you’d make it. DJAMAL: Don’t worry, Isaiah. I won’t let you down. BUNK: You can’t decide to be a soldier one moment and follow that ridiculous woman the next. DJAMAL: Watch out!… You’re not concentrating.

The battle gets wilder; the horses buck and swing. The tango gets even louder. Djamal and Bunk punctuate the battle with rhythmic shouts. They fight as a practised team amidst the chaos. Helja rides through the battle, side saddle on a hobby horse, singing Kiss of Fire. DJAMAL: It’s her! BUNK: The horse! DJAMAL: She’ll get herself killed.

Bunk and Djamal rescue Helja, carrying her off on the hobby horse. HELJA: Paastakaa minut alas! Tama on Tiibetin Tie. Tiibet, Tiibet, Tiibet! BUNK: What is she talking about?

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DJAMAL: Something about Tibet. BUNK: Thank you, Djamal.

They move her to safety and get back to the fight. Helja resumes singing and rides through the battle again. They rescue her again. HELJA: Paastakaa minut! Ma haluan Dalai Lamaan luo.

Again, they return to the fight. Bunk finds that his sword has been broken and uses his fingers to poke out the eyes of his imagined opponent. Helja resumes her song. BUNK: (To Matson.) Who is she?! MATSON: (Still playing.) There’s no way out of it now.

They rescue Helja again. HELJA: Paastaka minut! Ma haluan Tiibetiin! DJAMAL: She’s even beautiful when she’s upset. BUNK: Please, Djamal. I can’t take much more of this fawning. HELJA: Paastakaa minut heti paikalla!

They put her down. She is very angry by now. BUNK: You are crazy. We’re saving your life!

Helja swings her horse at him, knocking him over. She walks past Djamal and ignores him. DJAMAL: (Shy all of a sudden.) Hi.

Bunk crawls toward his sword as Djamal speaks. Matson’s tango fades into Cancion De Cuna Para Dormir Un Negrito, a Spanish lullaby. DJAMAL: (To audience.) I have developed a feeling for beauty which was unknown to me before I adopted this disguise. With it has come an extreme aversion to ugliness. It is terrible to see the man of your dreams betray the image you’ve created of him. Terrible to learn that your romantic hero is, in reality, obsessively practical. 18.

26 ERIKA BLOCK

Helja picks up the tent/table cloth, which has been hanging from hook, and extends it across the stage as she steps up on her box. It becomes a billowing sail. She sets off on a journey as she sings the lullaby. She looks through her binoculars. She moves through vast and varied terrain with the cloak and then a rope, which she hangs on hooks, cutting a passage through the stage. Djamal attempts to follow her, tripping over the cloak as she abandons it and dangling from the ropes she has hung. Helja is oblivious to her pursuer. BUNK: (During the journey.) Djamal! What are you doing? Come back.

(To Matson.) Please, tell me what she’s after. MATSON: It costs a dime. BUNK: I don’t have a dime. MATSON: It costs a dime. BUNK: How about a shilling?…or a pfennig?…lira?…I have a shekel… Djamal! MATSON: There’s no way out of it now, and I need to make an honest dollar or two. BUNK: Deutsch mark? Rouble? MATSON: Do I look like a change bureau? BUNK: Don’t do this to me, Djamal!

Bunk takes out his treasured locket. BUNK: (Continuing. To Matson.) Look at this I’ll leave it with you for collateral. Just tell me what she wants. DJAMAL: (Turning away from Helja.) You can’t leave that with him! We’re in the middle of a wager. MATSON: I do not drink and I do not gamble. BUNK: (To Matson.) Tell me what she’s looking for. DJAMAL: You’ve had that locket for hundreds of years. It’s solid gold. He only wants a dime. MATSON: I have always conducted myself with propriety. DJAMAL: I want that locket.

Bunk gives the locket to Matson, who stops playing. There is silence onstage as Matson opens the locket. Both Djamal and Helja turn to watch Matson. He smiles and tosses it away. Bunk scrambles to catch it before it falls to the ground.

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The music resumes. Djamal climbs a rope in pursuit of Helja, who has eluded him. DJAMAL: It doesn’t matter what she’s looking for. Just listen to her. BUNK: She’s getting in my way. She’s affecting your performance. DJAMAL: What’s in the locket, Isaiah? BUNK: You’re changing the subject.

Helja gives a war cry and rides off stage. DJAMAL: Wait! BUNK: Let her go, Djamal. 19.

Djamal slides down the rope as he speaks. DJAMAL: (To audience.) I wanted to live among men in order to avoid all the games and deceits of mixed society. MATSON: Come on, now. You did it on a lark. DJAMAL: I did not. MATSON: Your best friend dared you to go. Two bored southern belles. DJAMAL: I have never been a southern belle.

Although dressed in uniform, Djamal assumes the posture, walk and voice of Dadeshkeliani. She sits on the cart at Matson’s feet. MATSON: All right One belle and one exiled Russian princess. Bored and slightly infatuated with him.

Bunk continues to fight off the enemy. MATSON: I dare you to go after him. Put on a uniform. Follow him to the front. DJAMAL: How can I? MATSON: You’re going to wait for him to come back to you? DJAMAL: I won’t just sit around waiting. MATSON: You’re going trust the stories he tells you about his adventures at the front? DJAMAL: I haven’t thought that far ahead. MATSON: You’re sure that there won’t be any other women to tempt him along the way? DJAMAL: He won’t— MATSON: You’re sure? DJAMAL: It might be fun to dress up.

28 ERIKA BLOCK

(To audience.) I wasn’t sure I could play a man. MATSON: It’s easy, once you remember who you are. DJAMAL: Once you figure out who they are. MATSON: I dare you to get inside his head. DJAMAL: (To audience.) All right. It did start as a dare. But then I began to take it seriously. I really wanted to learn about him. To understand what I was getting myself into.

Bunk is graceful as he fights on foot, with his sword. Djamal begins to shadow him, as if learning his moves, until they are fighting together, again as a practiced team. MATSON: (To audience.) When I became two or four or six and twenty, somewhere around there, I put on the entire male garb. DJAMAL: And I wanted to be good at it. To prove myself as one of them. 20.

Helja enters suddenly, with a map. Djamal stops fighting and follows her with his eyes, mesmerized. HELJA: Hei! Tiibet! Tassa on kartta!

She crosses in front of Bunk and waves the map in his face. BUNK: A map of Tibet won’t help you here. You’re on a different continent.

He shakes his finger at the map. Helja misreads this as a gesture of congratulations. She shakes his hand, smiling. HELJA: Kiitos, sotamies. Kiitos avusta. BUNK: (To Djamal) What continent are you fighting on? DJAMAL: Watch your back, Lieutenant.

Bunk turns and stabs someone behind him. DJAMAL: (Continuing. To audience.) I am good. As good as any man. Better than most. HELJA: (To Bunk.) Tarvitsen sherpaa, sotamies. Mun on pakko saada sherpaa. DJAMAL: From a distance men appeared handsome.

Helja tries to woo Bunk with potato chips. She pulls him down on her knee.

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HELJA: (To Bunk.) Kay pitkaksesi, sotamies. Voin kuoria ne sinulle. BUNK: (Struggling.) There’s a war going on here….. Somewhere. HELJA: Ota taffelchipseja.

She attempts to shove chips in his mouth. DJAMAL: But now I have seen them up close, I have practically been one of them.

Bunk is standing now, having fought Helja off. BUNK: Dammit! Where are they? MATSON: I think the battle’s over, Lieutenant. BUNK: Again? It can’t be. I’m not finished! MATSON: Do you hear any cannon? DJAMAL: And I have decided that they are horrible creatures.

Helja is sitting on her box. Bunk is looking for the enemy. Helja trips him as he walks past her and pulls him over her knees. HELJA: Voin kuoria ne sinulle, sotamies.

She strokes his ears. He struggles to get up. BUNK: Why can’t this woman leave me alone? HELJA: Mun on pakko saada sherpaa. DJAMAL: (To audience.) I cannot understand how women can let such animals into their beds. BUNK: (To audience.) I’ve seen many forward ladies in my day-but never on the battlefield. This woman is beyond my experience. I’ve had them knocking on my door after midnight. Inviting me into their chambers for a late night drink. Asking me, believe it or not, for a kiss when we’ve hardly been introduced. Not a shred of decency. But this…this— MATSON: They say that she’s beautiful.

Bunk frees himself from Helja. She grabs his sword before he can get to it. He grabs Djamal’s sword and defends himself against her. BUNK: I’m not interested in beauty. We’re in a bloody war! Why is it always me?

Bunk and Helja face each other with swords. Djamal steps in the middle and pulls them apart. DJAMAL: (To Helja.) Can you spare a few chips for a hungry soldier?

30 ERIKA BLOCK

Djamal leans back on one leg with his mouth open, waiting to be fed. Bunk and Helja are surprised. Bunk walks away, appalled. Helja looks into Djamal’s mouth and puts a sword in it, gently. She flips a chip at him. As she walks away she begins to sing Rossignolet du Bois, a gentle, sad folk song. Djamal is dejected. Helja sings to the horses and feeds them potato chips. 21.

Bunk sets up the tent and prepares dinner. DJAMAL: (To audience.) At first my horror of men was extreme; I thought they were monsters. I despised everything about them—their language, their lack of manners, their bravado and their violence. BUNK: I have some food, Djamal. Come share it with me. DJAMAL: I’m not really hungry. BUNK: Come eat. It will warm you up.

(Djamal accepts food.) MATSON: Not once in all these years have I been offered an insult by any man. BUNK: (To Matson.) Do you want some? MATSON: No thank you.

Helja looks on, hopeful for food. Bunk looks at her and can’t bring himself to offer her any. She continues to hum the folk song. DJAMAL: What about you? BUNK: I’m not hungry. DJAMAL: You need to eat, too, Isaiah. BUNK: I’ll have something later. I never eat after a fight. DJAMAL: You never eat when there are other people around to feed.

Helja assumes the lotus position and sits with the horses. BUNK: What is it about her? DJAMAL: Don’t change the subject. BUNK: You can’t even have a conversation with her. DJAMAL: Can’t you see? BUNK: I see a crazy woman speaking gibberish about Tibet in the midst of dying soldiers. DJAMAL: I can’t explain it to you, Isaiah. There are things you can’t explain. BUNK: I know all about those things. MATSON: I have always conducted myself with propriety.

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BUNK: I prefer your company, when you’re not chasing after her. DJAMAL: I want the locket. What round were we on last night? BUNK: I’m winning.

They start to wrestle but Bunk breaks off. BUNK: I’m getting tired of this game. 22.

Bunk starts picking at the peas in the pot on the fire. DJAMAL: (To audience.) In the beginning I had a hard time disguising my contempt for them, but I slowly got used to their way of life. I even began to like things about it.

Bunk tastes a pea and spits it out. Then he takes another and spits it at Helja, who doesn’t know what’s happening. He spits a pea at Djamal and another at Helja. Djamal smiles and spits back. They are tentative at first, but quickly build into a fullblown food fight. It turns into a game of shooting and lighting explosives, first as “boys’ play”, building into surreal war games and then shifting into fireworks. Through this, Helja sings a melancholy Roumanian folk song, Loosin Yelar. Bunk and Djamal make sounds of fireworks. They wind down, ending on a note of stillness. 23.

To audience: BUNK:If you knew men the way I do-when they’re on their own, away from the drawing rooms and theatre boxes. Honest, kind-hearted men, defending their countries, defending each other, sharing their last bites of food with their mates. Women were never so fraternal.

MATSON: I’d like to see anyone arrest me for wearing men’s clothes. I have been wearing this style of costume for the last 26 years, and I wouldn’t wear any other. You wouldn’t either if you knew how comfortable it was.

DJAMAL:They know how to enjoy life in ways that women can’t or don’t. And, in a bind, they’ll help you out in any way possible. Some of them are witty and brave and talented. And loyal—to each other.

32 ERIKA BLOCK

MATSON: This thing of being skewed up in tight waists and subject to the flapping of petticoats is to me unbearable. I don’t see how the women can stand them.

Matson signs a check, tears it from the book, drops it on the platform. 24.

Still at camp: Helja approaches Bunk. HELJA: Sotamies! Ma tarvitsen sherpaa, etta ma paasen Tiibetiin. Et sa void auttaa mua paasemaan perille?

He turns away from her. BUNK: What should we do about her? DJAMAL: Take her to Tibet. BUNK: I’m serious. DJAMAL: I’ve fallen in love with her.

Dialogue is strategically punctuated by Matson playing bars of Heartbreak Hotel. During this, Helja wraps the cloth around her waist, as if it’s a huge skirt. BUNK: (To audience.) I’ve fallen in love with him. DJAMAL: There’s a problem. BUNK: Oh? DJAMAL: She wants you. MATSON: I was always more of a boy than a girl in my tastes.

Djamal disappears behind Helja. BUNK: I have a way with women. Everywhere I go they fall in love with me. MATSON: I didn’t like the restraints or humdrumness of domestic life. BUNK: I don’t understand it. MATSON: And it was a relief to go out into the world.

Dadeshkeliani rolls out from under Helja’s skirts. MATSON: I have never worn women’s clothes since I cast them off, and my experiences around the world have been those of a man.

Helja saunters over to Bunk, the seductress now.

WALKING ON PEAS 33

HELJA: Auta minut loytamaan Dalai Laama. BUNK: This isn’t Tibet! HELJA: Ma tarvitsen sherpaa.

He climbs up the rope to escape from her. BUNK: Why is it always me?! 25.

Bunk slides down the rope and into a luncheon, pushing Helja aside. Reprise of Smoke Gets in Your Eyes. MATSON: Lieutenant Bunk, may I present Princess Kati Dadeshkeliani.

Bunk and Dadeshkeliani create a table with the cloth, exactly as in the previous luncheon scene. BUNK: I believe the Princess and I have met before. DADESHKELIANI: The Lieutenant is a very fine dancer. I’m certain he must have learned to waltz in Europe. Americans just don’t move in the same way. BUNK: (To audience.) Not a shred of decency. DADESHKELIANI: I believe we’re seated in the same section, Lieutenant. Are you a teetotaller? BUNK: I’ve learned that liquor can be quite dangerous, Princess.

(To audience.) I decided to enjoy it. After all, some intelligent conversation with a beautiful woman…I missed that. Might as well go all out. Try to be absolutely charming to every man, woman and child at the table. Try not to notice the glances all the girls are casting my way. How much attention they all pay me! How they hang on my every word. Even the dogs lay bright-eyed at my feet. I must admit that I can be quite brilliant…Why, I’d love some of your fresh buttermilk, madam. It’s a particular favorite of mine…Thank you kindly…, Can I offer you a glass, Princess Dadeshkeliani? He produces a glass of buttermilk from the air, as if by magic. DADESHKELIANI: No, thank you, Lieutenant Bunk. I’ll stick to my lemonade. BUNK: (To audience.) Sweet, cool buttermilk running across my tongue, down the back of my throat. Sweet, cool buttermilk resting in this glorious mustache. I smile at the princess. She giggles—no, titters—at me. What an effect I’m having on the poor thing! I wipe the milk from above my lip and

34 ERIKA BLOCK

smile again, enjoying this flirtation. She’s turned coquetry into a high art from…But the…I feel…a tickle…an itch…a…my mustache…in danger… and no way out. Panicked, Bunk presses the glass against his mustache. Helja, still at camp, digs through Bunk’s rucksack. HELJA: Sotamies, onks sulla kompassia? BUNK: What? HELJA: Haluan kuulla lisaa musiikkia.

Bunk drags her across the stage, behind the table, away from his rucksack—still holding the glass against his mustache. DADESHKELIANI: Are you enjoying your stay in Savannah, Lieutenant? Bunk is caught between Helja in the present and Dadeshkeliani in his flashback. BUNK: Very much, thank you.

(To audience.) She’s trying to hook me in. So obsessed with her own questions and flirtations that she doesn’t seem to notice me holding the glass to my face… Helja runs out from under the table and goes for Bunk’s rucksack. BUNK: (To Helja.) What do you think you’re doing?! HELJA: Mun on pakko saada lisaa musiikkia. He drags her away again, trying to get the bag from her. BUNK: I don’t understand what you’re talking about. HELJA: Ma en tieda missa pohjoinen on. BUNK: Stay away from my things!

Bunk and Helja tussle behind the table. She grabs a frying pan to hit him over the head. He wrests it away from her. DADESHKELIANI: Would you like some more buttermilk, Isaiah?

He jumps back into the luncheon. Dadeshkeliani smiles. Suddenly he realizes that he still has the frying pan. He tries to hide it from Dadeshkeliani. BUNK: Put down the glass. A test of courage. Be a man, now. The princess is watching. The locals are waiting for the end of my story…Another glass of buttermilk would be very nice, thank you.

He puts the frying pan on the table, hoping it won’t be noticed.

WALKING ON PEAS 35

DADESHKELIANI: It’s a specialty of this plantation. Everyone seems to think it isn’t made any better than this. Myself, well, I don’t seem to be able to drink anything quite so heavy. BUNK: She needs the glass, Isaiah. Put it down, Isaiah. Lieutenant Bunk… Thank you kindly, Kati….

In slow motion, he hands the glass to her and turns away. He puts his finger on the mustache. BUNK: (Continuing.) Southern way of life. Beautiful women, genteel hostesses. Gracious living…

Helja emerges to throw the pan on the ground as she rips the dinner table from their hands and explodes into a piercing aria, Udite Amanti. The table becomes her cloak. Simultaneously, the pan crashes, Helja explodes into her opening note and Bunk screams in anguish. 26.

Another battle: Helja continues to sing, alone in a spotlight. Bunk takes cover behind Helja’s box. Djamal joins him, hastily buttoning his uniform. They have machine guns. Helja begins to move. She will sing throughout this battle—her voice is the tension of the battle—except during Bunk’s flashbacks. BUNK: Stop disappearing! DJAMAL: Nature calls, Isaiah. Not much I can do about that. BUNK: Listen. They’re close. DJAMAL: Where?

They come out from behind the box and circle, back to back. Suddenly the lights change and we’re back in Bunk’s flashback. BUNK: (To audience.) The mustache? It’s still there. Hanging precarious ly on my lip. Itching madly, now, as I wait for it to fall into the glass. As I try to find an exit…Thank you, ma’am…I truly appreciate your hospitality…Can’t she see?—I’d love to visit again before I leave savannah…

Back to the battle. They grab the end of Helja’s cloak for cover—like a trench or sandbag wall—as she moves past them. They move with her but are in a separate space. Sometimes Helja watches them with fascination, other times she is unaware of them.

36 ERIKA BLOCK

DJAMAL: I am getting really tired of this. BUNK: Tired of what? DJAMAL: Tired of all this crouching and hiding and fighting. BUNK: What do you think this is all about? You enlisted to fight. DJAMAL: I know. I’m just getting tired of it. BUNK: Don’t you dare go AWOL on me. DJAMAL: Do you think this will ever end? BUNK: The war? Of course it will. DJAMAL: When? BUNK: In time for the next one to begin.

Bunk screams, as if hit. They drop the cloak. DJAMAL: Isaiah!

Djamal carries him to safety. They resume fighting, circling again, back to back. DJAMAL: I don’t know how much longer I can last. BUNK: Djamal, you are the best soldier I’ve ever fought with. You’re a great marksman, a strong rider. And you think about what you’re doing in the midst of it all. DJAMAL: (To audience.) Do you think he’d say that if he knew I’m a woman? BUNK: You’re made for this. You just need a short leave. I’ll arrange for one as soon as we get back to headquarters…How does that sound? DJAMAL: I’m not sure. BUNK: What else would you do with yourself? DJAMAL: (To audience.) I could go back to Savannah. BUNK: What would I do without you? DJAMAL: There are plenty of good soldiers around. DJAMAL: (Continuing. To audience.) I could put on a dress again. Sit with my cousin. Receive the endless parade of would-be suitors.

Bunk screams, as before. DJAMAL: (Continuing.) Isaiah!

Djamal carries him to safety. The light changes and we are in Bunk’s flashback again. BUNK: (To audience.) Off on my own with a pocket looking glass. And it’s still there. My mustache hasn’t moved a bit. All in my head! Demons. Imaginings.

They resume fighting, picking up the end of Helja’s cloak as she passes them.

