by Tom Stoppard
Ed Berman, an expatriate American, founded Inter-Action, a charitable trust aiming to stimulate community involvement in the arts, in 1968. He now works as the Artistic Director of Inter-Action Productions (including the Ambiance Lunch-Hour Theatre Club, the Almost Free Theatre, the Fun Art Bus and the Dogg’s Troupe). Not coincidentally like the American seeking British naturalization in New-Found-Land and like other members of Inter-Action’s co-operative, he divides his time between the production company and work in schools, youth clubs, mental hospitals, community centres, playgrounds, remand homes and the streets. Most of his time is now spent as Programme Director of Inter-Action Trust, creating new community arts and action projects such as City Farms 1 in Kentish Town, and youth employment programmes. He still manages to direct some ten plays a year, mainly for children’s and community theatre, and to perform in two hundred-odd shows. Ed Berman became a British subject on 5th April 1976, the date of the first public showing of Dirty Linen and New-Found-Land.
TOM STOPPARD
1976
Characters
MADDIE
COCKLEBURY-SMYTHE, M.P.
MCTEAZLE, M.P.
CHAMBERLAIN, M.P.
WITHENSHAW, M.P. (the CHAIRMAN)
MRS. EBURY, M.P.
FRENCH, M.P.
HOME SECRETARY
The first performances of Dirty Linen and New-Found-Land were an Ambiance Lunch-Hour Theatre Club presentation at Inter-Action’s Almost Free Theatre, Rupert Street, London WI, on 6th April 1976. The cast was as follows:
Dirty Linen
MADDIE
Luan Peters
COCKLEBURY-SMYTHE, M.P.
Edward de Souza
MCTEAZLE, M.P.
Benjamin Whitrow
CHAMBERLAIN, M.P.
Malcolm Ingram
WITHENSHAW., M.P. (the CHAIRMAN)
Peter Bowles
MRS. EBURY, M.P.
Christine Ozanne
FRENCH, M.P.
Richard O’Callaghan
HOME SECRETARY
Derek Ensor
New-Found-Land
ARTHUR
Stephen Moore
BERNARD
Richard Goolden
Directed by Ed Berman
Designed by Gabriella Falk
Production Management and lighting by Suresa Galbraith
Administration by Martin Turner
Stage Management by Robin Hornibrook and Brenda Lipson
Wardrobe by Carol Betera
The plays transferred to the Arts Theatre on 16th June 1976 with the following cast changes:
MCTEAZLE, M.P.
Frederick Treves
FRENCH, M.P.
Jonathan Elsom
An overspill meeting room for House of Commons business in the tower of Big Ben. A committee table with chairs for everybody; separate table with good slammable drawers for MADDIE; large blackboard on easel; shelves of files and books, with portable steps; and two doors.
Ultimately the characters will be seated in the following order, left to right from the audience’s point of view: FRENCH, CHAMBERLAIN, COCKLEBURY-SMYTHE, WITHENSHAW (centre), MRS. EBURY, MCTEAZLE, and MADDIE at separate desk.
The room is empty, MADDIE puts her head round the door cautiously, enters in street coat and carrying a small classy looking bag from a classy lingerie shop, and a handbag. The room is unfamiliar to her. She hangs up her coat on a coat/hat/umbrella stand which is just inside the door, walks to the desk, and after a moment’s hesitation she takes a pair of silk, lace-trimmed French knickers out of the bag and puts them on.
MADDIE finishes putting on her knickers and drops her skirt. The knickers ought to be remembered for their colour—perhaps white silk with red lace trimmings.
MADDIE is now wearing a low cut, sleeveless blouse, buttoned insecurely down the front; a wrap-round skirt, quite short; underneath, suspenders not tights, and a waist-slip which is also pretty, silk and lace, with a slit.
From her bag she takes a notebook and a pencil and puts them on the desk. There are glasses and a carafe on the large table. She picks up the lingerie bag and looks around for a waste-paper basket. Finding none, she leaves by the other door, bag in hand. The first door is now opened by MCTEAZLE who holds it open for COCKLEBURY-SMYTHE.
COCRLEBURY-SMYTHE (entering): Toujours la politesse.