WALKING ON PEAS 37

DJAMAL: I haven’t had a good meal since I can remember. And I wouldn’t mind the feel of a silk nightgown. BUNK: (To audience.) Detection…I’ll tell you what I’ve learned about courage. The courage it took for me to put down that buttermilk glass, to accept another serving, to go on answering questions as I imagined my mustache dangling from its perch—that courage is more difficult to muster than the courage it takes to meet the enemy in battle. Bunk screams as before. DJAMAL: Isaiah! Djamal carries him to safety. They resume fighting, climbing up and down on a box, as if going through hilly terrain. DJAMAL: (To audience.) But then I’d have to give this up. And I’m so good at it. BUNK: (To audience.) Courage in battle is not a rare quality. It is frequently associated with meanness of spirit—a meanness I’ve seen in many a good soldier. DJAMAL: (To audience.) And I want to be a hero. BUNK: (To audience.) It is easier to meet the enemy bravely in battle than it is to exercise one’s brains so as to meet him most effectively. Easier to fire a cannon at an advancing regiment than it is to let the enemy retreat in peace.

Bunk screams again, in a bigger voice. Echoes of screams elevate this injury. DJAMAL: Isaiah!

Bunk tries to resume fighting but can’t stand up. Helja’s singing slowly fades out during this. DJAMAL: Stay down! BUNK: I’m okay. It just grazed me. DJAMAL: Your trousers are covered in blood. BUNK: It’s only my foot. I can tell it’s not serious. DJAMAL: Let me see. I’ll have to cut them off.

Djamal takes out a knife. Bunk moves away from him, trying to hide his pain. Bunk continues to stand up and fall over during this, somehow moving himself around the stage. Djamal is conscious of both Bunk and their vulnerability as targets. BUNK: I’m fine. You can’t cut my trousers. I don’t have another pair with me. DJAMAL: It doesn’t look like you’ll need them. We’ll have to get you out on a stretcher. You’ll get a blanket. BUNK: I don’t go anywhere without my trousers. DJAMAL: You’re being ridiculous, Isaiah. Look at yourself.

38 ERIKA BLOCK

BUNK: I’m fine. Really. It’s probably just my toe. DJAMAL: I’ve never seen a toe bleed upwards. BUNK: They’re still fighting, Djamal. Stay in it. DJAMAL: I’m not leaving you alone. You’re hurt… BUNK: I am your commanding officer. It’s an order. DJAMAL: I don’t care what it is. I am your friend. I’m not leaving you until we get to a hospital. BUNK: No hospitals! DJAMAL: Dammit, Bunk. You’re hurt. You can barely move. What happened to the pragmatic officer I know? BUNK: I can’t leave in the middle of a battle. DJAMAL: The war will go on without you. BUNK: Just give me some bandages and some brandy. DJAMAL: I thought you didn’t drink. BUNK: Give them to me.

Djamal takes out cloth and a flask. He begins to give them to Bunk, but then pulls back. DJAMAL: This is ridiculous. You can’t bandage yourself up when you haven’t even looked at the wounds. There are probably shell fragments in your leg. BUNK: I know where it is. I’ll take care of it myself. Give me the bandages. DJAMAL: I’ll help you. BUNK: Fine. Pour the brandy over me. DJAMAL: Where? BUNK: All over here. DJAMAL: You should get your trousers off first. BUNK: Please, Djamal. Just do as I ask. DJAMAL: (Pouring.) I don’t understand this, Isaiah.

He tries to bandage Bunk’s leg but can’t figure out where the wounds are. Bunk is biting back his pain. Djamal, frustrated, suddenly tears open Bunk’s trousers. Bunk screams, almost in a new voice. Djamal starts to laugh. BUNK: Damn you. I’m still your commanding officer. DJAMAL: Yes sir. BUNK: I can’t go to a hospital. DJAMAL: All right. But there’s metal in your…groin. BUNK: I know. Will you help me get it out? DJAMAL: I don’t think I can. BUNK: What’s the matter? Haven’t you ever seen a woman before?

(Djamal laughs.) I can’t do it myself.

WALKING ON PEAS 39

(Djamal continues to laugh.) Have you no compassion? DJAMAL: IsaiahBUNK: Lieutenant. DJAMAL: Lieutenant. How long have…? I’m not a surgeon. BUNK: I don’t need a surgeon. I need a friend with a knife. DJAMAL: I want to show you something. BUNK: I’m losing blood, Djamal.

Djamal unbuttons his jacket, revealing Dadeshkeliani’s top. BUNK: I am not delirious. DJAMAL: And you’re not unconscious. BUNK: And you’re not Djamal. DJAMAL: And you’re not Isaiah. BUNK: I think we need to talk about this. But my…groin is killing me. DADESHKELIANI: I’ll try.

She cleans the knife with brandy and begins to remove the shell fragments. 28.

As Dadeshkeliani cleans the wound: DADESHKELIANI: What is your name? BUNK: Isabelle…Isabelle Bunken. DADESHKELIANI: You seduced me in Savannah. BUNK: It was you who tried to seduce me, Princess. DADESHKELIANI: I was beginning to despise Isaiah. BUNK: I am still Isaiah. And I am in love with Djamal. DADESHKELIANI: Djamal is in love with her. BUNK: And Kati? DADESHKELIANI: Kati can’t decide what to do. BUNK: Isabelle doesn’t exist. DADESHKELIANI: How long have you been like this? BUNK: Since the murder of a woman I once knew. DADESHKELIANI: Did you kill her? BUNK: I don’t remember. DADESHKELIANI: How can anyone forget a thing like that?! BUNK: How can anyone forget what sex they are? MATSON: I am not a criminal and yet I was arrested. DADESHKELIANI: I thought the forger always knew the forgery. MATSON: I am not a forger.

He signs a check, tears it from the book, drops it on the ground.

40 ERIKA BLOCK

BUNK: It’s not so simple. MATSON: I simply endorsed a check. Luisa Matson. Me. And Milton Matson— ME—spent three weeks in jail. DADESHKELIANI: You put on a costume and play a role. BUNK: Perhaps that’s what you’ve done. I haven’t played a role for three hundred years. MATSON: An end to my privacy. DADESHKELIANI: I dressed up to follow you. BUNK: And I dressed up to save my life. MATSON: A curiosity. Everyone wants a peek. Some want answers. BUNK: I am Bunk…We’re not the same. DADESHKELIANI: No, we’re not. MATSON: I signed a contract to sit on this platform. For public viewing. BUNK: Do you think anyone will ever want to see my scar? DADESHKELIANI: I would have. Before Djamal. She might still. BUNK: But you’re in love with her. DADESHKELIANI: And you’re in love with Djamal. MATSON: There’s no way out of it now and I need to make an honest dollar or two. BUNK: Are you Djamal? DADESHKELIANI: Do I look like him? 29.

Helja begins to sing a phrase from Leçons de Ténèbres, then moves into De Profundis. She opens her box, taking out a soldier’s jacket and hat. She puts the uniform on. She stops singing in mid-phrase. BUNK: Will you keep my secret? DADESHKELIANI: Look at her. BUNK: Will you keep my secret? DADESHKELIANI: We should help her. BUNK: Are you offering me a deal? DADESHKELIANI: No I am not! That is what I hate about you Isaiah—Isabelle —whatever your name is. So cut and dried. BUNK: How do you think I’ve survived all this time? DADESHKELIANI: You’ve never been discovered before? BUNK: Once. DADESHKELIANI: What happened? BUNK: He kept it to himself. DADESHKELIANI: Just like that? No deals? BUNK: There was a deal. DADESHKELIANI: Well? BUNK: Well, what? DADESHKELIANI: What was the deal? BUNK: There are some things that can’t be discussed in front of a lady. DADESHKELIANI: You’re a lady! BUNK: Am I?

WALKING ON PEAS 41

DADESHKELIANI: I just saw what’s inside your trousers. BUNK: I have never been a lady. DADESHKELIANI: You should probably have it stitched up. BUNK: Do you have any thread? DADESHKELIANI: No. And even if I didBUNK: Do you think she has any? DADESHKELIANI: I don’t know. BUNK: Don’t women always carry thread with them? DADESHKELIANI: I don’t know what you’re talking about. BUNK: Sewing kits. I thought women always travelled with them. DADESHKELIANI: Don’t be ridiculous. She’s hardly a typical woman. Do you travel with one? BUNK: I am not a woman, Kati. Don’t you see? My experience has been man’s experience. I don’t know anything about women. Except what men know. I’ve forgotten what I used to be…I don’t even like women. I’ve been wondering why they always fall for me. DADESHKELIANI: So have I.

Helja resumes singing and takes a skirt from her box. She puts it on. She stops singing. BUNK: We could be friends, you know. DADESHKELIANI: Did you like me in Savannah? BUNK: I’m always more comfortable with men. DADESHKELIANI: And Djamal? BUNK: I’m in love with him. I told you that. DADESHKELIANI: I’m not him. BUNK: Are you the princess I met in Savannah? DADESHKELIANI: No. BUNK: What will you be? DADESHKELIANI: I’m not sure…Djamal today. Kati tomorrow. BUNK: You’ve done all that in an afternoon. DADESHKELIANI: I will be both of them. BUNK: And who will allow it? DADESHKELIANI: Who will stop me?

Helja resumes singing. She takes off her hat, puts on a long-haired wig, and replaces the hat. Then she puts on a mustache. She stands, finally, in a soldier’s jacket and a skirt; with a woman’s wig, a soldier’s hat and a droopy mustache. Bunk starts to overlap her singing. BUNK: It is easier to lead a charge on horseback than to live with the secret of one’s own sex. Easier to slip past enemy lines than to abandon all the learned behaviour and social graces of womanhood. DADESHKELIANI: You’ve done it.

42 ERIKA BLOCK

BUNK: You’re not like me. DADESHKELIANI: I had you convinced. BUNK: What is she doing? DADESHKELIANI: I thought the forger always knew the forgery. MATSON: I am not a forger. BUNK: I am not a woman. DADESHKELIANI: What are you? BUNK: (To Matson.) What is she doing? MATSON: Have you paid your dime? BUNK: I offered you gold. I showed you my locket. DADESHKELIANI: Your locket is worthless now. BUNK: I don’t have a dime. MATSON: There’s no way out of it now and I need to make an honest dollar or two. BUNK: (To Matson.) I need to know what she’s doing. DADESHKELIANI: She’s changing her clothes. It’s obvious. BUNK: What is she changing into? DADESHKELIANI: Whatever she wants to be. BUNK: She can’t do that. DADESHKELIANI: Why not? BUNK: She looks ridiculous. DADESHKELIANI: She’s beautiful. BUNK: What is she? DADESHKELIANI: Whatever she wants to be. BUNK: She can’t be both. DADESHKELIANI: Why not? BUNK: It’s not practical. MATSON: An end to my privacy. DADESHKELIANI: Stop being a soldier! BUNK: That’s what I am. DADESHKELIANI: What else are you? MATSON: There’s no way out of it now. DADESHKELIANI: Dance with me. BUNK: What? MATSON: A curiosity. DADESHKELIANI: Dance with me.

Matson plays Smoke Gets in Your Eyes, as before. After a few moments, Helja joins him. DADESHKELIANI: (Continuing.) Isabelle. BUNK: I don’t know whom you’re talking to. DADESHKELIANI: Dance with me—Isaiah.

Bunk reluctantly gives in; he starts to lead. DADESHKELIANI: (Continuing.) I lead this time.

WALKING ON PEAS 43

Bunk can’t move when Dadeshkeliani holds him to dance. BUNK: I don’t know how to be a woman.

He pushes Dadeshkeliani away. DADESHKELIANI: This will help you.

She gets her skirt. BUNK: I’m not putting that on. DADESHKELIANI: Come on, Isaiah. Just try it. BUNK: I can’t. DADESHKELIANI: It’ll help you move. BUNK: I know how to move—as a man. DADESHKELIANI: Don’t you miss it at all? BUNK: No. DADESHKELIANI: Even a little? BUNK: No. DADESHKELIANI: Why have you kept the locket, then? BUNK: Don’t you have a shred of decency? MATSON: Everyone wants a peek. DADESHKELIANI: I’ll be Djamal. BUNK: For how long? DADESHKELIANI: For a dance.

Dadeshkeliani catches him in a moment of hesitation and forces the skirt over his head. BUNK: I can’t. DADESHKELIANI: You might like it.

Dadeshkeliani tightens the skirt around Bunk’s waist. He stands in his jacket, hat and mustache. Helja, similarly costumed, stands behind him. MATSON: Have you paid your dime? DJAMAL: Can I have this dance?

They dance. Dadeshkeliani leads. Bunk is painfully awkward. BUNK: I look like a man disguised as a woman. MATSON: Perhaps I shall even sell my photo. It is a horrible idea. But it’s all in a lifetime…

44 ERIKA BLOCK

(To audience.) Have you paid your dime? The lights slowly fade on their dance. The music follows.

END

Selected Bibliography Kati Dadeshkeliani, Princess in Uniform . London: C.Bell, 1934 Rudolf Dekker and Lotte van de Pol, The Tradition of Female Cross-Dressing in Early Modern Europe . London: Macmillan, 1988 Diane Dugaw, Dangerous Examples: Warrior Women and Popular Balladry. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989 Elsa Jane Guerin, Mountain Charley. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1968 June Rose, The Perfect Gentleman: The Remarkable Life of Dr. James Miranda Barry, the Woman Who Served as an Officer in the British Army from 1813 to 1859 . London: Hutchinson, 1977 Steven Scobie, Isabel Gunn. Kingston, Ont: Quarry Press, 1977 Loreta Janeta Velasquez, C.J.Worthington, eds., The Woman in Battle. Hartford, Conn.: T.Belknap. Julie Wheelwright, Amazons and Military Maids. London: Pandora, 1989

WALKING ON PEAS 45

Figure 1 Walking on Peas. Dorothy Talk Theatre Company Production, 1991. Photo: Susy Taylor

46 ERIKA BLOCK

Figure 2 Walking on Peas. Dorothy Talk Theatre Company Production, 1991. Photo: Susy Taylor

Bloody Mary and the Virgin Queen By Deborah Barnard, Jill Dowse, Kate Hale, and Cath Kilcoyne.

Bloody Mary and the Virgin Queen was first performed by Foursight Theatre at Warwick Arts Centre 29th June 1993

Original Cast: Kate Hale: Virgin Queen Jill Dowse: Bloody Mary

© 1993 This play is fully protected by copyright. Any enquiries concerning the rights for professional or amateur stage productions, broadcasting, readings, etc. should be made to: Foursight Theatre Ltd., Newhampton Centre, Dunkley Street, Wolverhampton, WV1 4AN.

48 DEBORAH BARNARD ET AL.

Two boxes on stage. Silence. Begin to hear the sound of scribbling. Gradual rise from Liz writing on wall of box. Finally sits back to admire her latest work… LIZ: Mary. Are you awake. Mary…I’ve got one. I think you’ll like it. Mary— listen! Mary—are you listening? MARY: Elizabeth—I don’t have any choice do I? LIZ: Well, this is my best one yet! MARY: I hope it’s nothing like the last one. LIZ: No, no, absolutely not. MARY: Or the one before… LIZ: No—I promise. MARY: Or the one before that. LIZ: No! Here we go…One, Two, Mary the Shrew! MARY: I don’t like it. I’m not going to listen. LIZ: Three, Four, Holy Bore MARY: Elizabeth! LIZ: Five, Six, Burnt Heretics MARY: Stop! LIZ: Seven, Eight, Took Her a Mate Nine, Ten, Wanted Children MARY: You’re pushing it LIZ: Eleven, Twelve, Hopes Shelved Thirteen, Fourteen, Self-Aborting … MARY: (Silence. Head flipped up. Turns to look at Liz) That’s not funny. It’s not funny, clever, or big, is it? LIZ: Sorry. It’s only a little rhyme—I thought we might skip to it later. MARY: Elizabeth! You knew before you wrote it I wouldn’t like it. It’s simply uncalled for isn’t it? LIZ: Yes. MARY: It’s unnecessary and unkind. I don’t do that to you do I? LIZ: No. MARY: Well then! Now put your pen down. LIZ: Alright, alright (Begins to go down, reluctantly) MARY: Have you put it down? LIZ: Yes. MARY: Good. So we don’t need to mention it again, do we? LIZ: No. MARY: Promise? LIZ: Yes. MARY: Good. Well done. (Puts head down) LIZ: (Head up) 17,18 Hubby Doesn’t Love His Queen; 19, 20 Whores a Plenty! (Head down) MARY: (Head up) Right…that’s it! (Head down begins to play nintendo) LIZ: (Cautiously peeps up) Oh Mary—don’t start playing that game again. I promise I’ll write a nice one. I have to write—it’s in me. Why don’t you write one? You could write a really mean one about me…I’ll do my speech…Mary, if you don’t turn it off—I’ll do my speech—The Golden One; have you got one of those? I don’t think so. I’ll just have to do mine.

BLOODY MARY AND THE VIRGIN QUEEN 49

LIZ: Was I side on? No straight on. Armour clad. 1000’s of lusty young sailors hustle, bustle, sea, sun, Armada looming on the horizon, deep breath—last chance Mary—OK. ‘My Loving People, I come amongst you in the heat of the battle, to live or die amongst you all; to lay down for God, for my kingdom and for my people, my honour and my blood, even in the dust… MARY: Tosh! LIZ: I know I have but the body of a weak and feeble woman; but I have the heart and stomach of a King… MARY: Twaddle! LIZ:…and of a King of England too, and think it foul scorn that Parma or Spain… MARY: (Mumbles) you pissed your panties. LIZ:…or any Prince of Europe, should dare to invade the borders of my realm; MARY: (Louder) You pissed your panties! LIZ:…I myself will be general, judge and rewarder…on the word of a Queen you shall be duly paid. MARY: (Up) You’re a liar—you didn’t pay them a penny and half of them died of scurvy. LIZ: That’s not very sisterly of you is it Mary? MARY: We’re not sisters, we’re half sisters—my mother was the Great Queen Katherine of Aragon and your mother was Anne Boleyn—a crucial distinction, I feel. LIZ: Mary, get down. This is now my moment, this is now my space. You missed your chance. And I happen to be delivering one of the most famous speeches in history-My Golden Speech-it brought tears to their eyes. MARY: Codswollop—it’s a charlatan’s speech. Golden?-Tin Can! All lies and hot air Elizabeth, and well you know it. LIZ: Mary, it’s in all of my 93 biographies, it’s famous. It’s s part of the National Curriculum, for God’s sake. MARY: Well I’m sick, sick, sick of it…‘I have the heart and stomach of a King’ blah blah blah blah. It’s my turn and I want to talk about me—The Maryian Period. LIZ: The Maryian period! There wasn’t a Maryian period-you didn’t last long enough to warrant an age…six years of sack-cloth and ashes, papism and prudery. (Aside) Everyone thinks you’re Mary Queen of Scots anyway. MARY: I am not Mary Queen of Scots, I’m Mary Tudor, the first Queen to reign in England. I’m proud of it, it was a wonderful reign. LIZ: Bollocks! it was one bloody great big bonfire. MARY: Oh, so let’s s discuss the great E-Liz-abethan period—a vast deflating soufflé. Your English Renaissance was perfumed by the rotting bodies living on the stinking streets of glorious England; while you, prevaricated, procrastinated, and broke every promise you ever made! LIZ: You’re just jealous Mary. Jealous. MARY: Jealous? Jealous? Of a Lute Player’s Daughter? Who was your father Lizzie? King Henry VIII? I don’t think so—Mark Smeaton was it? Mummie’s lute player? There’s not a drop of blue blood in your veins-not even your varicose ones-you’re just a glorified commoner!

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LIZ: Malicious Gossip! Of course I’m King Henry’s daughter, of course I am. Look at me, if s obvious. Look at me!—I’m the Spit of him. I look more like King Henry than King Henry looked like himself! I am the Image of my father —everybody said so. MARY: They wouldn’t dare say otherwise- ‘Oh Good morning your Royal Highness, you know it’s funny but…you don’t half remind me of your mother’s lute player…‘You’d have had them strapped to the rack, fingernails out, eyes popped, hung, drawn, and quartered. And they call Me the bloody one—Good Queen Bess? More like Good Queen Butcher. LIZ: Oh, ashes to ashes Mrs Bonfire—at least I didn’t burn every poor soul who wasn’t chanting the Ave Maria or swinging a rosary. MARY: Well, at least I was up front about it. I didn’t do it for myself Elizabeth, I did it for God. LIZ: Well! He must’ve been tickled pink about that then, mmm mmm? He certainly worked in mysterious ways when it came to producing that all important Catholic Heir—Air—exactly! Remember Mary?- Hot Air; that’s all your pregnancies amounted to-one big Catholic fart! Let’s face it Mary, God’s a Protestant and he wanted Me!

(Mary scrabbles for sword) MARY: Satan’s Strumpet!

(Liz scrabbles for sword) LIZ: barren papist! MARY: spawn of a witch with six fingers! LIZ: bitter twisted aberration! MARY: devil worshipper! LIZ: Frigid rotting flabby reject! MARY: toothless saggy-titted tart!

(Together) LIZ: nutter! MARY: whore! LIZ: granny fanny! MARY: pox face! LIZ: burst boil! MARY: pauper’s pimple! LIZ: running sore! MARY: dog breath! LIZ: Spanish Dago! MARY: Bigot! MARY: delinquent, bottom leech, frog kisser, hag, frump, etc. (Both emerge from boxes and begin sword fight—Liz throws Mary to floor)

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LIZ: I apologise for the interruption—I’d now like to continue with this—my Virgin Speech—‘Concerning marriage, I have already joined myself to a husband, namely the Kingdom of England. And do not upbraid me with my miserable lack of children, for every one of you are children to me. When I shall let my last breath, it shall be engraven upon my tomb— “Here lies Elizabeth, which reigned a virgin and died a virgin”’.

(Mary drops to knees) MARY: Go on—lop it off! Finish off the job, Lizzie. See it through! Lop it off. Secure me my place in history. Anne Boleyn. Jane Grey. They both lost their heads and no one has a problem remembering their names. Not to mention Mary, Queen of Scots…After all, what am I but a mere cocktail, a footnote in your biographies? Go on, Lizzie. Do it for me. LIZ: Mary, I can’t. MARY: Why not? LIZ: You’re dead. Mary, you’re already dead. MARY: Oh. I forgot… (Begins to cry) I can’t even remember if I’m dead or not. Oh, I just do everything wrong—it’s pathetic, pathetic. LIZ: Come on—you’re taking this too hard. MARY: Mistake after mistake after mistake… LIZ: We all make mistakes, Mary. MARY: I made more than any one else ever, they all said so. LIZ: Come on Mary, you were the first Queen to ever reign in England—not an easy job—you were the ground breaker, made my job a lot simpler. All those men—they were all against you. MARY: Yes, I was quite brave, wasn’t I? I faced them all. LIZ: And you were really popular—at the beginning. They didn’t want Jane Grey on the throne, the nine day wonder Queen—people wanted you…you, Mary. MARY: Yes, yes they did-they rang the church bells for two whole days. LIZ: 48 hours, couldn’t get a wink of sleep. MARY: Bunting, bonfires, trumpets and drums, wine flowing from the fountains, parades of people—And I wore my best dress. LIZ: Yes, yes, you looked lovely, I remember thinking how lovely you looked— the crowd were cheering… MARY: Yes—cheering, waving, shouting… BOTH: ‘Long Live Queen Mary—Long Live Queen Mary’ MARY: It was a lovely day. LIZ: Then it was downhill from there on eh, Mary? Down the slippery slope of failure. MARY: (Begins to cry again) What was it Lizzie, what was it, when did it start to go so horribly wrong? LIZ: Well, you went and married that Philip of Spain—a foreigner! (Mary stands) —not a popular choice Mary, eh? MARY: Everyone hated Philip. Hated Spain. The xenophobic English. But Elizabeth, I loved him. I trusted him.

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LIZ: You should never trust men, Mary. MARY: He looked good on paper-He was Spanish-Catholic, like my mother, heir to the greatest empire on earth and so handsome! I vowed to God to love him as perfectly as I loved Christ…When we first met he kissed me right on the mouth! I thought ‘God has sent me my story book prince!’. I looked into his eyes and saw a great future together—Philip and Mary—I had never dreamt I could be so happy. I heard the gossip…‘What is the king to do with such an old bitch?’ I was pushing forty, I did look more like his maiden aunt, but he made me happy, that is until he went away—on a four-year business trip— with all the foreign perks…I begged him to return. I did everything I could, even going to war against the wishes of my people because he asked me to. I gave him everything-I loved him too perfectly. You were right, Elizabeth, I couldn’t even give him a child… LIZ: Could’ve been worse—you could’ve married John Knox. MARY: (Begins to laugh) John Knox-you know what he called me? Jezebel, Jezebel! LIZ: Or Mr Martin Luther—he could’ve been best man. MARY: Loony Luther! Ha, he was one of your lot. LIZ: Protestant, Catholic, they were all the same Mary—all against us, they just couldn’t get round the idea that we could think—What was it that Luther used to waffle on about? MARY: Martin Luther—1531. LIZ: Was it? Doesn’t time fly? MARY: ‘Men, have broad shoulders, and narrow hips, and accordingly they possess intelligence’ LIZ: That’s it! ‘Women ought to stay at home, the way they were created indicates this, for they have…narrow shoulders MARY:…broad hips BOTH:…and a wide fundament to sit upon’. LIZ: Fundament! Bloody ridiculous—and Knox. MARY: Nutty Knox. LIZ: ‘A woman to rule is repugnant to nature MARY: Weak Frail Impatient LIZ: Foolish Cruel Incompetent MARY: Their sight is but blindness LIZ: Their strength weakness MARY: Their counsel foolishness LIZ: Their judgement frenzy MARY: They are repugnant to nature LIZ: Weak MARY: Frail LIZ: Impatient MARY: Cruel LIZ: Blind in sight MARY: Foolish in counsel LIZ: Repugnant to nature MARY: Frenzied in judgement MARY: The monstriferous empire (Stop. Look)

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BOTH: The monstriferous empire of women must be brought to an end’. LIZ: And Mary Tudor is a wicked Jezebel— (Mary looks, Liz looks away) LIZ: Monstriferous, what sort of word is that—have you ever seen that written down Mary, have you ever read that among your books? MARY: No, and I’ve read a lot of books. LIZ: I think he made it up. MARY: It’s probably a spelling mistake LIZ: Men! Can’t live with them, can’t live without them. Anyway, are you feeling better now, got it off your chest? Accents haven’t improved eh? I don’t know Mary—what sort of man would you have ideally wanted?

(Cue music for song) MARY: I want a man to take me as his wife LIZ: I want a man in the prime of his life MARY: I want a man to whom I can belong LIZ: I want a man to be handsome and strong MARY: I want a man to give me a child LIZ: I want a man who’s a little bit wild MARY: I want a man who can help rule my lands LIZ: I want a man who has—smooth hands MARY: I want a man to put God’s love first LIZ: I want a man with an inquenchable thirst MARY: I want a man who can dance (well) and hunt LIZ: So do I! MARY: I want a man to be loyal and true LIZ: I want a man who looks good in dark blue MARY: I want a man who will love and inspire LIZ: I want a man to set me on fire MARY: I want a man who enjoys a good bet LIZ: I want a man as I’d want a pet MARY: I want a man to be cozy and comfy LIZ: I want a man for good rumpy pumpy MARY: I want a man who will join me in song LIZ: I want a man with a great big dong MARY: I want a man who is not like King Harry LIZ: I want a man—I don’t want to marry

(End of song) LIZ: But would my counsellors have it? God’s Death, Mary, they nagged me till they were blue in the bottom—do you know what they said? ‘Twould be better by far if the filly would take her a mate to be head of state’. Made me sick as a pig, a pox on the lot of ‘em. MARY: Well, Mum’s the word, but what I heard no ring on your finger to dinger, but plenty of flirty, dirty up your skirty.

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LIZ: Well, bless the guess and who can tell. I had my favourites, I liked them well. MARY: Yessy, yessy, but did your dressy get messy? Were you emerginin’ a virgin of the hymen intactus? LIZ: Scary Mary, what a question suggestion! I’m not wholly sure, it’s a bit of a blur. MARY: Oh close your gate, prevaricate!—I hear you were muchly taken by the frog o’er the laken. LIZ: Oh my kiss of the French, my Frog snog -13 nights of secrets, tongues and songs. Nearly linky pinky, but, Busy Lizzie, a French Wench! Thank the nank no! He died. I cried. MARY: But there were others, Carruthers—did you give in and sin? LIZ: Mr Seymour wanted Me—more than his wife, trouble and strife. Dangerous man had me in his span. Buttocky spanking and all sorts of twanking—he cut my dress, up against me did press his manhood, his wit, his percy dick stick. Tried and died to make me Queen-I was only 13—I mean! Reason treason, head on a stickedy—dick. MARY: Well then Dudley; ‘Dud the Stud’—did he jive in your hive? LIZ: What, my Leicester jester? I tried not to smirk as under my skirt, dibbledobble, Dudley had a gobble. I called him my eyes and he brought forth great sighs-wasn’t his wifey but true love for lifey. Lord Hatton, I sat on. Lastly not least, my boy, the toy, Essex—had sessex, but not with me—I was too old to be bold—he got rot too big for his rooty toot booties. Now deaded, beheaded. Not glad to. To do had to. Prefer to rule than marry a fool. MARY: Ah but what of the tool? Were you true maid or no, did you give it a go? LIZ: The riddle of the fiddle, a right royal twiddle. North, South, East, West— keep your cards to your chest, so give it a rest! Gin Rummy! But your hymen went flymen on your marriage nighty tight, eh juicy, loosey? MARY: Holy Mary Virgin mother! Queen Mary something other. Virgin? Mother? Neither. LIZ: Oh sister, blister, loved you ever of another? MARY: Choice would a been a fine thing a me ding—offers & profers were there a many—betrothally here, betrothally there, betrothally Mary everywhere. I gotly my first intended when I was but a tot of two dee do. And he a trouncy bouncy pon his mothers knee tee dee, nothing butty bitty baby. Eight years later the engagement arrangement fell through the floor dee dor and his daddy said ‘Well, come to my bed, let’s get wed, I’ll have you instead!’ LIZ: Keep it in the family tree, tee hee, funny type peopleys over the sea, along way from thee. MARY: ‘For my Mary to wed is a dangerous thing tee ding’ said Harry the King, my pater, much later. And he suspecty a plot in the pot if I a Catholic marry. Oh, yes, eyely nose a lot of sweety marriage type treatie weetys were broken while my maidenhead stayed wholly mine and only. But, bless ‘im, kept ‘em guessing. Had to wait till he bumped off for me to marry the toff from Spain, religion the same. LIZ: Philip the pain

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MARY: From the day I was born, political pawn. LIZ: King Harry, not let you marry? When he had six of the picks and all for a son, but we girlies won— MARY: My mother, your mother, string of the other. LIZ: Divorced, beheaded, died MARY: Divorced, beheaded, survived-Got through 3 Catherines, 2 Annes and a Jane. LIZ: Oh, let’s play King Henry’s Gallop. MARY: Oh shall we? It has been ages. LIZ: Yes—come on—Clear the space! MARY: It’s time for the race. LIZ: And they’re gathering in the paddock-a fine selection of fillies, glossy and trained for the race of a lifetime—The King Henry Stakes…the final leg of the ‘Who’ll be my Wife’ Season MARY: No 1 Katherine of Aragon-a definite favourite with the crowd—an honest runner, a bit long in the tooth but a determined old mare—currently at 10:1. LIZ: No 2 we see now—Anne Boleyn; a dark horse. Comes from poor stock but shows a good leg especially when the stakes are high—a cunning little runner odds on 7:1. MARY: No 3 Jane Seymour-The King’s favourite—quiet, well bred, looking for a clear win today. 7:2. LIZ: No 4 Anne of Cleves—from Holland. An ungainly runner and showing poor form, bit of a non-starter. High odds 50:1. MARY: No 5 Catherine Howard—a lively young filly, needs a tight rein but enjoys a fast ride. LIZ: No 6 Catherine Parr-showing excellent form, strong and steady she could surprise us all. MARY: A superb line up. The starter has called them to the gate. Oh and a false start from Katherine of Aragon, she could be disqualified. The Referee has raised the yellow flag. Katherine of Aragon is Out of the race. She will not be pleased. The crowd are definitely upset. This is Incredible! They’re under starter’s orders again—Oh and They’re Off… LIZ: Anne Boleyn takes a clear lead, followed closely by Jane Seymour, MARY: followed by Catherine Parr and Catherine Howard running neck and neck, LIZ: at the back of the field with an increasing gap is Anne of Cleves … MARY: Jane Seymour closing the gap on Boleyn as they round the bend to Male Heir Leap… LIZ: Seymour and Boleyn struggling for position, Oh Boleyn has fallen, Seymour takes the lead with Anne of Cleves still at the back the field And Anne of Cleves is Slowing Down, she looks in trouble, Anne of Cleves is walking… MARY: The rest of the field are approaching Broken Waters. Seymour has the lead, Catherine Parr is on her tail-the crowd are cheering Seymour on, they’re going over together, Oh And Seymour is Down, she’s fallen at Broken Waters and the crowd are gutted.

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LIZ: Parr & Howard race for the line-Howard could take her, she’s edging forward and parr is flagging, it looks like it’s Catherine Howard’s race… MARY: Oh, but Howard is being distracted, she’s seen a stallion in the crowd and leaving the field! Catherine Parr crosses the tape. Catherine Parr wins! LIZ: Mary, that’s enough now—I’m exhausted. MARY: Catherine Parr is the champion! LIZ: That’s enough—give it a rest. MARY: Oh, why can’t my mother ever win? LIZ: You can’t play around with historical fact. MARY: It’s s not fair—it was a Protestant referee—she deserved to win. LIZ: My mother didn’t win either. MARY: Yes, but, my mother was a saint. LIZ: Oh come on, she was only human—let’s face it, she was a bit fat, a bit bald and a bit past it. MARY: At least she didn’t have six fingers. LIZ: My mother did not have six fingers, she had a little, iddy-biddy stump—it was most probably a cartilage problem or something. MARY: She was an insatiable goggle-eyed whore who slept with her own brother to satisfy her craven sexual appetites! LIZ: You know as well as I do that she was framed. MARY: She’d a hooked nose, a poxy neck and wanted to kill me. LIZ: I don’t know why you’re so aggressive, she apologised before she was executed. I hardly knew my mother, you did, you could tell me all the nice things about her. MARY: Nice things! She once thought I’d curtsied to her in church when I was practically being sick in the aisle at the mere sight of her! LIZ: Well I never doubted my mother, I chose to keep quiet, but I never doubted her, unlike some ‘loyal’ daughters who signed their name to their mother’s guilt. What was that piece of paper…You know, the thingy—what was it called? MARY: Lady Mary’s Submission LIZ: Oh yes, that’s it, the one that said that your mother’s marriage… MARY:…was incestuous and unlawful in the eyes of man and God LIZ: Yes…that the Pope had no authority in England and you were an illegitimate bastard! MARY: Liz. There’s something I’ve been wanting to show you for quite some time. LIZ: What? MARY: Have a rummage in your box. LIZ: No! MARY: Go on—I think you’ll like it. LIZ: Have you got me a pressie? MARY: Yes. LIZ: Mary, that’s very unlike you, what’s it for? MARY: Let’s just call it a celebration of our 390 years together. LIZ: Oh, Mary, you old sentimentalist! MARY: A small token of my appreciation—right-hand side under the second flagstone from the left.

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LIZ: Ooh. (Goes to look. Screams) Mary Tudor! You’re sick, sick. A sick, twisted, bitter old woman. (Looks in) It’s disgusting. It’s perverted. How could you? It’s my mother’s. It’s my mother’s head! MARY: I thought you might like to see her. LIZ: How dare you—you’re abnormal, you’re evil. Go away Leave us alone, leave me alone with mummy…

(Song) I saw the headless queen wear royal crown…I heard her cackle pierce the night around In blazing sun her ghostly breath did chill The marrow of my bones and shake my will I knew that from this murdered stock I came But dare not think or speak of her by name As if inviting direst consequence In seeming to forget, I made pretense MARY: Loolalay LIZ: Then did I yearn for my mother’s circling arms To bury my aged form deep in her charms Kiss the copious tears she’d shed away Oh, to have let her live To have let her laugh, One other day… MARY: Loolalay MARY: Alright, I apologise. LIZ: Apology accepted. MARY: There’s more where she came from- I’ve quite a handsome collection actually. LIZ: You haven’t, God’s Death, you’re out to lunch—who else have you got? MARY: They’re all here—the place is positively teeming with them. LIZ: Who? Are they all people you killed? MARY: No. Some of yours, Henry’s, couple of mine (Begins to look) Catherine Howard, Thomas Moore, Margaret Pole LIZ: Who? MARY: Margaret Pole…my governess—they made a bit of a mess of her neck, only a work experience boy on that day. LIZ: Blunt swords and novices—bane of my life. My mother got it right—had a French sword. Look, clean little cut. Swish, plop! Never missed the basket. Anyone else I know? MARY: Oh, I’ve shared them out. Have a good old look. LIZ: Oh, you tinker! What on earth possessed you? MARY: Well I needed someone to chat to while you were writing your poems LIZ: (Rummages) Essex!! My toy boy! Got rot too big… BOTH…for his root-y-toot booties! LIZ: Oh, lord, he’s still leaking. Oh, who’s this? MARY: Let’s have a look—ah, thought you might like her—it’s Mary Queen of Scots!

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LIZ: I never met her. It was my worst nightmare—spilling the blood of a Queen. I was in a right royal state. MARY: You didn’t have any choice; she was after your throne Elizabeth. LIZ: She was a Queen; ordained by God like me. At her execution, her little dog, ran out from under her skirt and lay down right between her severed head and her body—and her wig fell off—I cried for a whole month. MARY: You supported the woman against all the odds, even when they said she’d blown up her husband. LIZ: I was desperate for someone to knock her off quietly. MARY: Oh Lizzie-oh we’ve got a sad little one here-sweet sixteen tiny Lady Jane Grey. I didn’t want to kill her either—It was in my best interest they said and Philip wouldn’t marry me if I didn’t— LIZ: What’s a girl to do? I must say you’ve a super collection-a veritable court ball— MARY: A proper little party. LIZ: I don’t recognise half of them—there’s so many. MARY: Mm. Imagine if they were all here, we’d be up to our necks– LIZ: swimming in them… MARY: drowning! (Find me somebody to love, find me…) LIZ: Mary—we did kill a lot of people; and we haven’t even touched on your weekly burnings. MARY: Oh Lizzie—We had to, it had to be done. (Cue Music) Death masque. They dance and put the 6 heads on poles. Music fade out when Liz sits on stool. MARY: Did you know that a severed head was aware of its fate for twenty seconds after being parted from its body? I wonder what they thought— LIZ: (Panic attack) The Fear, the Fear again. Where’s my Dudley? MARY: Elizabeth, he’s not here, it’s Mary—breathe deeply LIZ: I need my Dudley MARY: Elizabeth, breath deeply, it will go. Its alright, it’s Mary, Dudley’s not here,—it’s alright, you don’t need to be afraid anymore—you’re dead. LIZ: I hate death, I hate it now and I hated it then. I could never face the thought of it. After all that living, worrying, bother, lots of bother—what was the point? the thought of being nothing, it didn’t make any sense, when I was dying, I couldn’t accept it. They were all waiting; let’s face it they’d had enough, wanted new blood. All eyes watching me—waiting. MARY: Like scavenging crows. (Mary ‘becomes’ Liz over next speech) LIZ: Well I was going in my own time! I wanted to be in Richmond in my warm box. It was winter. I walked my own way to death. A great elephant going to my grave. I was half crippled but I strode around refusing help; I fell getting from my horse. I couldn’t let them see the pain. Dead but not buried. Proud as a peacock. I sat on my cushion my sandlewood body smelling of death. They were waiting… MARY: (As Liz) Scavenging crows. LIZ: I was sent comic verse! BOTH: Fools!