MCTEAZLE (closing the door): Noblesse oblige. (They each carry several newspapers, a whole crop of the day’s papers and the Sundays, which they dump on the big table. They doff their bowler hats and attempt to put them on the same peg.) Mea culpa. (Courteously.)
COCKLEBURY-SMYTHE: Après vous.
(MCTEAZLE signals that COCKLEBURY-SMYTHE should hang up his hat first. They put their brollies in the umbrella stand. COCKLEBURY-SMYTHE sits down.) J’y suis, j’y reste. (He opens the Daily Mail.) Quel dommage.
MCTEAZLE (sitting down): Le mot juste.
COCKLEBURY-SMYTHE: C’est la vie. Che sera sera. (He throws the paper aside.) (MCTEAZLE picks up the Daily Mirror and turns to page 3 which features a glamour picture, not particularly revealing!)
MCTEAZLE: Ooh la-la! (Then he recovers his dignity. Deprecatingly.) Vox populi … plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose. (He throws the paper aside and picks up the Guardian.)
COCKLEBURY-SMYTHE: De gustibus non est disputandum. (Pause.)
MCTEAZLE (hesitantly): A propos … entre nous … vis-à-vis le Coq d’Or.
COCKLEBURY-SMYTHE: Ah, le Coq d’Or …
MCTEAZLE: Faux pas, hein?
COCKLEBURY-SMYTHE: Bloody awkward though. Pardon my French. (MADDIE re-enters with a waste-paper basket, MCTEAZLE does not see her as he is engrossed in the Guardian, COCKLEBURY-SMYTHE sees her but registers nothing.) Honi soit qui mal y pense. (On which, without pausing, he produces from an inside pocket a pair of French knickers and hands them to MADDIE as she crosses to her desk collecting them urbanely.) Ergo nil desperandum. (COCKLEBURY-SMYTHE picks up his copy of the Daily Mirror and turns to the pin-up on page 3. He makes a wordless noise appropriate to male approval of female pulchritude. This coincides with MADDIE bending over, showing cleavage, to put the knickers into a drawer of her. desk. This moment of the man reacting to the pin-up photograph, and the coincidental image of MADDIE in a pin-up pose is something which is to be repeated several times, so for brevity’s sake it will be hereafter symbolized by the expletive ‘Strewth!’ It must be marked distinctly; a momentary freeze on stage, and probably a flash of light like a camera flash, MADDIE should look straight out at the audience for that moment.) Strewth! (After the freeze MCTEAZLE sees MADDIE.)
MCTEAZLE: Good afternoon. (He stands up.) I am Mr. McTeazle and you are …?
MADDIE: Miss Gotobed.
MCTEAZLE: Miss Gotobed. And this is Mr. Cocklebury-Smythe.
COCKLEBURY-SMYTHE: How do you do?
MADDIE: Hello.
COCKLEBURY-SMYTHE: So you are going to be our clerk.
MADDIE: Yes.
COCKLEBURY-SMYTHE: May I be the first to welcome you to Room 3b. You will find the working conditions primitive, the hours antisocial, the amenities non-existent and the catering beneath contempt. On top of that the people are for the most part very very very boring, with interests either so generalized as to mimic wholesale ignorance or so particular as to be lunatic obsessions. Their level of conversation would pass without comment in the lavatory of a mixed comprehensive and the lavatories, by the way, are few and far between.
MADDIE: It has always been my ambition to work in the House of Commons. (Sound of Big Ben chiming the half hour.)
COCKLEBURY-SMYTHE: Mine has always been the House of Lords. But then perhaps I have not been willing to make the same sacrifices you have.
MCTEAZLE: Have you had to make sacrifices Miss Gotobed? Not too arduous I hope?
MADDIE: It was hard work but I enjoyed the challenge.