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MARY: When thou dost feel creeping time at thy gate, these fooleries please thee less. I am past my relish for such matters. LIZ: I waved them away. Why couldn’t I let go? There was no-one left I cared about. Dudley, Hatton—gone. All my favourites—gone. What was I left with? Pain. Burning pain. After three days I put my fingers in my mouth like a child. I could feel the lump in my throat I wanted to cry. It frightened me. Unnatural. Shouldn’t have been there. Death. Taking me over. Filled with poison. Eyes! MARY: Dudley, Robert is that you? Eyes? Eyes. One drowns in them. One loses oneself. One is totally disorientated. LIZ: Just me and a boil. Getting bigger. Filling with poison. Pain. Goodbyes never said, tears never shed. It burst. I swallowed the poison. ‘Madam, to content the people you must go to bed’. MARY: Little man, little man, the word ‘must’ is not to be used to a queen. LIZ: Dead but not buried. A pathetic sight. Toothless, bald, wasted, tits like empty sacs. My coronation ring was so deeply embedded in my swollen finger, they had to cut it off; they divorced me from my England. MARY: You dare to ask who is to succeed me? LIZ: I waved them away. There was no voice to say… MARY: Go away! LIZ: No voice to say, ‘I am dead but not buried’. My wave they took as consent, my blessing for the new king. Bit, sucked, eased the pain, the burning pain of death. The Fear. The Panic. (Mary starts to have panic attack. Liz leaves and sits. Mary becomes herself again.) MARY: My death started when I married Philip. The people turned against me and I had my first phantom pregnancy. He left, lost Calais in the war, and I had another phantom pregnancy. Someone threw a dead dog through my window, my uncle died, my auntie died and my best friend the Cardinal went mad. My pregnancy turned out to be a fatal cancer and Philip made a play for you. Then it was visions of angels, children playing, I made a quick will, said a mass, hung my head and died. LIZ: There was I, waiting for your coronation ring, hot off your dead body. MARY: Scavenging crow. LIZ: I was a bit sad that you died. I remember saying The laws of nature move me to sorrow for my sister’. MARY: Well, I heard that you fell to your knees crying out This is the Lord’s doing and it is marvellous in our eyes’. LIZ: Oh, Mary, I was excited. Did you really have visions of angels? MARY: Yes. LIZ: and a dead dog was thrown through your window? MARY: Yes. LIZ: Perhaps you were stark raving mad, like the King of Spain’s daughter— your Auntie Juana—‘I had a little tree nothing would it bear… BOTH: But a silver nutmeg—And a golden pear The King of Spain’s daughter— Came to visit me And all for the sake Of my little nut tree’. (Sung) MARY: Look! LIZ: What? MARY: She’s there!

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LIZ: Who? MARY: It’s s Auntie Juana! So if s true. Every time my nanny sang that song she saw the ghost of Mad Aunt Juana standing by me. And there are the rest of them. (Cue Music) Juana, Isabella, Catalina. Las Madres—The mothers— all those Spanish matriarchs stretching back into history, obsessive, depressive or potty—potty, potty, potty! They won’t leave me alone. They possess me.

Las Madres

(Song)

I see Queen Isabella Mother of my mother She is proud Her body clad in armour Oh, fearless warrior Still she swings Her sword against the infidel In Holy War I see Queen Juana Sister to my mother Juana the mad Whose faithless husband stole her mind She drags behind her His dead body loose in a coffin Possessive of a corpse I see their tears Still true to faithless husbands Las madres The mothers Imprisoned still Within my soul Las madres Estan de pie de tras de mi Las madres illuminan Las sombras del futuro En el fondo de la tinieblas de los tiempos. Who is this? My mother’s daughter Myself Am I as they, the mothers? Las Maaaadrraaass

MARY: Truth or dare, Elizabeth? (Quick fade out music) LIZ: Oh, dare me, go on Mary, dare me! MARY: I dare you to stand on that stool (Liz stands) and say in public, whether you’re a virgin or not. LIZ: ‘In public whether you’re a Virgin or not!’ MARY: Elizabeth! LIZ: I am a Virgin MARY: No! Is that what you wanted? LIZ: Yes. It was a political decision. MARY: After all that big talk. LIZ: I had my fun and I got what I wanted. When I entered the political arena, my chosen weapon was marriage; my virginity my greatest asset. The Princes of Europe? They learned to dance to a woman’s tune. MARY: Gosh! You’re not as stupid as you look! LIZ: Truth or dare? MARY: Truth. LIZ: Are you sure? MARY: Yes. LIZ: You don’t want a dare? MARY: No—I’m ready for a truth. LIZ: Really—right; Mary Tudor—did you ever lie? MARY: No!

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LIZ: to your mother? MARY: No LIZ: What about Lady Mary’s Submission—you promised her you would never sign. MARY: I didn’t sign, well I did sign, but I didn’t really look, I mean, I didn’t mean it, I sent a disclaimer to the Pope, it was for the greater good, I was persuaded. LIZ: You went back on your word. MARY: They were breathing down my neck, I had to, I was the last hope for the Catholics, you must understand—My own father wanted my head on a platter—Yes, I lied to her. She loved me, and I lied…Truth or Dare? LIZ: Truth. MARY: Did you help plot my death? Were you part of the Wyatt rebellion? LIZ: I knew that one was coming, could feel it in my bones. MARY: Answer! LIZ: No. MARY: What about the poem? The poem you scratched on the window, with a diamond? LIZ: ‘Much suspected by me, nothing proved can be’ MARY: Exactly—equivocal! Were you a traitor or not? LIZ: Whether you like it or not it was a case of Tanquam Ovis—a lamb to the slaughter! If there’s one thing I believed in, it’s the right of succession. You wrongfully imprisoned me and I resent the fact that you still don’t believe me. Truth or Dare? (Ushers Mary to chair) If during your reign, I’d admitted to being Protestant, would you have killed me, your sister, purely on religious grounds? MARY: I might have respected your honesty. LIZ: Truth! MARY: Yes. LIZ: Dare. MARY: Dare? It’s not my turn. LIZ: Dare! MARY: Alright. Dare-yes. Dare-I dare! LIZ: (Looks round at heads) MARY: Liz—don’t give me a rotten one—Liz, no. LIZ: Put your tongue in Wyatt’s mouth. MARY: No! Kiss a traitor-No! LIZ: DARE! MARY: Right (Goes off to kiss head. Throws at Liz) MARY: Urghh, that was utterly disgusting- I feel sick Lizzie, I feel sick, something’s moving, Lizzie, I think…I think I’m pregnant… LIZ: Mary… MARY: Thanks be to God—Philip, I love you, I’m pregnant, feel it Lizzie, a life, a life, inside me, inside me, Lizzie, I’m pregnant; it’s the miracle baby— ring the bells, the new Catholic heir. From the belly of the whale came Jonah! LIZ: Mary, Mary, Mary-there is no baby! MARY: Burn the heretics—Burn the heretics—burn the heretics (Liz slaps, runs to box) I’m sorry, I’m so sorry…

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LIZ: It’s alright, it’s alright—you need a rest…you can go in my box if you like… Mary…go on…in the box, settle down, you’ve exhausted yourself…there you go…better in your box than out your box… MARY: Oh Elizabeth, I’m so sorry. LIZ: (Placates) It’s alright, in you go, all finished now, come on, that’s better, calm down. MARY: ‘Burn the heretics!’ Sometimes I get up and I can taste ash in my mouth—it was for God, Elizabeth. LIZ: Mary, stop, it’s over. MARY: I’m sorry, I’m (Sees Poem)… MARY: 1,2 Mary the Shrew. 3, 4 Holy Bore. 5, 6 Burnt Heretics. 7, 8 Took her a Mate. 9,10 Wanted Children. 11,12 Hopes Shelved LIZ: Mary, stop. MARY: 13,14 Self Aborting…I could’ve stopped you Lizzie, if I’d had a child, I could’ve stopped you in your tracks! LIZ: C’est la vie Mary, c’est la vie! Mary, if you had had a child, what would you have done if it had been a girl? MARY: Stuck her in a pair of trousers and called her ‘Walter’? LIZ: Either way, King Henry wouldn’t have liked it! MARY: He would have risen from his grave to tell me how disappointed he was. LIZ: We were the two biggest disappointments of his whole life… MARY: and the downfall of both our mothers. LIZ: He must’ve turned in his grave the day you came to the throne and positively danced the Galliard when I arrived. He was desperate to keep the men in the driving seat—and what did he end up with? MARY: six wives, two daughters and sickly Edward. LIZ: Do you remember the portrait he gave Edward? MARY: ‘Imitate your father, the greatest man in the world. Surpass him and none shall surpass you’ LIZ: Well I imitated him as fast and furiously as I could. I read in one of my biographies that I was more feared a monarch than King Henry—well that frightens me, it frightens me—and yet I worshipped the ground he walked on. MARY: Me too, more’s the pity. At one of my betrothal celebrations… LIZ:…and which one out of the 493 was that? MARY…King of France, when I was twelve. Father danced with me and spun me around the room—I was giddy with excitement; at the end of the dance he let down my hair; a golden cascade -I felt like a true Princess. Then look what happened… LIZ: One of my earliest memories was dancing with father—there he was, dressed in bright yellow, a whirling, cavorting canary. I’d never seen him so happy. MARY: What was the occasion? LIZ: I’m sorry to say we were celebrating the death of your mother. MARY: Oh. LIZ: and I would like to apologise for that. MARY: It’s alright, you were too young to know. LIZ: Thank you, Mary. MARY: Oh, he was an insensitive, selfish bore!

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LIZ: Couldn’t half dance though—and if there’s one thing we inherited it’s a… MARY: Good, firm dancing leg! Oh, Lizzie, let’s have a dance! LIZ: Oh, Mary, I’m knackered. It’s s been a long day. MARY: Elizabeth Tudor, I demand the pleasure of the next dance! (Cue music) LIZ: You be the man. MARY: I don’t want to be the man. LIZ: You’ve got the deep voice. MARY: You be the man. LIZ: But I don’t want to be the man. MARY: Well it doesn’t matter then. (They start to dance) LIZ: D’y know, I’ve had this funny feeling in my water all day. MARY: So have I. LIZ: I was wondering whether it might be worth another try. MARY: We’d have to do it perfectly. LIZ: It might work this time. MARY: It might. LIZ: Time to move on. MARY: Yes—let’s give it a go. LIZ: Swords? MARY: Swords. (Begin to fade out music) LIZ: How are you feeling? MARY: Alright—how are you feeling? LIZ: Nervous, very nervous. MARY: Me too. LIZ: Mary, when Philip left you and took up with a mistress—I laughed like a hyena/drain. MARY: That’s s alright—I didn’t really put my tongue in Wyatt’s mouth. LIZ: I know. Ready? MARY: Ready. (Mary: Cues Music)

Music On Tape ‘Born Free, as free as the wind blows, as free as the grass grows born free—to follow your heart Live Free, and beauty surrounds you, The world still astounds you each time you look at a star Stay free, where no walls divide you, Free as a roaring tide so there’s no need to hide. Born Free, and life is worth living, But only worth living cause you’re born free’ (Whilst music plays they sword fight and ‘kill’ each other)

64 DEBORAH BARNARD ET AL.

Figure 3 Bloody Mary and the Virgin Queen. Katie Joseph (left) as Elizabeth I and Jill Dowse (right) as Mary Tudor. Foursight Theatre Production (1992/3). Courtesy of Foursight Theatre Company Ltd.

Mrs. Beeton’s History of the World Julie Wilkinson

© 1990. Applications for licences to perform the play should be addressed to Julie Wilkinson, 98 Newport Road, Chorlton-cum-Hardy, Manchester, M21 9WN.

66 JULIE WILKINSON

CHARACTERS

Mrs. Isabella Beeton Caroline, her maid-of-all-work The play is set in the present day. References to Household Management are to the first edition (1861). Mrs. Beeton’s History of the World was first produced by Perspectives Theatre Company in 1991. The original cast were: Mrs. Beeton: Alison McKinnon Caroline: Sally Armstrong SET

A working victorian kitchen, with some modern technology cunningly concealed in it. e.g. The range looks like the “Improved Leamington Kitchener as adapted for families” (Household Management page 27. fig. 5), but in fact contains a working microwave and, if possible, a modern electric hot plate. [Isabella, is on stage, in an armchair, asleep. Dressed but dishevelled. She is drunk. She snores. An alarm clock goes off. She doesn’t stir. Another clock starts to ring. No response. And another. She reaches out and switches one alarm off. Another one starts. There are now three ringing. She reaches out, still with eyes shut, collects all the clocks up, and puts them under cushion, still ringing, and carries on sleeping] [Caroline stumps up stairs, pulling on her clothes, tying boot laces] CAROLINE: Six o’clock in the rotten morning. Six o’ rotten clock. An’ I didn’t sleep a wink, with all that wailing and gnashing of teeth. Lord, it’s purgatory down there. Purgatory. No, I mean it’s really Purgatory. You know, warmish place, ‘alf way between ‘eaven and ‘ell. I’m lodging there, for my sins. ‘s only temporary. Now, where is she? [Caroline looks exactly as people expect Isabella to. Plump, older than Isabella, dressed in the manner of Queen Victoria-but the material of her dress is a lot poorer] CAROLINE: Oh, look at her. Look at her. Snoring. I dunt believe it. Sluggard. Idler. If you do not rise early, you can make progress in nothing. Who said that? Who said that, eh? But she’s still abed. Early rising, I’ve got it written in my heart…Self indulgence, t, t, t,…she should be up and in her cold or tepid bath by now. I’m doing nowt until she’s up. I was summoned. Six o’clock sharp, they said. You get some strange requests. A cookery demonstration, they said. When you’re in Purgatory, you got to do what you’re told. Believe me, it’s no feather bed. Cinders for a mattress, if you’re lucky. I can’t be doing with the gnashing myself, sets my teeth on edge; and I don’t hold with tearing your hair, or rending your garments…but I’ve got to do something for a bit of holy grace and favour, I’ve been down there nearly a century, don’t want to stay there for all eternity…So I go where they send me. ‘course she went straight to heaven. Well, if s who you know, really, ain’t it? She looks different when she’s asleep. Sort of soft. So young, she is…I don’t know. Hair in your eyes… [She goes to brush back Isabella’s hair, but

MRS. BEETON’S HISTORY OF THE WORLD 67

sniffs her breath] Wait a bit. Hang on a bit. [Sniffs again] Would you credit it. She’s been drinking. She’s drunk. [Nudges her] yoo hoo. Wakey wakey… Oh…all innocent she looks. You’d think butter wouldn’t melt…So that’s what they do in heaven. They’re all up there, knocking back the old holy spirit…She’s blotto on nectar. Pissed for all time…and they always made it sound so boring. Would you believe it. You know they don’t let you touch a drop in Purgatory. So much for the demon drink. Ooh, I’d give my best coal scuttle for nice pint o’ porter…What’s this? She’s been writing. Menu for the day, is it? My instructions. I’ll bet. [She reads] “Mrs. Beeton’s History of the World in Eight Courses with Entremets and Dessert.”…Primordial Soup…“Primitive preparation of eggs…” There’s pages of it…. I’ll have to wake her up, I can’t do all this on my own. Isabella! Mrs. Beeton! Such a slip of a thing, she is, to have such a name. Sounds so sort of…well rounded, dunt it. Beeton. Sort of motherly. And yet look at her; this is how she looked the day she went to heaven, only a bit paler, with the fever. Isabella! Twenty eight, she was, when she died. It’s no age, is it? You know, there’s a few I’ve met in Purgatory, confused me for Mrs. Beeton-me, the maid! I never could ‘ave done what she done; all that writing; Editress of two magazines, she was. And the trips she went on-she could speak French you know-she had to, to write about the fashions and that…Only thing she couldn’t do was cook. Bella! Bella! That’s what Sam used to call her. Bella…when they got really soppy, in the evenings, he used to call her his master…Used to lie with his head in her lap, and say; What do you think, wise Bella…Some people thought he was a bit free; a bit naughty…. No. Oh, no. Bell…. Come on, wake up, your public’s waiting…! No use, she’s out to the world. I’ll tell you what; I’ll have a go. I hate to see disappointed faces. [She reads the instructions, and enacts them] “A Primitive Method of Cooking Eggs. Take twelve eggs”…twelve eggs…“Fashion a simple sling of the kind David might have used to fell the awful Goliath…” fashion a sling…“Swing eggs round the head rapidly until cooked…”…“What? Twelve eggs…“twelve eggs…“Sling like David’s”…sling like David’s. “Swing eggs round the head rapidly until cooked… [On the next page] …one at a time.” Oh, one at a time. All right. Here goes… [She smashes the egg] ISABELLA: Caroline? Caroline…? What’s happening? Where am I? CAROLINE: [To audience] ‘scuse us. You’ve come down to earth, dear. From heaven. You’ve been brought back by popular demand. Publishers reckoned there was money in a sequel. ISABELLA: What? What…? CAROLINE: Mrs. Beeton’s History of the World. Following on from the great success of Mrs. Beeton’s Book of Household Management…They’Ve sent us out on a national tour. To whip up interest in the new book; to tickle the public’s appetite. With any luck we’ll get on Wogan. ISABELLA: Wogan? CAROLINE: Oh, dear, she’s completely out of it. I’m ever so sorry about this, Ladies and Gents. ISABELLA: Following on from Household Management? CAROLINE: That’s it… ISABELLA: Household Manage…where is it? Where’s my book?

68 JULIE WILKINSON

CAROLINE: Well, actually, we’ve had a bit of trouble with that. Come on, sit up properly. ISABELLA: Bu…. Trubble? What d’you mean, trubble? CAROLINE: It’s not available. Not any more. ISABELLA: I thought…I thought… CAROLINE: I know, most popular book ever…but somehow I neglected to bring it with me into the next world. ISABELLA: Don’t be ridiculous. CAROLINE: Oh, she’s waking up. ISABELLA: Just go to any good book shop. They’ll know the name of Beeton. CAROLINE: Yes, but a first edition… ISABELLA: Caroline…I must have my recipes. What’s needed in the kitchen is precish…precish…getting the quantities right. CAROLINE: A good cook does it by feel… ISABELLA: Nonsense! CAROLINE: I never measured anything; and whose souffles rose the better? Yours used to come out like scrambled eggs… ISABELLA: Don’t! CAROLINE: All gooey and yellow… ISABELLA: [Groaning] Don’t talk to me about food. CAROLINE: It’s a hangover, pure and simple. Can’t you remember your recipes? ISABELLA: I have been in heaven for a very long time… CAROLINE: One hundred and twenty five years… ISABELLA: I wouldn’t know. Too much nectar. There’s no call for memory in heaven. I’m out of practice. Anyway, all my historical notes are in Household Management…good Lord! The room’s full of people. CAROLINE: We’re late starting. Or they’re early arriving. ISABELLA: Are all the ingredients prepared? Are your pans polished? Have you swept the grate? [She checks the stove] Heavens, the fire’s not even in. CAROLINE: I’ve only just got up. ISABELLA: Early rising is the quality most essential to the servant. CAROLINE: Listen who’s talking. ISABELLA: Go and find the book! CAROLINE: There is no book, I told you… ISABELLA: Go! Ladies and Gent… [To Caroline] wait; Caroline. Caroline! [Caroline comes back] Am I neat? [Caroline helps her fix her collar] Collar straight? Thank you…Ladies and…. [To Caroline] Well, go on! [Caroline goes] Notes, notes…out of order…Ladies and Gentlemen. Ah, here we are… The History of the World…is the history of the kitchen. The progress of mankind from barbarism to civilisation is marked by a gradual succession of triumphs over the rude materialities of nature, just as in cookery, mankind began by subsisting ,on the simple, raw fruits of the earth, and ascended by stages to the giddy heights of dinner for 18 persons a la Russe, with mock turtle soup, fricandeau de Veau a la Jardinière, Larded peahen etcetera as set out in Beeton’s book of Household Management, a copy of which Caroline will immediately furnish us with. As Lord Byron observed “Who would suppose, from Adam’s simple rations—That cookery could have called forth

MRS. BEETON’S HISTORY OF THE WORLD 69

such resources-As form a srience and a nomenclature—From out the commonest demands of nature?” And we may well say, “Who indeed would suppose it?” The gulf between the savage Hun on the Steppe, with a steak under his saddle, and Alexis Soyer, the renowned Chef de Cuisine, getting up a great dinner at the Reform Club, or even Thackeray’s Mrs. Raymond Gray giving “a little dinner” to Mr. Snob (with one of those famous “roly poly puddings” of hers,)—what a gulf it is! But this is the gulf we shall cross together, today…as I demonstrate how the art of cookery has advanced good behaviour and good taste through the ages… [Caroline arrives with a book] ISABELLA: There, you see; that wasn’t so difficult to find, was it? CAROLINE: No. ISABELLA: No what? CAROLINE: No mum. ISABELLA: That’s better. CAROLINE: Just like the old days. ISABELLA: Look up lentils in the index, and prop the book up over there in case we need it. [Caroline does so. Isabella does not consult the book until she needs to find the recipe for Mackerel Garum] The first dish, Ladies and Gentlemen, in my projected history of the world is The Mess of Pottage for which Esau sold his birthright. Genesis Chapter 25 Verse 34, “Then Jacob gave Esau bread and pottage of lentils”. CAROLINE: Lentils, lentils… [She searches for them in the kitchen] ISABELLA: Really, Caroline. CAROLINE: They’re here somewhere. ISABELLA: The cook’s rule should always be, “A place for everything, and everything in its place”. CAROLINE: An’ I know mine. [Caroline fetches the ingredients. The onions are raw] ISABELLA: Shortly, my maid and I will demonstrate how the hairy Esau came to sell his birthright by taking on the personae or characters of Jacob and his sibling; but first we shall prepare the pottage itself. For this recipe, you will need 12 ounces of split red lentils, two chopped onions fried in 2 ounces of mutton fat, one and half pints of water, 6 ounces of wheat grains, roasted and pounded into granular form… CAROLINE: Roasted and pounded? ISABELLA:…I have some here that our angel helpers prepared earlier… CAROLINE: Thank goodness for that… ISABELLA:…half a teacup of finely chopped parsley, and seasoning to taste. Onions please Caroline… [Caroline starts to peel the onions] While Caroline is chopping those onions… CAROLINE:…might’ve known I’d be chopping the onions… ISABELLA:…and I am preparing the lentils, we will ask: How did mankind arrive at the pottage stage? The combination of grain and pulses in this recipe shows that agriculture had begun. The Greeks believed that bread making was invented by the god Pan… CAROLINE: Is he the one with the little horns and the cloven hooves? ISABELLA: According to the Ancients, yes.

70 JULIE WILKINSON

CAROLINE: I’ve met him. ISABELLA: But the advance which made pottage possible was the discovery of fire. So, I’ve put the lentils into a pan with water, and now I’m going to simmer them on a low heat until they are soft. [She goes to put the pot in the oven. There is a microwave inside, visible to the audience] Caroline. Where’s the fire? Caroline. What on earth is this? CAROLINE: The cooker, mum. ISABELLA: No coal? CAROLINE: No, mum. ISABELLA: No gas? CAROLINE: No, mum. ISABELLA: No heat at all? What are we going to do? CAROLINE: Doesn’t need any. I’ll show you. [She puts the onions in with the fat and switches the microwave on] ISABELLA: What’s happening now? CAROLINE: It’s s vibrating the onions. ISABELLA: It’s vibrating the onions. CAROLINE: Sort of wobbling them. ISABELLA: Wobbling them. CAROLINE: Yes, mum. From the inside out. Wobbling them. ISABELLA: There is a roomful of gourmets here, waiting to sample Mrs. Beeton’s best recipes, and you tell me I should wobble my onions? CAROLINE: It was invented after you died. ISABELLA: Don’t mention that again! CAROLINE: Sorry. ISABELLA: I don’t want to talk about death. CAROLINE: Sorry. ISABELLA: Especially my own. oh, I could do with a nice glass of nectar… CAROLINE: The oven will work. Trust me. ISABELLA: I hope you’re right. CAROLINE: When have I ever let you down? Here; look… [She takes the onions out] ISABELLA: They’re cooked! CAROLINE: Told you. Give us the lentils then. [She puts the lentils in] ISABELLA: Remarkable! While Caroline is erm…vibrating the pottage, a word about the lentil. The lentil is a variety of the bean tribe, but in England is only fed to pigeons. Fellow Gourmands may wonder how this prejudice against the lentil arose. It was not so in Ancient Egypt, where the lentil was almost as revered as the onion, which the idolatrous Pharoahs worshipped as a God. The Romans, however, thought less of the lentil. It is from the Latin, ‘lentus’, meaning ‘slow’, that the vegetable got its name, and we know from experience that a meal of lentils makes it difficult to move with speed. Any mistress who feeds her servants upon lentils should not expect a prompt response to her drawing room bell. [The Microwave tings] CAROLINE; They’re done. ISABELLA: So soon? Surely not!… [She sticks her finger in the dish] Ow! CAROLINE: Careful…! Blow on it! Butter…smear it with butter…

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ISABELLA: Don’t fuss, Caroline! The next stage is to add the cracked wheat, and the onions… CAROLINE: You must give it a good stir. ISABELLA: When that’s well mixed… CAROLINE: I think you need a little more water there… ISABELLA: I like a nice stiff consistency myself. CAROLINE: If you don’t put more water in you’ll end up with a pan full of cement. Mum. ISABELLA: And, erm…yes, a little more water; then you cook again, for two or three minutes, until all the water has been absorbed. [Caroline puts the mixture back in the microwave] ISABELLA: Caroline, where did you find this wondrous machine? CAROLINE: Wasn’t easy. Had to go to hell and back. ISABELLA: Language! CAROLINE: Swipe me with a soup ladle if it aint the truth. ISABELLA: The Ladies and Gentlemen don’t want to hear it! Let us now travel back in time to that little group of tents somewhere in the middle east, which housed those biblical brothers. Are you ready, Esau? CAROLINE: Yes, Jacob. ISABELLA: Headdresses… CAROLINE: ‘ave I got to? ISABELLA: You want to get to heaven, don’t you? [They don desert head gear] ISABELLA: In this section, I shall represent the character of Jacob, the younger, the smooth man, dwelling in tents, and Caroline shall represent Esau, the elder, red and hairy, a hunter. [To Caroline] Bow and arrows…you’re a hunter. CAROLINE: I’ve only got this. [A three pronged fork] ISABELLA: Where did you get that from?…don’t answer that. Just get on with it. ESAU: Ah brother; it is hot out there in the fields hunting wild animals. JACOB: Yes, Esau; a waste of time if you ask me. ESAU: Oh yes, Jacob? And what would we do without the venison which my father loves? JACOB: We should grow grain, as our mother showed us/ Esau. She is wise beyond all human understanding. With these lentils, and this wheat we may feed many more people from a smaller patch of land, and provide superior nutriments Esau. Also it gives us a chance to stay in one place and found a city; I do not want to chase wild animals around the fields for the rest of my life. I have plans Esau… ESAU: That’s all very well, Jacob, but I’m starving. JACOB: You should eat one of your deer, Esau. ESAU: You know very well that I am not as nippy on my pins as I once was, Jacob and that I haven’t caught a thing in two weeks. JACOB: Then you will have to ask for some of the grain product I have bubbling in this cauldron, Esau. [She gets the pottage out] I am seasoning it now, with chopped parsley, salt and pepper. ESAU: How much? JACOB: This pottage is priceless.

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ESAU: It is disgusting but I am hungry. JACOB: Give me your birthright, and you may eat your fill. ESAU: You drive a hard bargain, brother. [Jacob slops food into Esau’s bowl] JACOB: You can even come back for seconds. ESAU: [He tastes the pottage] No thanks, Jacob. ISABELLA: And thus civilisation began. CAROLINE: Feeling queasy, Mrs. B? ISABELLA: Take that away, please…The Romans. The Romans advanced the art of cookery considerably. [Caroline goes down into the audience, and offers them a taste of pottage ] CAROLINE: What do you think of that? Revolting isn’t it. ISABELLA: Ever since Romulus and Remus were suckled by a wolf, the strange appetites of the Romans led them to far-flung lands, in search of new and ever more exotic food stuffs…Caroline, what are you doing? CAROLINE: I’m giving them a taste of civilisation. ISABELLA: And I’m getting a headache. You are neglecting your kitchen tasks. There are two buckets of mackerel here, to be gutted. CAROLINE: Oh, lor’. ISABELLA: One of the greatest delicacies to the Roman palate was a sauce named Garum, made from well-rotted fish. CAROLINE: Rotted fish? ISABELLA: If you turn to page 142 of Household Management, [Caroline snatches the book to her bosom] …you will find the recipe for Mackerel Garum, as a footnote to “Pickled Mackerel”…Pass me the book, please. CAROLINE: [She doesn’t want to] You remembered the lentils, all right… ISABELLA: What’s the matter with you? CAROLINE: You didn’t need to look the lentils up. ISABELLA: Caroline. The Book. [Caroline reluctantly hands it over] What’s this? CAROLINE: It’s the only one I could find. ISABELLA: Mrs. Beeton’s Everyday Cookery? I never wrote anything called Everyday Cookery… CAROLINE: I told you I couldn’t find an original. ISABELLA: [Looking through the book] There’s no mention of Mackerel Garum in here. CAROLINE: Well, there’s no call for it nowz… ISABELLA: Garum, garum…. I had all the details; how the Romans used to salt fish, and put it in open barrels, sprinkle wine over the top, and leave it to rot in the sun for a year…I don’t understand. Where are my footnotes? [Caroline shrugs] There are entire chapters missing; nothing about the duties of the mistress; nothing at all about servants… CAROLINE: Hardly anybody has servants now. ISABELLA: Is there no etiquette? Where does the respectable middleclass woman turn to discover what to do with her boa when paying a morning call? And not a single recipe for boot polish! CAROLINE: Times’ve changed. Since 1861.

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ISABELLA: Where’s the section on rearing children? Surely that hasn’t gone out of fashion! I spent most of my childhood bringing up my brothers and sisters; there were twenty-one children in our family you know… CAROLINE: I know… ISABELLA:…and that’s not counting the ones who died as babies… CAROLINE: Bless ‘em… ISABELLA:…and I was the eldest girl. And no-one to advise me but old Granny Jerram. CAROLINE: You had servants though; nursemaids and that, didn’t you? ISABELLA: Imagine twenty-one children, teething one after the other. I put everything I learnt from bitter experience into the book…but it’s not here. I don’t understand. CAROLINE: It’s s not the same book. ISABELLA: But there’s my name, on the cover. CAROLINE: Ah, yes; but you’re an industry now. Your name is no longer your own. ISABELLA: You are speaking in riddles. CAROLINE: I just couldn’t find a first edition. ISABELLA: How many editions are there? CAROLINE: Fifty nine. ISABELLA: Fifty nine? CAROLINE: And they’re all different. ISABELLA: How do you know all this? CAROLINE: I’ve been in Purgatory, ‘aven’t I? They don’t let you forget anything in Purgatory. ISABELLA: Fifty nine editions. CAROLINE: Quite an achievement. ISABELLA: But this is not my work! CAROLINE: What are you going to do? ISABELLA: What can I do? We have an audience, Caroline… CAROLINE: But what about your footnotes? ISABELLA: I’ll just have to work from memory. So…where were we CAROLINE: The Romans. ISABELLA: The Romans. Yes. Do you think you could find me a glass of nectar? CAROLINE: Now she can’t do without her nectar. There might be a drop of cooking sherry back here… ISABELLA: The Romans were cruel, and given to excess in all things. Striped Red Mullet was particularly prized amongst them, because a certain cook discovered that when this unfortunate fish is killed it goes through a remarkable change of hue, as beautiful to behold as it is terrible to contemplate. The Romans devised a method of boiling red mullet alive, at the table, in a glass vessel, so that diners might enjoy its colourful death agonies before eating it. Excuse me. I think I’ll just have to have a little sit down. CAROLINE: Here you are; hair of the dog… She gives her a glass of sherry] ISABELLA: Thank you. CAROLINE: It’s a bit of a shock, coming down to earth, all of a sudden. ISABELLA: It took me four years to write that book.

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CAROLINE: You just take it easy for a moment. The Ladies and Gentlemen won’t mind. Isabella; tell me something…How did you get to heaven? I mean, I don’t say you didn’t deserve to…but it’s just…well take myself. All my life I was in service to other people; and mostly to your family. All my life I’ve been peeling taters, boiling puddings, washing up, cleaning grates, waxing floors, scraping mud off boots, emptying slops, going up the chimney in my shift; all that…I mean I know you had your troubles… ISABELLA: I don’t want to discuss my troubles. CAROLINE: [To audience] When I was set on, she’d only just buried her first baby…little Samuel Orchart… ISABELLA: Caroline… CAROLINE: Died of croup, he did. ISABELLA: This is not for public consumption. CAROLINE: Ever seen a child die of croup? Doesn’t happen so much these days… ISABELLA: Everyone has their cross to bear. CAROLINE:…oh, but it’s heartbreaking; the little thing choking away on its own phlegm… ISABELLA: Such trials are sent by God. CAROLINE: And only three months old… ISABELLA: Caroline! CAROLINE: All right, all right, I’ll button up. I was only saying that it wasn’t all moonlight and roses for you neither. But then I never had any children; never got the chance. Never ‘ad a man I could keep. ISABELLA: Please! CAROLINE: I drudged every mortal hour I ‘ad, but I still ended up roasting, whereas you; you’re famous on earth, on top of which you make it to ‘eaven. I mean; what’s the secret? ISABELLA: There was one thing that got me into heaven, Caroline. CAROLINE: Yes? ISABELLA: And if I had my book, I could show you. CAROLINE: You mean there’s a recipe for eternal life? ISABELLA: Certainly. Have you forgotten “Useful Soup for Benevolent Purposes”? CAROLINE: Forgotten it? We made gallons of it! ISABELLA: Eight or nine gallons a week, in my copper. CAROLINE: By, there were onions in that! I used to peel ‘em by the pan full. ISABELLA: It was the winter of 1858. Sam and I had been in Pinner for two years. CAROLINE: The first sight I had of you; you were still in mourning black for the baby, sitting at a desk, with papers and books piled up all round you… ISABELLA:…articles for Sam’s magazines, research for the book, a thousand recipes to comb through… CAROLINE: They sent me down from Epsom to look after you; I wasn’t long in service, then. They put me on the mail coach; up on the box with my bundle. ISABELLA: It snowed, I remember… CAROLINE: I was an ‘umble kitchen maid…

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ISABELLA: A kitchen maid with chilblains…. [Caroline starts preparing the soup] What are you doing? CAROLINE: Making Useful Soup! ISABELLA: Now? CAROLINE: This is my chance to get into ‘eaven! ISABELLA: Caroline; we have a whole menu to complete. CAROLINE: Isabella. This could be my last chance to get out of Purgatory. ISABELLA: But it takes six and a half hours to cook Useful Soup. CAROLINE: Not in this it doesn’t. [The microwave] Cheap trimmings of beef, that’s the first thing… [As she flings the ingredients into a large soup pot, she sings] Heaven…I’m in heaven… ISABELLA: We used to buy up scraps from the butchers—anything they had; but I always put in an ox cheek. CAROLINE: [Singing, and cuddling the meat] …dancing cheek to cheek. ISABELLA: [Isabella helps to put the ingredients in] Bones, any stock from the larder, 6 leeks; herbs… [A Big Bunch] pieces of celery… CAROLINE: The tough bits that stick in your teeth ‘ll do… ISABELLA: 1/2 lb carrots, 1/2 lb turnips, 1/2 lb coarse brown sugar… CAROLINE: 1/2 pint of beer… [She takes a swig] ISABELLA:…in the soup pot pleas… CAROLINE: 10 gallons of water…and we’d put that on, and let it boil for four hours. ISABELLA: And about two hours before the soup was wanted, we’d put in 4 lbs of rice, or barley, 1/2 lb of salt, 1 ounce of black pepper, and a few raspings, and stir it all up… CAROLINE: And the smell of it simmering would fill the ‘ole ‘ouse, and drift out down the snow covered lanes… ISABELLA: And before you knew it, there’d be a queue of cottagers’ children waiting at the back door; all hungry as anything… CAROLINE:…there with their bowls, and jars, and cracked mugs… ISABELLA:…and every hungry child went away with a dish of warm, comforting soup… CAROLINE:…as cheap as we could make it…Oh yes! I remember. ISABELLA: All those dirty little forlorn faces CAROLINE: If this don’t get me into heaven, I don’t know what will. ISABELLA: And I used to look at them, and think; no child of mine would ever have gone hungry. Yet these scruffy, unwashed specimens of human profligacy live, while my own child is dead. What justice is there in nature? None. I don’t want to remember! CAROLINE: Isabella … ISABELLA: Who gave you permission to call me by my first name? CAROLINE: No-one, but… ISABELLA: I detest false informality, between servant and master. And I don’t like servants who make a noise. CAROLINE: Me? Noise? ISABELLA: Your boots squeak. CAROLINE: Do they? ISABELLA: And your behaviour is most improper.

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CAROLINE: You can sack me if you like. I don’t care. I’m already dead; there’s not much more you can do to me! ISABELLA: Don’t you want a reference, for your next position? CAROLINE: My next position? ISABELLA: I thought you wanted to go to heaven. CAROLINE: You’ll give me a reference for heaven? Will you? I’ll eat my boots if you’ll do that for me. ISABELLA: Only if you assist me in a respectful way with my History of the World. CAROLINE: Oh, I will, I will…I promise I will. Oh mother, mother, I can’t wait to see you again! ISABELLA: We’ve been here for some considerable time, and we haven’t even reached the Middle Ages. CAROLINE: I’m clearing up, I’m clearing up. ISABELLA: What about this soup? CAROLINE: Soon as it’s cooked, I’m going to distribute it to the needy. ISABELLA: As long as you don’t fall behind with your preparations. CAROLINE: Me? Never. I can cook in my sleep. What’s next? ISABELLA: Attila the Hun Hamburgers. CAROLINE: Ah yes; the original convenience food. [She rushes round tidying up and preparing the ingredients] ISABELLA: Are you ready? CAROLINE: Nearly… ISABELLA: The whole apparatus of cooking should move with the regularity and precision of a well-adjusted machine. CAROLINE: I’ll be ready by the time you’ve finished off the Romans. ISABELLA: I hope so. The Roman Empire, however, fell; and many reasons have been advanced as to the cause of its decline. We are now able to reveal that the true cause of the collapse of the Roman Empire was indigestion, caused by eating large meals in a prone position, on sofas and other padded upholstery. It was not until mankind learnt to sit up properly at the table that a truly stable empire was finally established by the British. CAROLINE: Isabella… Mrs. Beeton… ISABELLA: What’s the matter now, Caroline? CAROLINE: I’ve got news for you. ISABELLA: What’s that? CAROLINE: There is no British Empire any more. ISABELLA: Don’t be ridiculous. I haven’t been in heaven for that long … CAROLINE: Have it your own way… ISABELLA: Until mankind discovered roasting, he used a variety of methods to make raw meat more palatable. Steak, Caroline. [Caroline gets the meat out] We are now going to begin a scientific experiment, to see whether we can recreate the exact flavour and texture of the sort of meat that Attila the Hun ate. [Caroline puts on a white coat and plastic gloves] Attila’s hordes would put a slice of meat under their saddles, and ride all day over the steppe. By the evening the meat would be tender enough to eat. CAROLINE: You don’t want me to ride a horse do you?