COCKLEBURY-SMYTHE (quickly): Yes … yes, the P.M. offered me a life peerage, for services which he said he would let me know m
ore about in due course if I were interested. ‘I hear you’re a keen gardener, Cockie,’ he said, ‘we can call it services to conservation.’ ‘Not me, Rollo,’ I said, ‘all I use it for is a little topiary in the summer.’ ‘Services to sport,’ he said, ‘ignorant fool.’ ‘No, no, Rollo,’ I said, ‘I really have no interests of any kind.’ ‘That will be services to the arts,’ he said. ‘Stop making such a fuss—do you want a life peerage or don’t you?’ ‘No I don’t,’ I said to him. ‘What with only a couple of bachelor cousins in line ahead, one of whom is an amateur parachutist and the other a seamstress in the Merchant Navy, I prefer to hang on for a chance of the real thing.’ He said to me: ‘My dear Cockie, life peers are the real tiling nowadays.’ ‘Oh no they’re not, Rollo,’ I said. ‘That’s just the kind of confusion you set up in people’s minds by calling them Lord This and Lord That, pour encourager hoi polloi. They think they’re lords—they skip off home and feed the budgerigar saying to themselves, my golly gorblimey, I’m a lord! They’d be just as happy if you suddenly told them they were all sheiks. They’d put the Desert Song on the gramophone and clap their hands when they wanted their cocoa. Now you’d know they’re not really sheiks and I’d know they’re not really sheiks, and God help them if they ever showed up east of Suez in their appalling pullovers with Sheik Shuttleworth stencilled on their airline bags—no, my dear Rollo,’ I said, ‘I’ll be a real peer or not at all.’ ‘Now look here, Cockie,’ he said to me, ‘if they weren’t real peers they wouldn’t be in the House of Lords would they?—that’s logic.’ ‘If that’s logic,’ I said, ‘you can turn a regimental goat into a Lieutenant Colonel by electing it to the United Services Club.’ ‘That’s an interesting point, Cockie,’ he said. ‘It could explain a lot of my problems.’ Do you suppose we’ve got the wrong day? (He takes out a pocket diary and consults it.) Oh yes—Select Committee, House of Commons—take L.P…. take L.P….? What L.P.?
MADDIE: It is the right day. I didn’t get a wink of sleep all last night.
COCKLBBURY-SMYTHE (mutters): L.P….
MADDIE: It’s not every girl who gets advancement from the Home Office typing pool.
MCTEAZLE: I expect it’s not every girl who proves herself as you have done, Miss Gotobed. Do you use Gregg’s or do you favour the Pitman method?
MADDIE: I’m on the pill. (Small pause, MCTEAZLE is expressionless.)
MCTEAZLE: Perhaps this might be an opportunity for me to explain to you the nature of the duties expected of a secretary/clerk attached to a Select Committee, duties which for one reason or another you may have got confused in your mind.
COCKLEBURY-SMYTHE (suddenly): Lace panties. Sorry.
MCTEAZLE: Now, this is a meeting of a Select Committee of Members of Parliament to report on moral standards in the House—not in the House literally, or rather, in the House literally but also, and for the most part, outside the House too.
MADDIE: In the car park?
MCTEAZLE: Not literally in the car park—or rather in the car park too, yes, but also—don’t try to take in more than you can. Now, this is a continuation of a Select Committee set up during the last session of Parliament, though at that time the membership of the Committee was different. A Select Committee must be reconvened with each new session of Parliament, and it is this reconstituted Committee which is about to begin sitting to report on rumours of sexual promiscuity by certain unspecified Members which, if substantiated, might tend to bring into disrepute the House of Commons and possibly the Lords and one or two government departments including Social Security, Environment, Defence, Health, Agriculture and even, I’m sorry to say, the Milk Marketing Board.
MADDIE: Why’s that?
MCTEAZLE: Because I have the honour to be on that Board and I think I can say without fear of contradiction that the M.M.B. has an unrivalled record of freedom from suggestions of being a sexual free-for-all, and furthermore we are now getting yoghurt and single and double cream to every corner of——
MADDIE: Actually what I meant was, why would it bring them into disrepute?
MCTEAZLE: Because the country by and large looks to its elected representatives to set a moral standard …
MADDIE: No it doesn’t——
MCTEAZLE (smoothly)’. No it doesn’t—you’re quite right. Then it’s because the authority of the—er—authorities is undermined by losing the respect of——
MADDIE: I don’t think people care.