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ISABELLA: Certainly not. We will have to find another way of creating the effect of a large amount of pressure on the meat. CAROLINE: Books? Weights? ISABELLA: Won’t get the friction. CAROLINE: I could go outside and get a lorry to run over it. ISABELLA: A lorry? CAROLINE: Never mind. ISABELLA: There’s nothing else for it…You’ll have to stamp on it, Caroline. CAROLINE: Stamp on it? ISABELLA: Put it in a cloth, and stamp on it. Off you go. CAROLINE: Like this? [Caroline stamps with gusto] ISABELLA: Can’t you stamp a little more quietly? CAROLINE: No! you told me to stamp, I’m stamping! I’m gonna get to ‘eaven if it kills me! ISABELLA: While Caroline is carrying out our experiment, a word about the discovery of fire as a medium of cooking. The beneficial effect of fire on meat was first discovered by a certain Scythian herdsman whose hut chanced to burn down while his sheep were penned in for the night. He escaped, but the unhappy lambs were burned alive. He returned at dawn to pick over the ashes for anything valuable spared from the flames. By chance he touched one of the charred carcasses of his flock…still warm. He put his finger to his lips… and discovered roast meat. A great advance on raw, which does so stick to the teeth. For some years his tribe regularly burnt down their huts on a Saturday night, in order to provide for the table at Sunday lunchtime; eventually, man realised that it was not necessary to roast house and home in order to provide a single joint of meat. CAROLINE: Have I done enough yet? ISABELLA: Let me see. [She tests the meat with a fork] No. Too tough. Keep stamping…It is interesting to note that great men have not always eschewed the kitchen. There was Alfred the Great, famous for burning his cakes… CAROLINE: Duke of Wellington. ISABELLA: Wellington? CAROLINE: Beef Wellington. ISABELLA: Bechamel sauce was named after the rich French financier, Monsieur Bechamel. CAROLINE: Napoleon Brandy. Garibaldi. ISABELLA: Caroline… CAROLINE: The Earl of Sandwich. ISABELLA: Thankyou Caroline. CAROLINE: Can I stop? I’m worn out. ISABELLA: Remember—those pearly gates await. CAROLINE: What sort of meat is this anyway? Elephant? ISABELLA: Horse meat. CAROLINE: This is horse meat? ISABELLA: That’s right. CAROLINE: Where did you get it from? ISABELLA: I’d rather not say. CAROLINE: It’s a secret is it?

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ISABELLA: It’s not important, Caroline. CAROLINE: Wait a minute; Mr. Henry Dorling! ISABELLA: My stepfather. CAROLINE: Your stepfather! He was in racing, wasn’t he? ISABELLA: Certainly. He was responsible for many improvements in the course at Epsom… CAROLINE: So he had access to the stables, then? ISABELLA: Of course; Caroline, what is the point of your questioning? CAROLINE: [She points to the meat] Did this sorry lump of flesh once run in the Derby? ISABELLA: Certainly not! CAROLINE: It’s one of your father’s racehorses, isn’t it? Fresh from Epsom! ISABELLA: My stepfather didn’t own horses. He was clerk of the racecourse; he looked after the spectators, not the animals. CAROLINE: If you say so, mum. [She stamps] ISABELLA: He had nothing to do with the horses. Nothing, Caroline! He just happened to own the lease on the Grand Stand, that’s all. It was a wonderful place to live—like a fairy tale palace. CAROLINE: Well I’m not touching a morsel. ISABELLA: Stamp. Stamp! [Caroline stamps] I’m very fond of horses. Every morning we children would run out onto the balcony of the Grand Stand to watch those powerful animals pounding across the Downs… CAROLINE: That’s it! That’s enough! No more! ISABELLA: Don’t be so squeamish…Let me try it now…yes that’s perfectly tender. The meat should now be seasoned and garnished. [Caroline won’t do it] Give it to me. [She seasons the meat as she continues her lecture. Meanwhile, Caroline prepares the garnish] Where are we? I’m losing my thread… CAROLINE: In the Dark Ages. ISABELLA: Yes, yes…Roman Empire collapsed, pagan tribes sweeping across Europe, sustained by a steak from the noble quadruped, washed down with a drink of mare’s milk mixed with horse’s blood. Constantly on the move, Attila’s hoardes lived, one might say, both on their horses, and off them. CAROLINE: Bit like your family. ISABELLA: What do you mean? CAROLINE: Lived off the gee-gees, so to speak. ISABELLA: You make it sound so vulgar. CAROLINE: That’s where the money come from. ISABELLA: My stepfather was a highly respected man who played five musical instruments. And I resent being compared to Attila the Hun. CAROLINE: It’s not you who’s like Attila the Hun. It’s that stepfather of yours. ‘e was an ogre, an’ no mistake. ISABELLA: Caroline, that’s unjust. Henry Dorling was always very good to me; he paid for my education, he treated me as if I were his own flesh and blood. He was stern but kind. CAROLINE: Sam Beeton didn’t think so. ISABELLA: They rubbed each other up the wrong way.

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CAROLINE: And your little brother Alfred didn’t think so. The one that was mysteriously sent away… ISABELLA: I don’t want to talk about my brother Alfred. CAROLINE: Ah ha! More carcasses in the pantry. ISABELLA: Be quiet! CAROLINE: She doesn’t want to talk about her brother Alfred…Z ISABELLA:…that’s enough now… CAROLINE:…and I was there when they brought his little sea-chest home…the railway porter carrying it down the road from Epsom Station…all that was left of him…oh, piteous sight it was. ISABELLA: Stop it! Stop it! CAROLINE: Death comes to all of us, mum. Came to me when I was up a step ladder with a wet rag. Kicked the bucket and landed up in the next world covered in soap suds. ISABELLA: Caroline, that has absolutely nothing to do with the History of the World. Why must you keep talking about death? I am trying to enlighten these poor people; I am trying to bring a little order and reason into their lives. But you seem intent on resurrecting painful personal memories. CAROLINE: I’m sorry, mum. [She has set the meat out on a gigantic hamburger] Here, look; your hunburger’s done… ISABELLA: I don’t want it. Human food is as dust and ashes to me. CAROLINE: Please don’t be miserable. ISABELLA: My notes are all over the place, my book’s been changed, and I’m forced to remember all sorts of things I can’t bear to think about…My first baby, and my poor brother Alfred, and Sam, dear Sam—what became of him? What happened when I…when I passed away? CAROLINE: I am a loud mouthed old corpse. No, it’s true. You must forgive me; you see, I haven’t had the advantages of oblivion. Don’t cry. You’ll set me off an’ all. ISABELLA: I’m not crying. [She was] In heaven, I was content. But now it seems to me that I did not leave my worldly affairs in order. CAROLINE: Don’t go to pieces… ISABELLA: There is so much unfinished business, so much sheer untidiness… CAROLINE: I could dust around a bit. ISABELLA: This kitchen should be spotless! Knives covered in rust…I don’t believe anyone has scalded these muslins since I shuffled off this mortal coil. Look at that! [She lifts up a muslin full of very large holes] CAROLINE: Moths? ISABELLA: I left you in charge, Caroline. CAROLINE: Well, yes, but…Z ISABELLA: And you betrayed my trust. CAROLINE: I never! I never did! ISABELLA: Of course I blame myself. CAROLINE: You don’t know the half of it. If it wasn’t for me … ISABELLA: Negligence in a servant simply reflects the bad example of her mistress… CAROLINE: It’s not fair!

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ISABELLA: Though goodness knows where I went wrong. I must have been too indulgent, too kind. CAROLINE: I always behaved myself! ISABELLA: You gave me your solemn promise that you would help me with my demonstration. CAROLINE: I am helping! ISABELLA: Then where is my spice box? CAROLINE: Spice box… [She searches for it] ISABELLA: Come along, come along! CAROLINE: How should I know what’s coming next? ISABELLA: It’s a matter of common sense. After the Dark Ages, comes the Mediaeval Kitchen. CAROLINE: Not a rotten mind-reader… ISABELLA: Don’t mutter! So noisy… CAROLINE: Sorry. Won’t make a sound…wee mousi… ISABELLA: When the feudal nobility of Europe first realised that food could taste of something other than boiled cabbage, the discovery went to their heads. [Caroline brings the spice box and opens it. A cloud of dust flies out. She struggles for sometime to suppress a gigantic sneeze] Saffron, cinnamon, cardamom, pepper…all spices which the Christian Knights brought home from the Crusades. A new fashion in pungent sauces began. Blood was shed, and trading empires rose and fell…all over nutmeg and cloves. [Caroline can hardly contain herself. Isabella looks daggers at her] Fair Venice long held sway over the spice routes, and the great Italian families fought for control over her tenitories; the Medici, the… CAROLINE: [Sneezing violently] Uffizi! ISABELLA: Thank you, yes, the Uffizi…the Ferrara, the Malfi… CAROLINE: [Sneezing again] ‘Uffizi! ISABELLA:…the Uffizi, the Lamborghini, the Bugatti, the Pavarotti, the CorLeone… CAROLINE: [Sneezing again] Ufftzii! Uffizi! ISABELLA: [Her patience has run out] Yes, yes, we’ve had the Uffizi…and not least, the infamous Borgias. Caroline—the cook’s chair. [Caroline fetches a very high chair] My assistant and I will now recreate the cuisine of Lucrecia Borgia. CAROLINE: Lucrecia Borgia? Wasn’t she a mite wicked? ISABELLA: She has been much misunderstood. CAROLINE: But she poisoned people! ISABELLA: Only her enemies. CAROLINE: [Shocked] Mrs. B! ISABELLA: There’s a lot to be said for revenge. CAROLINE: [To audience] They’ll never let her back in, up there. ISABELLA: Miss Borgia exercised power through her pots and pans, in the only domain entirely under her sway—the kitchen. Pass me the long spoon, Caroline. [Caroline does so] CAROLINE: What’s that for?

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ISABELLA: Tasting the various comestibles; see? [She demonstrates how she can taste the food without leaving her seat] The recipe we shall now demonstrate is Lucrecia Borgia’s Devilled Lampreys. CAROLINE: I don’t know about Lampreys, mum. ISABELLA: In Britain, the Lamprey has at various periods, stood high in public favour. It was the cause of the death of Henry the first of England, who was carried off by a surfeit of ‘em. CAROLINE: All I’ve got’s eels. ISABELLA: It’s not the same. CAROLINE: It’s eels or nothing. ISABELLA: I shall represent Lucrecia Borgia; Caroline will play the part of Lucrecia’s trusty kitchen boy. CAROLINE: Am I a man again? ISABELLA: Of course. Lucrecia wouldn’t employ a woman. CAROLINE: I don’t want to be a man. ISABELLA: Caroline… CAROLINE: Why can’t I be a woman? ISABELLA: You can be a woman in disguise. CAROLINE: Can I? ISABELLA: Yes. Are you satisfied? CAROLINE: Yes. ISABELLA: Thank you. CAROLINE: Mrs. B? ISABELLA: What is it now? CAROLINE: How will they [The audience] know that I’m a woman being a woman pretending to be a man, and not just a woman pretending to be a man? ISABELLA: Because I’ve just told them! Now can we proceed? CAROLINE: Ready. ISABELLA: Thank you. [As Lucrecia] Come on, come on…Get those lampreys on to boil… [Caroline puts eels in a stewpan with parsley and just sufficient water to cover them, and simmers till tender] … I want one of those swans stuffed with partridges stuffed with larks stuffed with greenfinches…and then we’ll have sweetbreads with truffles…three whole roast oxen…I want the highest quality mind; the guest of honour is my latest fiancé, the Prince of Naples. I don’t want to marry him, but I’ve invited him to dinner anyway; that’s the generous sort of person I am. Boy! You, Boy! [She cannot get Caroline’s attention, so she prods her with the spoon] CAROLINE: Hey! ISABELLA: I was calling you. CAROLINE: You called me boy. ISABELLA: Yes? CAROLINE: But I’m not a boy, I’m a woman in disguise. ISABELLA: You’re supposed to be pretending. If you don’t turn round when Lucrecia calls ‘Boy’, she’ll suspect you, won’t she? Then she’ll put you in the stock. CAROLINE: Don’t you mean the stocks? ISABELLA: I mean the stock. CAROLINE: I’ll turn round then.

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LUCRECIA: We’ll have spit roasted boar with egerdouce sauce, followed by almond milk with vinegar. COOK: As well as the swan and the oxen? LUCRECIA: Oh, that’s just the first course… [We hear a rat’s squeak] What’s that squeaking? COOK: Squeaking? LUCRECIA: I can hear a noise…like a rodent scrabbling…it’s coming from inside the warming cupboard. COOK: That’s Hieronymus. My only friend. LUCRECIA: Hieronymus? COOK: My pet rat. LUCRECIA: Just keep it out of my pans, do you hear? COOK: Si signora. LUCRECIA: Now. What sort of a sauce do you think we should add to these Lampreys? COOK: Something simple, signora. LUCRECIA: Something simple? COOK: Something simple and piquant… LUCRECIA: What do you think I am, a nun? On a fast? Do you know who is going to be at this banquet? COOK: Apart from your fiancé, the Prince of Naples? LUCRECIA: My father the Pope is going to be there. COOK: Your father the Pope? LUCRECIA: My father the Pope. Don’t look at me in that tone of voice. COOK: I’m not looking… LUCRECIA: [Thumping the cook with her long spoon] Well don’t! Nobody asks questions about my daddy. CAROLINE: [To audience] If I wasn’t on my way to ‘eaven, I’d never put up with it… LUCRECIA: A good sauce should always be surprising; a nice surprise for the Prince of Naples. He’ll taste…sweetness itself to the tongue. He swallows… gulps…then it gets him in the back of the throat…his eyes pop out, his face turns blue, his tongue black…then over he goes…and no more wedding. Yes, surprise is the essence. We will make Cameline sauce; but we will add a new ingredient. COOK: Cameline sauce? LUCRECIA: [Shouting orders] Pestle and mortar, and start pounding! Pound, pound, pound! Ginger! COOK: Ginger! LUCRECIA: Cinnamon! COOK: Cinnamon! LUCRECIA: Cloves! COOK: Cloves! LUCRECIA: Put some sweat into it! COOK: Sweat? Very well. [He obediently wipes his brow into the sauce] LUCRECIA: Bread soaked in vinegar…over there, it’s over there, ready. Squeeze out the vinegar, and strain that lot together. [The cook nibbles the bread] What are you doing?

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COOK: Please maestro, I’m starving. LUCRECIA: That’s white bread! COOK: I’m ever so hungry. And they are getting forty three other courses. LUCRECIA: Not the point. This is my banquet. COOK: Couldn’t I just have a bite to eat? LUCRECIA: Not until you’ve finished your work. COOK: Even Hieronymus gets more to eat than me… LUCRECIA: Quiet! Now sauce the lampreys. [The cook does this] Time for the seasoning. [She comes down from the stool] Let me see…what shall we have. Arsenic, toad’s bile, opium…mushrooms. [She hands a jar of mushrooms to the cook] Oh, innocent little mushrooms, grown white and soft as kid gloves in the dark… COOK: [He sniffs the mushrooms] They’re off. [He sets off towards a store cupboard] LUCRECIA: Where d’you think you’re going? COOK: Going to get some fresh ones. LUCRECIA: No, no, no. Dolt! [She clouts the cook] Three plates, yes? COOK: One for you, one for the Pope… LUCRECIA: And this one for my fiance. [She puts the mushrooms on the fiances plate] Now we must test the seasoning. Lucrecia’s…a little more salt. The Pope’s…no, that’s just right. Here. This one’s for you to test. COOK: Do I have to? LUCRECIA: I thought you were hungry. COOK: I’ve just lost my appetite. LUCRECIA: There’s promotion in it. COOK: What if I don’t test it? [Lucrecia draws her finger across her throat] COOK: Oh, look, up there; isn’t that the Sistine Chapel? LUCRECIA: Where? [As Lucrecia is distracted, cook swaps the dishes round, and as Lucrecia returns is sampling the dish with enthusiasm] COOK: It’s fine. LUCRECIA: Are you sure? COOK: Maybe a little more salt… [He adds salt] LUCRECIA: My god. This boy has the stomach of a viper. COOK: Mmmm! LUCRECIA: [Pointing to the plates] Lucrecia? COOK: Yes. [The cook shuffles the plates energetically and covers them] LUCRECIA: The Pope? COOK: Yes. LUCRECIA: The Fiance? COOK: Yes. LUCRECIA: What are you doing? COOK: Keeping the food warm. LUCRECIA: Now they’re all mixed up again! COOK: Can I have my dinner now? LUCRECIA: Not until I know which dish is for the Prince of Naples.Taste. [Lucrecia forces the cook to eat from one of the dishes. Cook waits for a terrible result]

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COOK: [To audience] How’s my tongue? [Lucrecia gives the cook a spoonful from the second dish. He makes strangled noises] COOK: I’m dying! I’m dying! Mother! [The rat gives a dying squeak from under the cover of the last plate. Lucrecia lifts the cover and picks up the dead rat by the tail] COOK: Hieronymus! LUCRECIA: I think this is yours. COOK: Poor Hieronymus; you saved my life! Squeaked your last and left me… sacrificed yourself… [He mourns] LUCRECIA: So this is the lethal dish. [Setting out the plates] Pope, Lucrecia… and bye bye Prince of Naples. [To cook] You can eat now. Your dinner’s over there. COOK: Argh! LUCRECIA: What’s the matter now? COOK: Lentil pottage! LUCRECIA: Very wholesome. COOK: Cold lentil pottage. With black bread. My food’s just the same as it was in the Dark Ages! LUCRECIA: Stop moaning. [She swipes the servant once more with the spoon] COOK: Ow! ISABELLA: And there we have it; a nice dish of Devilled Lampreys in Cameline sauce. You may like to try this recipe out at home; it would perhaps make an interesting, and unusual addition to any Menu for a modern Ball Supper, omitting the poisonous mushrooms of course. CAROLINE: You said you’d never do that. ISABELLA: Do what, Caroline? CAROLINE: You said you’d never hit a servant. ISABELLA: It wasn’t me who hit you, Caroline. I was merely acting as a channel for the legacy of the past. CAROLINE: ‘ist’ry makes my ‘ead ache. ISABELLA: Lucrecia Borgia was reputed to have eliminated a number of unwelcome suitors, as well as several political enemies through her culinary machinations. We shall never know how of the the course of history has been changed through the judicious use of poisoned dates, or the odd pinch of furious arsenic in the downtrodden housewife’s stew. CAROLINE: Excuse me ma’am. Are you going to do my reference now? Because the Useful Soup is ready. ISABELLA: To whom are you going to give the soup? CAROLINE: To them. [The audience] And while I’m doing it, p’raps you could just nip up to heaven; put in a word for me… ISABELLA: Another glass of nectar, perhaps. CAROLINE: We certainly aint got any down here. ISABELLA: In the second part of our history of the world, after a brief stroll through the 17th century farmyard, we shall demonstrate the best way to gut a turkey, and then proceed to the greatest discovery of the Victorian Middle Classes—how to use up your left-overs. Waste is ever the enemy of Empire. Caroline; you will make sure everything is prepared. CAROLINE: Yes mum. Don’t forget…

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ISABELLA: Forget? CAROLINE: My reference… ISABELLA: Yes, yes. [Isabella goes off stage. Caroline begins the distribution of useful soup to the audience] CAROLINE: Useful Soup! Come an’ get your Useful Soup! ACT 2

[There is a large joint of mutton on a chopping board on stage. Caroline arrives and sets up a pan as a mirror] CAROLINE: Neck scrubbed, ears excavated, hair oiled…now for my best cap… and ready for heaven. Isabella not back yet? Now, you mustn’t mind Isabella’s manner. She might seem a bit stern to you, a bit prim—but fair! Always fair! That stiff necked bit; it’s how she was brought up; she can’t help it. I feel so good! Really good. I’m boiling over with goodness. Isabella—I forgive you. I forgive you for thumping me with mediaeval kitchen implements. I forgive you for using my skills in the kitchen, and never giving me as much as a sniff at your royalties…I forgive you for making me eat up all your failed experiments…your soggy puddings, your salmonella stew…I even forgive you for stealing my copy of Miss Eliza Acton’s cookery book, and passing off a goodly number of her recipes as your own…Oh, yes, that’s true, that is. That’s another lot of bones what rattle in her larder, on dark nights. Fair enough, Isabella tried all Eliza’s recipes out. And then she changed the ingredients; a pinch of salt here, a different herb there…just enough to avoid being sued. But Miss Acton’s hand is unmistakable. I met Eliza Acton down below…she was fuming. She reckoned if she hadn’t died just before Isabella’s book’d come out, the shock’d’ve killed her. My mother taught me to read by that book, and then I took it with me, when I’ad to go into service; I never got it back off of Isabella…But am I going to mention it? No! Eliza Acton… [She spits] Gripe all you like, Eliza, it’s none of my business, I’m on my way up! This is what it feels like to be good. This is what it feels like to be chosen. It was all worth it…! Do I look presentable? What’s presentable to the Almighty? Look at my hands! Lor’, what if the Archangel Gabriel offers me his hand, as I go through the gates? They’re such a give away…too rough! If they’re too rough to dust ornaments, they’re going to be too rough to touch angels. I’ll bow. I’ll bow instead. Straight away, as soon as I arrive. Keep my hands behind my back…proper humility…I’ll just think of it as an interview for a new position; and if they offer me an’ ‘eavenly throne, I’ll sit on ‘em. I’ll never criticise my betters again. Never again. I’ll never reproach my mistress, or the powers above, [Looking up to heaven] begging your pardon, sir, that gave me the short straw. I’ll never criticise Isabella’s cooking. After all; she means well. Under that proud exterior, she’s gentle as the lamb that sat down with the tiger. No, she’d never hurt a fly. [Enter Isabella, crumbling. She has been tarnished by contact with the world. She is carrying a butcher’s saw and small chopper] ISABELLA: Roast saddle of mutton. [She smashes the chopper into the joint] Shakespeare frequently compares men to sheep.