MCTEAZLE: No, people don’t care—of course they don’t. In which case I think it is fair to say that this Committee owes its existence to the determination of the Prime Minister to keep his House in order, whatever the cost in public ridicule, whatever the consequence to people in high places, and to the fact that title newspapers got wind of what was going on. It is unfortunate that the well known restraint and sense of higher purpose which characterizes the British press—a restraint which would have treated with utter contempt stories of garter-snapping by a few M.P.s—gave way completely at the rumour that they were all snapping the same garter. You may know, if you are a student of the press, or if you have at any time in the last few weeks passed within six feet of a newspaper, that there is no phrase as certain to make a British sub-editor lose his sense of proportion as the phrase ‘Mystery Woman’. This Committee was set up at the time when the good name of no fewer than 21 Members of Parliament was said to have been compromised. Since then rumour has fed on rumour and we face the possibility that a sexual swathe has passed through Westminster claiming the reputations of, to put no finer point upon it, 119 Members. Someone is going through the ranks like a lawn-mower in knickers. Well, I need hardly say—(he is taking papers out of his brief case)—that we as a Committee are working in a sensitive area, one which demands great tact on all our parts—(MCTEAZLE produces from his brief case a pair of knickers and hands them to MADDIE)—your own not excluded. (MADDIE collects the knickers urbanely and puts them in her knicker drawer; she has changed her position however and has to practically sprawl across the desk to do this, thus showing leg as well as cleavage. Simultaneously COCKLEBURY-SMYTHE has discovered a pin-up picture in the Daily Mail, or any other appropriate paper except the Sun.)
COCKLEBURY-SMYTHE: Strewth! (After the freeze there seems to be nothing to occupy the two men. MADDIE collects herself and sits demurely on her desk. The two men get up and move around.) Well, this is getting us nowhere. Where is everybody? (In the following section, the italicized words are said privately to MADDIE with no change of tone or volume while the other is at the extreme of his perambulation.) Are we going to have a quorum? You may not be familiar with the term quorum incidentally if anyone asks you where you had dinner last night it’s a Latin word meaning ‘of which or of whom’….
MCTEAZLE: Quite simply, it’s the smallest number of members of a committee necessary to constitute the said committee, for example, say you were nowhere near the Coq d’Or on Saturday night then the smallest number of members without which a quorum can’t be said to be a quorum——
COCKLEBURY-SMYTHE: A quorum is nothing more or less than the largest minimum specified number of members being that proportion of the whole committee, let us say three or four get Coq d’Or Sunday night completely invalid without them. Got it?
MCTEAZLE: It’s not as complicated as it sounds.
MADDIE: Is it a specified number of members of a committee whose presence—God bless them—is necessary for the valid transaction of business by that committee?
MCTEAZLE: Yes … yes, that is pretty well what a quorum is. I can see, Miss Gotobed, that there is more to you than your name suggests—by which I mean (trying to accelerate out of trouble) that you don’t spend all your time flat on your back —or your front—your side, flat on your side, sleeping, fast asleep, when you could be doing your homework instead of living up to your name, which you don’t, that’s my point. (COCKLEBURY-SMYTHE has been standing like stone, his glazed eyes absently fixed on MADDIE’s cleavage.)
COCKLEBURY-SMYTHE: McTeazle, why don�
�t you go and see if you can raise those great tits—boobs—those boobies, absolute tits, don’t you agree, Malcolm and Douglas—though good men as well, of course, useful chaps, very decent, first rate, two of the best, Malcolm and Douglas, why don’t you have a quick poke, peek, in the Members’ Bra—or the cafeteria, they’re probably guzzling coffee and Swedish panties, (MADDIE has crossed her legs) Danish, I’ll tell you what, why don’t you go and see if you can raise Malcolm and Douglas—(to MADDIE)—sometimes there are more of these committees trying to meet than there are rooms for them to meet in—that’s why we’re up here in the tower instead of one of those nice rooms on the Committee Floor with the green leather chairs, though I expect you’ve spent a lot of time on the Floor, Miss Gotobed, by which I mean, of course, the Committee Bed, Floor—(getting hysterical)—McTeazle the Division Bell will go before we even get started and then we’ll all have to go off and vote on some beastly amendment to make anyone who buys his own council house a life bishop with the right to wear a nightie on his head, mitre on his head. My God, I could do with a drink——