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CAROLINE: Mrs. Beeton… ISABELLA: When Gloucester rudely drives the lieutenant from the side of Henry VI, the poor king thus touchingly speaks of his helplessness:-“So flies the reckless shepherd from the wolf: so first… CAROLINE: Mrs. B! ISABELLA: Please don’t disrupt the pentameter! “So first the harmless sheep doth yield his fleece, And next his throat, unto the butcher’s knife.” [She chops at the joint again] CAROLINE: Isabella, please, I’m on tenterhooks! What did they say? ISABELLA: What did who say? CAROLINE: Up there! About me going to heaven! ISABELLA: Oh, yes; I’m sorry Caroline, but your application was refused. The keeping of flocks seems to have been the first employment of mankind… CAROLINE: Refused? ISABELLA: Turned down flat. Of all wild or domesticated animals, the sheep is the most useful to man… CAROLINE: But you said you’d give me a reference. ISABELLA: I did try. CAROLINE: Don’t tell me they’re full up. ISABELLA: Oh no. Far from it. I was quite lonely up there. CAROLINE: But I gave out all that soup. You said that was how you got into heaven. ISABELLA: It was. They’ve changed the rules. CAROLINE: They can’t do that! ISABELLA: I’m afraid, Caroline, that much against my personal taste and inclination, times have changed, and charity is no longer a qualification for entry into heaven. Quite the reverse. CAROLINE: I don’t understand. ISABELLA: Did your friends pay for their soup? CAROLINE: Well, I had to make a small charge. I knew it! It should have been completely free! I only asked them to give whatever they could afford…. I was out of pocket on the butcher’s scraps; they’ve gone up such a lot since you…since the mid-nineteenth century, and my housekeeping money just wouldn’t stretch… ISABELLA: And how much did you make? CAROLINE: Only enough to cover my costs; honestly! ISABELLA: Not enough. CAROLINE: What? ISABELLA: They don’t let you into heaven these days unless you make a profit. CAROLINE: A profit? ISABELLA: That’s right. CAROLINE: I’m supposed to make a profit on Useful Soup for Benevolent Purposes? ISABELLA: Apparently, they’ve got to pay. Otherwise they’ll become dependent on you. On handouts. They’ll have no incentive to work. This is the wisdom of the modern age, Caroline. CAROLINE: Well, there’s progress for you.

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ISABELLA: The notion of agricultural economy entered into history with the sheep, on its four woolly legs, for each and every part of this mammal is useful to man. The meat is light and nutritious; the udder provides milk, and a sound though inferior cheese. From the fat we obtain light; from the fleece, broadcloth, kerseymere… CAROLINE: It’s s not fair. ISABELLA:…blankets, gloves and hose. CAROLINE: It’s s just not fair. ISABELLA: The bones, when burnt, make ivory black, used to polish boots; when powdered, a manure for wheat. CAROLINE: Even in heaven, there’s no justice. ISABELLA: The skin provides us with carriage mats, horse cloths, or a comfortable lining for hats. CAROLINE: Well I’m not taking it lying down. ISABELLA: Finally, when oppressed by care and sorrow, the harmonious strains of musical instruments which soothe us, are elicited from strings prepared almost exclusively from the intestines of the sheep. CAROLINE: Isabella! I’ve just been sentenced to everlasting misery, and all you can do is talk about sheep’s guts. ISABELLA: Caroline, the History of the World may not interest you… CAROLINE: [with scorn] History of the World… ISABELLA:…but there are people to whom knowledge is as a light shining in a dark prison; whom since childhood have been shut into the airless cupboard of ignorance, and left alone to suffer all the terrors their superstition can invent. Such terrors are legion; I know! To these benighted souls, order is a veritable salvation. Knowledge must be readily available for all to enjoy, Caroline. That is the principle by which Sam and I live and work. CAROLINE: You’re dead! ISABELLA: Don’t! CAROLINE: You’re dead, and so is Sam. Dead, dead, dead! You’ve been dead for over a hundred years! You died of puerperal fever; infected by your own doctor, who didn’t believe in those new-fangled ideas about germs. ISABELLA: Be quiet! CAROLINE: I won’t! History of the World…what do you know about the world? Not only have you been wallowing in a drunken stupor for the last century; you can’t even remember what happened in your own life. ISABELLA: You are impertinent! CAROLINE: Damn right! Damn…ooh, that sounds good; isn’t that a lovely word…Damnnnnatin… ISABELLA: Caroline! CAROLINE: What’s the point in behaving? If there’s no chance of an ‘eavenly reward; well, I’ve nothing to lose. ISABELLA: Do I take it that you do not intend to continue with this demonstration? CAROLINE: No I don’t [pause] I wanted to be a cook. ISABELLA: You were a cook. CAROLINE: Not a proper one. In an ‘otel, with a big ‘at. An’ check trousers. ISABELLA: That’s a chef, not a cook.

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CAROLINE: I had to spend all my time doing other things; scivvying… ISABELLA: You should have persevered. CAROLINE: You never give me a chance then, and you won’t give me a chance now. ISABELLA: I fail to see how I am responsible. You are a servant. CAROLINE: I was more than a servant to you. I was…I was one of the family. ISABELLA: What nonsense. CAROLINE: I was closer than the family. I done more for you than any of them ever did. ISABELLA: You were paid. CAROLINE: Well if you think you can do without me… ISABELLA: Now, be reasonable…. CAROLINE:…that’s fine. [She sits down. She is on strike] ISABELLA: [To audience: carrying on regardless] Although we have heard, at various intervals, growlings expressed at the inevitable “Saddle of Mutton” at the dinner parties of our middle classes, yet we doubt whether any other joint is better liked, when it has been well hung and artistically cooked. The carving is not difficult. CAROLINE: Here we go… ISABELLA: It is usually cut in the direction of an imaginary line from here to here, quite down to the bone…ow! [She’s cut herself] CAROLINE: She’s always doing that. Can’t leave her alone with a knife. ISABELLA: Blood! It’s s my blood! CAROLINE: All right, all right, calm down, I’ll bandage it. ISABELLA: What shall I do? I can’t make pastry like this! Caroline, you must help me. CAROLINE: Oh, I don’t know about that. ISABELLA: Please! The audience…my reputation…I implore you! CAROLINE: All right… ISABELLA: Thank you. CAROLINE: On one condition. ISABELLA: Condition? You are my employee! CAROLINE: And you are nothing but a rather lively stiff. ISABELLA: What is this…condition? CAROLINE: I say what recipes we do. ISABELLA: Is that all? CAROLINE: Yes. ISABELLA: And what recipes do you want to do? Madame Maître d’Hôte? Madame Chef de Cuisine? CAROLINE: The first one is Admiral Nelson’s Plum Duff. ISABELLA: Well, I see no difficulty there. CAROLINE: Good! ISABELLA: In fact, that is the very recipe I myself should have chosen to illustrate the role in history of the English pudding. Were it not for our famous plum puddings, Caroline, I doubt if England’s navy would ever have come to rule the waves. CAROLINE: What did they do, use them for cannon balls?

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ISABELLA: The mariners’ reward for success in battle was an extra ration of their favourite suet pudding, boiled in water in the ships’ galley, and generously sprinkled with rum. Without his Plum Duff, would Jack Tar have had the boldness to defeat the Dutch, and bring the spice producers of the East under the sway of our empire? CAROLINE: Your empire. Leave me out of it. ISABELLA: If your rebellion amounts to no more than Admiral Nelson’s Plum Duff… CAROLINE: Admiral Nelson’s Plum Duff as cooked by Alfred Dorling. ISABELLA: Oh, no… CAROLINE: Your brother. ISABELLA: Caroline… CAROLINE: The one that was sent away to sea from Epsom, though nobody knew why; and within the year he was drowned, and all that ever came back was his little sea chest… ISABELLA: I’d really rather not… CAROLINE: Well I’m not helping you then. ISABELLA: But I can’t manage on my own. Everything I touch seems to go wrong. CAROLINE: I noticed. ISABELLA: Oh, very well. Let’s get it over with. CAROLINE: You play Alfred. I’m the ship’s cook. Pass me the knife…look sharp, you’re under my orders now. And ‘ere we are in the galley of a certain English merchant vessel. The year is 1858. An eventful year for the Beeton family. [as the Cook] So, young lubber; play us an ‘ornpipe, while I’m chopping up this 1/2 lb of suet… ALFRED: Can’t play the hornpipe, Cook. COOK: Can’t play the ‘ornpipe? Sailed all the way to Australia and still ‘e aint learnt the ‘ornpipe? Learning the ‘ornpipe’s the first duty of all new galley boys. And the second duty is cooking plum duff. You ready for that? ALFRED: Still a bit sea sick, Cook. COOK: Not really cut out for the mariner’s life, are we? It’s about time you worked for your rations, lad. ‘ere, pick over these currants. ALFRED: Currants? What about the plums, Cook? COOK: ‘e wants fresh plums in his pudding. Where d’you think we are lad; in a blinking kitchen garden? We’re riding at anchor in Sydney Harbour, in case you ‘adn’t noticed. You seen any fruit trees in the ‘old? ALFRED: Only barrels. COOK: Only barrels, that’s right. And what’s in those barrels? ALFRED: Saltfish, ship’s biscuit and currants. COOK: Zante currants. Zante, Zante, beautiful island of dreams…I love the med. If you’re lucky lad, you’ll get a berth to Zante, one of these days. [Alfred is sneakily eating the currants while cook talks] You can watch ‘em packing the currants on the dock. They store ‘em all caked together in these great crates; and when it’s time to load, they prize them up with iron crowbars, and tread them into casks. With their bare feet. ALFRED: With their feet?

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[Alfred spits out a handful of currants] COOK: An’ that’s why we always wash ‘em before we eat ‘em, boy. [Alfred washes the currants] COOK: How old are you, lad? I mean, really? An’ don’t try telling me the porkies you told the mate; if you’re sixteen, I’m a bowsprit. ALFRED: I’m twelve years old. But it’s a secret. COOK: So you did tell a lie. ALFRED: I was only doing as my father bade me sir. COOK: Were you now? Not to worry; Horatio Nelson was twelve when he first went to sea, and look what became of him. Time to mix your dumplings. 1 lb of flour…mix your suet with your flour and add your currants…that’s it. Now add enough water to make it into a nice limp paste go on, I’m watching. So you ran away from home, did you, boy? ALFRED: No sir, oh no, I never did. COOK: Well, Alfred, if you didn’t run away to sea, what are you doing here? ALFRED: My father sent me away; he told me never to darken his doorstep again. COOK: Well I never. Don’t blub into the bowl, you’ll turn it salty. ALFRED: Not blubbing, sir. COOK: Now you divide that mixture into dumplings; one for each man aboard so there’s no scrapping over ‘em. [Alfred shapes the dumplings] You must’ve been the very devil of a child to make your father so angry, Alfred. ALFRED: I did the devil’s work, he said. But I meant no harm by it; truly. It was a joke. COOK: Your father sent you to sea, because you played a joke on him? ALFRED: I meant to speak for my mother, I suppose. COOK: Drop those in the water, now, and give ‘em a good sir… ALFRED: It was all the babies, you see. I am my mother’s eighth child; then after me came seven more. COOK: Don’t let those dumplings stick now. ALFRED: Every year mother would swell up, till she became all bloated, and couldn’t manage the stairs; and then the monthly nurse would arrive. I came to dread the sound of mother crying out in pain, as another creature came screaming into the world, and all the other babies set off crying with it, ‘til my ears rang. I thought there would soon be enough Dorlings, sir, to fill up all the empty wastes of Australia. COOK: And you blamed your father. ALFRED: I am no innocent sir, for all my twelve years. We did live on a racecourse. COOK: So what was the joke? ALFRED: I got an empty envelope, and I put something in it, and sent it to him. I did not sign my name, but he found out that it was from me. I don’t know how. He knows everything. He sees everything. COOK: Is that the envelope in question? ALFRED: It is. COOK: Let’s see what’s in it then. ISABELLA: No, Caroline. CAROLINE: What’s up now?

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ISABELLA: It isn’t fair to my step-father. CAROLINE: What about Alfred? ISABELLA: Poor Alfred drowned in a freak storm. CAROLINE: In Sydney Harbour. ISABELLA: He was rowing ashore with another sailor; it was an accident—noone was to blame. Certainly not Henry Dorling. COOK: Come along, young Alfred; don’t be bashful. What was in that envelope you sent to your father? ALFRED: [He opens the envelope and takes out a condom] My father was so angry… COOK: He wasn’t amused by your little hint… ALFRED: I thought he would kill me. But instead he drove me to the docks, and put me aboard the first ship that’d take me. We were two days out before I discovered we were bound for Australia. COOK: And you’ve never heard from your father since? ALFRED: My sisters write to me sir. My sisters write. I think the plum duff’s ready. CAROLINE: So that’s what happened to Alfred. I never knew…Well your stepfather was an ogre; I was right. I’ve got a nose for people. ISABELLA: You have no right to judge him. You have nothing but servant’s tittle tattle to go on. CAROLINE: I’m not judging him. You’re the one playing Alfred. ISABELLA: But I benefited from his kindness. As did all the family. He was a great family man. And this is not history. CAROLINE: It is. ISABELLA: It is not. There are no dates in it, no famous men…I apologise for this tendentious diversion, Ladies and Gentlemen. Rest assured such material will not be included in my forthcoming book. Of course what we should have shown you was Admiral Nelson, rewarding his men with plum duff, after their victorious Battle of the Nile, where French cuisine was dealt a body blow by good plain English cooking. CAROLINE: What about the servants then, in this history of yours? Where are they? Where are the ordinary people? Where are the peasants who grew the spices? Where are the slaves who cut the sugar? This isn’t a history of the world, it’s a history of the well-fed. ISABELLA: I have always been a champion of fair treatment and consideration towards servants. I insist upon that in my book… [She thumbs through the book] Where is it? And I mention your job, if I remember, with particular sympathy. CAROLINE: Yes, but if s not in there now, is it? You survived, but I didn’t ISABELLA: I said the maid of all work or general servant was the only one of her class deserving of commiseration. I said her work was never done. CAROLINE: I can tell you now, you won’t find a word about servants. ISABELLA: I simply don’t understand what’s happened to this book. Of course, they’d have to bring it up to date, that’s progress. Improved ranges, new kitchen equipment, perhaps even this marvellous machine of yours, Caroline; but to leave out all my historical and chemical notes…What was Sam thinking of?

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CAROLINE: I should be in the history books. It shouldn’t be any old History of the World, it oughter be the History of Mrs. Beeton and Caroline. [Isabella and Caroline speak simultaneously] ISABELLA: Surely Sam must have supervised the later editions personally, as he did the first?… CAROLINE:…She’s driving me mad. She knows very well why Sam Beeton didn’t look after her book; he went bankrupt, that’s why. Not his fault. The bank went bust… ISABELLA:…Goodness me, we planned the book together! He would never have allowed any changes that I wouldn’t have approved myself… CAROLINE:…He went bankrupt, and he was bought out by another publisher. She just doesn’t want to remember. ISABELLA: Caroline, you are mumbling again. Please prepare the pastry board; we are going on. CAROLINE: Yes, mum. Anything you say, mum! [During the following speech Caroline models a guillotine in pastry while whistling the Mars eillaise] ISABELLA: Although from puddings to pastry is but a step, it requires a higher degree of art to make the one than to make the other. Indeed, pastry is one of the most important branches of the culinary science. It unceasingly occupies itself with ministering pleasure to the sight as well as to the taste; with erecting graceful monuments, miniature fortresses, and all kinds of architectural imitations, composed of the sweetest and most agreeable products of all climates and countries. An example of the summit of the art of the pastry cook was invented in the present century… CAROLINE: She means last century… ISABELLA:…by my own Grandmother, Granny Jerram. The dish was first made for the race-goers who enjoyed a special luncheon on Derby Day. She named the recipe Epsom Grand Stand Pigeon Pie. This pie is justly famous, for its rich texture and delicious gamey taste. Caroline, if you would clean the pigeons… CAROLINE: I haven’t got any pigeons… ISABELLA: The blue-house pigeon is the variety principally reared for the table in this country; they are tastiest when young and still fed by their parents. CAROLINE: I haven’t got any pigeons! ISABELLA: Fortunately I have a pie dish here, which has been prepared in advance by our angel helpers. [The pie dish is not yet covered with pastry] In here we have a lining of rump steak, two or three pigeons stuffed with butter, three slices of ham, the yolks of four eggs, with stock…and then we cover the pie with puff pastry, like this. Now take three pigeon’s feet, and clean them. Make a hole in the crust, thus, and put the feet in the hole. This shows what kind of pie it is. That goes in a well heated oven for about an hour and a quarter…and when it is done, it looks like this. [Isabella displays a magnificent pie to the audience. Then she notices Caroline’s completed guillotine] What have you done? CAROLINE: I’ve made a guillotine. We’re going to do the French Revolution. ISABELLA: So you are still dictating the menu?

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CAROLINE: Certainly. I play La Tricoteuse, and you play my aristocratic employer, Madame de Maintenant, who is now living in reduced circumstances. ISABELLA: And what, pray, did the French revolution contribute towards the development of international cuisine? CAROLINE: It meant more people got to eat cake. [Caroline sets up a large cauldron, and sits in front of it, knitting] Entree! MADAME: Ah, Cook. LA TRICOTEUSE: Call me citizen, citizen. We are all equal now. MADAME: Erm…good morning, citizen. LA TRICOTEUSE: Citizen. MADAME: What are you cooking there in your large bubbling cauldron that smells so delicious? LA TRICOTEUSE: Lunch. MADAME: Excellent. Shall you bring it upstairs, when we are ready? LA TRICOTEUSE: I shall not citizen. Anyone as wants food ‘as to get it themselves. MADAME: Perhaps if I were to bring a bowl downstairs…You see, I haven’t eaten for some time. LA TRICOTEUSE: Oh, you’ve still got a bit of fat on you. MADAME: And I have in fact already sold all the silver. LA TRICOTEUSE: So you can’t even pay for your dinner? MADAME: Perhaps if I offered to share this bottle of wine with you, I might have something from the pot? LA TRICOTEUSE: I don’t want any old plonk. MADAME: This is vintage claret! LA TRICOTEUSE: Fair enough. MADAME: Is it nearly ready? LA TRICOTEUSE: Oh, no citizen. ‘s got to boil a while yet. MADAME: I notice you’re adding herbs…bay, is it? LA TRICOTEUSE: Keep your nose out. MADAME: These are strange times we’re living in, are they not? Everything seems topsy turvy. You haven’t seen his lordship have you? LA TRICOTEUSE: I haven’t seen the citizen’s citizen husband no. MADAME: He went out early this morning to try and sell some of his shares, but he has not returned, and I am worried he is caught up in the mob. LA TRICOTEUSE: He won’t come to any harm, citizen, as long as he is not profiting at another citizen’s expense. MADAME: Oh, no…I’m sure he wouldn’t do that. That does smell good. What did you say it was? LA TRICOTEUSE: Boiled ‘ead. MADAME: Boiled head. Well, I’m very hungry. LA TRICOTEUSE: Here’s to the Revolution! MADAME: The Revolution! [They drink] LA TRICOTEUSE: Did you ever hear the story, citizen, of the Scottish servants who were so angry with their master that they cut off his head and served it up to his wife, as if it were boar’s head? With an apple in between the teeth. MADAME: Terrible!

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LA TRICOTEUSE: He was terrible unjust, citizen. MADAME: I’m sure he deserved it. LA TRICOTEUSE: Have you never wondered why when they display a traitor’s head after it has been guillotined, it doesn’t turn black and rot away? MADAME: No I can’t say that I’ve dwelt upon the thought. LA TRICOTEUSE: It’ s because they pickle them. MADAME: Pickle them? LA TRICOTEUSE: They get citizens who know how to cook, to take the heads home, and boil ‘em up in their pots, with salt, and bay leaves. Then they take ‘em back and stick ‘em up on poles in the market square. Last for ages like that. As an example. MADAME: What are you putting in there? LA TRICOTEUSE: More salt. MADAME: Citizen…would you be offended, if after all, I refused lunch? LA TRICOTEUSE: Yes I would citizen. MADAME: It’s just, I feel a little faint. LA TRICOTEUSE: You’ve got to keep your strength up citizen. MADAME: My god, is that an eye? Staring up at me? LA TRICOTEUSE: I believe it is, citizen. MADAME: Can’t eat that…! [She leaves] LA TRICOTEUSE: You won’t mind if I finish off the wine, then? What a shame. A nice lunch of collared pig’s face is just what a hungry citizen needs. [ She shows the audience the pig’s head] ISABELLA: And what is that foolish story meant to show? CAROLINE: I got all those stories from you! ISABELLA: I didn’t write a word about the French revolution… CAROLINE: It’s your story about the servants and the boar’s head… ISABELLA: How can you do this to me? CAROLINE: Do what to you? ISABELLA: All those years I trusted you…all those years I housed and fed you… Where is your gratitude? Where is your loyalty? CAROLINE: That’s it! I’ve had enough, You sit there! [She pushes Isabella into the armchair] ISABELLA: What? CAROLINE: Sit there and shut up. I’m tired of all these accusations…you go on about gratitude. Who nursed you when you were dying? ISABELLA: Don’t! CAROLINE: You’re going to listen. You’re going to. History of the World… Right. I’ll tell you what the next scene is. Isabella Beeton’s deathbed scene, that’s what. [She covers Isabella with a blanket] ISABELLA: It’s supposed to be a recipe… CAROLINE: Oh, it’s a recipe all right Beef tea, and more beef tea, and beef tea again… [She offers a cup of beef tea to the invalid] …drink it. ISABELLA: [Pushing the cup away] No, no, I can’t…I’ve died once. You can’t make me do it again. CAROLINE: Drink it! Doctor’s orders! [To audience, while spooning beef tea into Isabella] That Doctor! He delivers her baby, an’ he doesn’t even bother to wash his hands. He’d not get away with that in my kitchen, I can tell you.

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She’s all right at first, and the baby’s fine. Then the fever sets in; three days later she’s too poorly to feed the little mite. After a week, she can’t even feed herself. [Isabella chokes on the liquid. Caroline wipes her mouth] ISABELLA: I feel…I’m hot. CAROLINE: You’re shivering. ISABELLA: No, no more blankets. CAROLINE: Your hand’s as cold as ice… ISABELLA: Where’s Sam? CAROLINE: I’m not letting him in. Not after last time. ISABELLA: Tell him I’ll help with the accounts. Tell him not to fret about the money, we’ll manage somehow… CAROLINE: Forget about it. ISABELLA: We’re bankrupt; there’s no money left… CAROLINE: He shouldn’t be bothering you with that stuff. Not at a time like this. ISABELLA: Caroline…Caroline… CAROLINE: You must try and drink something… ISABELLA: Father doesn’t like Sam, Caroline. Father doesn’t like me working. Father thinks Sam forces me to work. He doesn’t understand. I love it. I want to write. CAROLINE: If you can’t drink anything you should stop wittering and go to sleep. ISABELLA: Is my work there? CAROLINE: Yes, it’s here by the bed… ISABELLA: My article… CAROLINE: You’ve finished it, you’ve met all your deadlines… ISABELLA: I’ve got to go to town with Sam. We’ve got to catch the train to the office. They’re all looking at me. Why are those gentlemen looking at me? CAROLINE: I suppose they think you’re a bit odd. There aren’t many ladies commuting to the office in 1865. Now settle down. ISABELLA: [In pain] My baby! CAROLINE: Where’s it hurting? ISABELLA: Where’s my baby? CAROLINE: Show me…[Isabella’s breasts are hurting] Lord, she’s so much milk… ISABELLA:…dead…is he dead? CAROLINE: I’m sending for that doctor again. ISABELLA:…he died. He must have died… CAROLINE: [To audience] She slipped away from me. She spoke again a few times, but none of it made sense. ISABELLA: Three mad men, up to their necks in a pit full of water… CAROLINE: On February 5th 1865, at four in the morning, Isabella Mary Beeton died. [She puts on a black arm band] ISABELLA: What are you doing now? CAROLINE: Well, naturally we went into mourning for you. I missed you. I’d always looked up to you. You did things…well I never met a woman like you. ISABELLA: Don’t be so maudlin!

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CAROLINE: And Sam…he was wild with grief. He went off somewhere… nobody in the house knew where he was…Didn’t come home for weeks. ISABELLA: I’m supposed to be in heaven, I shouldn’t have to suffer this! CAROLINE: So you don’t want to know what happened to Sam? ISABELLA: No! CAROLINE: To your little boy, Orchart? To the baby you’d just given birth to? ISABELLA: It’s unbearable! I can’t help them now, I couldn’t help them then, so what’s the point of going over it all again? CAROLINE: So, ignorance is bliss. ISABELLA: I have put the world out of my mind. For ever! CAROLINE: There’s a few things I’d like to forget, I can tell you. ISABELLA: I feel faint. CAROLINE: Oh, loosen your stays. ISABELLA: Give me water. CAROLINE: Get it yourself. ISABELLA: I must have sustenance, I must eat, I’m hungry. CAROLINE: You don’t know what hunger is. ISABELLA: I don’t understand you. In life you were always such a good natured, contented girl. CAROLINE: Contented? You thought I was contented? Oh, I certainly gave you value for money. ISABELLA: Have you no pity? I just died! CAROLINE: You’re hungry are you? ISABELLA: I told you, I am almost fainting! CAROLINE: All right. Here. [She ties a pristine serviette round Isabella’s neck. She prepares a tray with silver cutlery, and wipes a large china plate with her apron. She puts a flower in a vase on the tray, and puts the tray on Isabella’s lap. She then gets out a raw turnip, covered in earth, and places it carefully on the plate] Eat that. ISABELLA: What is it? CAROLINE: Don’t you recognise it? You wrote about these. ‘ere, give it a wipe. ISABELLA: It’s s a turnip. CAROLINE: That’s it. ISABELLA: Out of the ground. CAROLINE: Dug it up with my own bare hands. ISABELLA: There’s very little nutritional value in a turnip. CAROLINE: Don’t I know it. ISABELLA: I can’t eat that. CAROLINE: Then you’re not really hungry, are you? ISABELLA: Take it away. [Caroline does so] What happened to my baby Caroline? Did he die because I couldn’t feed him? CAROLINE: You’ve only to ask…he was fine. We found a wet nurse for him. That child was always strong; he lived to the age of 82. ISABELLA: 82? CAROLINE: And little Orchart, was 84 when he died. ISABELLA: I lost two other babies, you know. CAROLINE: I was there, Bella.

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ISABELLA: But you said Sam went away; what happened to Orchart and the baby then? Sam must have taken them to my family at Epsom. That’s it. I like to think of them running round the Grand Stand. CAROLINE: Isabella, Sam would never have gone to Epsom; he wasn’t welcome there. ISABELLA: Of course he would be welcome. CAROLINE: They blamed him for your death. They said he’d worked you to death. They said he hadn’t arranged proper care for you, in your confinement. ISABELLA: But that’s not true! CAROLINE: We had no help from them. No help from anyone. There were no wages, of course, and a list of tradesmen’s bills as long as your arm. It was only through the goodwill of the baker that I ate at all. ISABELLA: Why did you stay? Sam had no money. CAROLINE: True enough. Even the store-cupboard was bare; nothing left but one cup of rice. I thought, I’ll get to the end of this, then I’ll go. There was a little milk… ISABELLA: Rice Pudding? CAROLINE: Simmer the rice gently in the saucepan with the milk, for 3/4 to one hour…When it’s done, sweeten t…Add a little grated nutmeg, and serve. But we haven’t got time for that now, so I’ll open a tin. ISABELLA: Where did you get that? CAROLINE: The supermarket…You wouldn’t understand. ISABELLA: [Tasting the pudding] It’s not bad…Rice Pudding is very good for children. CAROLINE: But the nursery was empty. There were only two people in the house; me, and the bailiff. ISABELLA: The bailiff? CAROLINE: Sitting there, in the kitchen; warming his bum. Waiting for Sam. I told him he’d have a long wait. He says that’s what I get paid for missis, and parks himself right in front of the fire. ‘e ‘ad a nose like a potato, you could tell ‘e was a drinker. I says, do you like Rice Pudding? Thought I’d soften ‘im up a bit; get on ‘is good side, if he had one. He says, I hate Rice Pudding. I hated it since I was a kid. I says, oh well, all the more for me. Then comes this knock knock knock on the door. Well for a minute I froze. I thought, it’s the master come back, and the bailiff starts up, ready to pounce; and then I run like fury down the hall to get to the door before warty nose, and I just get my hand on the door knob ahead of him. I say, excuse me, Mr. Bailiff, it might be your duty to stick out for your money, but it’s my duty to open the doors while we’ve still got doors to open. And he lets go. And I open the door expecting to see the Master; somehow I was going to warn him about warty nose behind me…but it wasn’t the master. ISABELLA: It was the children. CAROLINE: How d’you know? ISABELLA: I can see them. I can see them in the snow. CAROLINE: There’s little Orchart on the step. And at his feet, in a basket…the baby! ISABELLA: And nobody with them?

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CAROLINE: I look up; and there’s a coachman walking away down the path, back to his horses. I shout after him; what are you doing? ISABELLA: What does he say? CAROLINE: He says; I was told to leave ‘em and there’d be somebody here to take em. I said, But there isn’t! But Orchart’s clinging onto me, for dear life. I put my arms round him. The man says; he looks happy enough with you. And off he went! ISABELLA: Why had they sent them back? Who sent them back? CAROLINE: Who? I don’t know. Why? It must have been some sort of mix up. ISABELLA: My father didn’t want the responsibility. He thought it was Sam’s business. CAROLINE: Maybe Sam confused things. In the state he was in … ISABELLA: My family deserted him. CAROLINE: Rice Pudding? [They eat in silence] ISABELLA: A great many things have happened that I know nothing of. CAROLINE: Well, if s all that nectar. ISABELLA: It’s true that I’ve never known hunger. CAROLINE: You were lucky. ISABELLA: But I’m wide awake now, Caroline. You have opened my eyes. I believe I owe you an apology. CAROLINE: Don’t worry about that. ISABELLA: I owe you a great deal. History will have to be corrected. CAROLINE: Well, things have changed a bit. ISABELLA: Yes, I’ve got some catching up to do. CAROLINE: You what? ISABELLA: You can help me, Caroline. CAROLINE: You’re not going on with it? ISABELLA: The new book? Of course! You can fill me in on the things I’ve missed. Starting with my own lifetime, and going on to these new innovations. Encasing food in metal… a fascinating phenomenon… CAROLINE: I don’t believe it; she’s seriously planning to go on with it! ISABELLA: Are there libraries in Purgatory? CAROLINE: No, but there’s quite a few experts. ISABELLA: Then let us get to work! We have several years research ahead of us. CAROLINE: Us? Wait a bit. Us? ISABELLA: Surely you want to help? The project will be most interesting. [To audience] Ladies and Gentlemen; publication of my forthcoming book, “Mrs. Beeton’s History of the World”, will be slightly delayed. Thank you for your interest, and in the meantime, I wish you all bon appetit! CAROLINE: Hang on a minute. What am I going to get out of this? ISABELLA: The work will be its own reward. CAROLINE: I’ve been working all my life! I want a rest! Just because you’ve been asleep for a century… ISABELLA: Caroline, you’d only get bored. Come along. [She goes off in the direction of purgatory] What we really need is a new sort of Useful Soup that doesn’t have to cook for six and a half hours.

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CAROLINE: [To audience] You’ll have to excuse me—I can’t trust her on her own. I wonder if she’s got the recipe for nectar. If we could tin that… we could have heaven on earth. Isabella! Watch out for those bins! [There is an almighty crash. Caroline follows Isabella into the depths]

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Figure 4 Mrs. Beeton’s History of the World. Sally Armstrong (left) and Alison Mackinnon (right). Photograph by Focal Point; Courtesy of Perspectives Theatre Company, Mansfield Community Arts Centre

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Figure 5 Mrs. Beeton’s History of the World. Sally Armstrong (left) and Alison Mackinnon (right). Photograph by Focal Point; Courtesy of Perspectives Theatre Company, Mansfield Community Arts Centre

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Figure 6 Mrs. Beeton’s History of the World. Sally Armstrong as Caroline. Photograph by Focal Point; Courtesy of Perspetives Theatre Company, Mansfield Community Arts Centre

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Figure 7 Mrs. Beeton’s History of the World. Alison Mackinnon as Isabella Beeton. Photograph by Focal Point; Courtesy of Perspectives Theatre Company, Mansfield Community Arts Centre

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Notes on Contributors

Erika Block is co-artistic director of the Walk & Squawk Performance Project, a Michigan-based touring company which produces interdisciplinary work. Most recently, she directed and co-wrote They Do It With Mirrors, a one-woman performance about identity, illusion and rabbit stew which is currently touring in the US and UK. Other work includes scripting Wickedness, a dance-theatre adaptation of Ron Hansen’s story which was performed in the Nebraska State Capitol Building and at DanceSpace Project in New York; an interdisciplinary adaptation of Willa Cather’s The Song of the Lark and And To Eat No Fish, a reconstruction of five Shakespeare texts. Her next project, inspired by Marc Chagall’s designs for the Moscow Yiddish Theatre, will be staged under a circus tent with clowns, acrobats and Klezmer. Foursight Theatre: Over the last nine years Foursight Theatre have created a reputation for producing high quality experimental theatre. Based on the theme of women’s biography, their work merges text, music and movement in a way which engages the senses, the intellect and the emotions in equal measure. Through the eyes of women such as Elizabeth I, Pope Joan, Mae West and Boadicea, Foursight have taken another look at history, redressed the balance a little and discovered some intriguing facts, good, bad and ugly, about the lives of these fascinating women. Bloody Mary and the Virgin Queen was developed by Kate Hale and Jill Dowse, both founder members of the company, from a stimulus poem by Cath Kilcoyne who also acted as script consultant and the play was directed by Deborah Barnard. Julie Wilkinson was born and brought up in Manchester, where she now lives with her partner and their two daughters. Her work has been performed in community venues, schools and theatres all over the country. Plays include On the Plastic; The Complete Servant; Pinchdice & Co (published by Sheffield Academic Press, 1991 in a volume edited by Gabriele Griffin and Elaine Aston); Don’t Call Me Now, and for young people The Sack of Lies; Thicker

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Than Water; and The Incredible Expanding Baby. Julie also teaches creative writing in Bolton and Manchester.

CONTEMPORARY THEATRE REVIEW AN INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL

Notes for contributors

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Papers should be typed or word processed with double spacing on one side of good quality ISO A4 (212×297mm) paper with a 3cm left-hand margin. Papers are accepted only in English. Abstracts and Keywords. Each paper requires an abstract of 100–150 words summarizing the significant coverage and findings, presented on a separate sheet of paper. Abstracts should be followed by up to six key words or phrases which, between them, should indicate the subject matter of the paper. These will be used for indexing and data retrieval purposes.

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Figures. All figures (photographs, schema, charts, diagrams and graphs) should be numbered with consecutive arabic numerals, have descriptive captions and be mentioned in the text. Figures should be kept separate from the text but an approximate position for each should be indicated in the margin of the typescript. It is the author’s responsibility to obtain permission for any reproduction from other sources. Preparation: Line drawings must be of a high enough standard for direct reproduction; photocopies are not acceptable. They should be prepared in black (india) ink on white art paper, card or tracing paper, with all the lettering and symbols included. Computer–generated graphics of a similar high quality are also acceptable, as are good sharp photoprints (“glossie”s”0145). Computer print-outs must be completely legible. Photographs intended for halftone reproduction must be good glossy original prints of maximum contrast. Redrawing or retouching of unusable figures will be charged to authors. Size: Figures should be planned so that they reduce to 12cm column width. The preferred width of line drawings is 24cm, with capital lettering 4mm high, for reduction by one-half. Photographs for halftone reproduction should be approximately twice the desired finished size. Captions: A list of figure captions, with the relevant figure numbers, should be typed on a separate sheet of paper and included with the typescript. Musical examples: Musical examples should be designated as “Figure 1” etc, and the re-commendations above for preparation and sizing should be followed. Examples must be well prepared and of a high standard for reproduction, as they will not be redrawn or retouched by the printer. In the case of large scores, musical examples will have to be reduced in size and so some clarity will be lost. This should be borne in mind especially with orchestral scores. Notes are indicated by superior arabic numerals without parentheses. The text of the notes should be collected at the end of the paper. References are indicated in the text by the name and date system either “Recent work (Smith & Jones, 1987, Robinson, 1985,1987)…”or “Recently Smith & Jones (1987)…” If a publication has more than three authors, list all names on the first occurrence; on subsequent occurrences use the first author’s name plus “et al.” Use an ampersand rather than “and” between the last two authors. If there is more than one publication

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by the same author(s) in the same year, distinguish by adding a, b, c etc. to both the text citation and the list of references (e.g. “Smith, 1986a”) References should be collected and typed in alphabetical order after the Notes and Acknowledgements sections (if these exist). Examples: Benedetti, J. (1988) Stanislavski, London: Methuen Granville-Barker, H. (1934) Shakespeare’s dramatic art. In A Companion to Shakespeare Studies, edited by H.Granville-Barker and G.B.Harrison, p. 84. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press Johnston, D. (1970) Policy in theatre. Hibernia, 16, 16 Proofs. Authors will receive page proofs (including figures) by air mail for correction and these must be returned as instructed within 48 hours of receipt. Please ensure that a full postal address is given on the first page of the typescript so that proofs are not delayed in the post. Authors’ alterations, other than those of a typographical nature, in excess of 10% of the original composition cost, will be charged to authors. Page Charges. There are no page charges to individuals or institutions.

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INSTRUCTIONS FOR AUTHORS ARTICLE SUBMISSION ON DISK

The Publisher welcomes submissions on disk. The instructions that follow are intended for use by authors whose articles have been accepted for publication and are in final form. Your adherence to these guidelines will facilitate the processing of your disk by the typesetter. These instructions do not replace the journal Notes for Contributors; all information in Notes for Contributors remains in effect. When typing your article, do not include design or formatting information. Type all text flush left, unjustified and without hyphenation. Do not use indents, tabs or multispacing. If an indent is required, please note it by a line space; also mark the position of the indent on the hard copy manuscript. Indicate the beginning of a new paragraph by typing a line space. Leave one space at the end of a sentence, after a comma or other punctuation mark, and before an opening parenthesis. Be sure not to confuse lower case letter “1” with numeral “1”, or capital letter “O” with numeral “0”. Distinguish opening quotes from close quotes. Do not use automatic page numbering or running heads. Tables and displayed equations may have to be rekeyed by the typesetter from your hard copy manuscript. Refer to the journal Notes for

another program, please provide details of the program used and the procedures you followed. If you have used macros that you have created, please include them as well. You may supply illustrations that are available in an electronic format on a separate disk. Please clearly indicate on the disk the file format and/or program used to produce them, and supply a high-quality hard copy of each illustration as well. Submit your disk when you submit your final hard copy manuscript. The disk file and hard copy must match exactly. If you are submitting more than one disk, please number each disk. Please mark each disk with the journal title, author name, abbreviated article title and file names. Be sure to retain a back-up copy of each disk submitted. Pack your disk carefully to avoid damage in shipping, and submit it with your hard

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Contributors for style for Greek characters, variables, vectors, etc. Articles prepared on most word processors are acceptable. If you have imported equations and or scientific symbols into your article from

copy manuscript and complete Disk Specifications form (see reverse) to the person designated in the journal Notes for Contributors.

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