OLDER MAN: Me? I am yeah I am.
YOUNG MAN: You sure?
OLDER MAN: Yeah. Are you cold?
YOUNG MAN: No.
Beat. The OLDER MAN stares at the YOUNG MAN sitting semi-naked before him.
OLDER MAN: When I think about all that, all he did, I’m not angry you know.
YOUNG MAN: No?
OLDER MAN: I don’t mind anyone fucken anyone you know. It’s nature isn’t it?
YOUNG MAN: Yeah.
OLDER MAN: Exactly. Men do that. We’re animals. So I’m not angry at that.
YOUNG MAN: No?
OLDER MAN: Not at all. I mean it didn’t make me love the cunt for sure. No.
YOUNG MAN: Right.
OLDER MAN: Exactly. But do you know what it made me?
YOUNG MAN: What?
OLDER MAN: It made me afraid.
YOUNG MAN: Oh?
OLDER MAN: Yeah.
Beat.
OLDER MAN: It made me afraid that no one knew him only in bits. That he lived a life and no one knew him fully. Not his children, not his wife, not even himself. That all he was at the end was an accumulation of fucken lies. That he never lived, he was of no consequence, nothing. He failed and he fucked us all up and then he died.
Beat.
OLDER MAN: Isn’t that hard?
YOUNG MAN: It is.
OLDER MAN: It’s awful. I hate it and it makes me afraid.
Beat.
OLDER MAN: I have a wife like.
YOUNG MAN: I know.
OLDER MAN: I know.
Beat.
OLDER MAN: And I don’t want to be like him, like that.
YOUNG MAN: I know.
OLDER MAN: I don’t want to go and be gone and have people putting me together different after. I want to be straight out.
YOUNG MAN: Yeah?
OLDER MAN: Yeah. For certain.
Beat. The OLDER MAN looks at the YOUNG MAN.
OLDER MAN: That’s why I done it.
YOUNG MAN: What?
OLDER MAN: I told him.
YOUNG MAN: Who?
OLDER MAN: My son.
YOUNG MAN: What did you tell him?
OLDER MAN: This.
Beat.
OLDER MAN: I’d had a hard weekend of it this weekend drinking. With me brother-in-law Noel. He’s just fell out of his marriage and I was keeping him company and he’s a fucking dog like.
YOUNG MAN: Yeah?
OLDER MAN: Anything now. So I was kind of disgusted with myself. When I woke up. Sick.
YOUNG MAN: Right.
OLDER MAN: He says things, Noel does, and he sickens me but I never contradict anyone and I should.
YOUNG MAN: OK.
OLDER MAN: He hates people I think.
YOUNG MAN: Right.
OLDER MAN: He’s a fucking asshole. And I just sit there then. Listening.
Beat.
OLDER MAN: Dying I was. When I woke. And I’d been thinking that dream again.
YOUNG MAN: Oh.
OLDER MAN: Yeah.
Beat.
OLDER MAN: Sick and my son there and my wife was working.
Beat.
YOUNG MAN: So?
OLDER MAN: So we start up the usual shit me and him, my son. And we’re chipping away at each other. And we don’t know each other. And I want us to stop. I want us to just talk. To try even. And I don’t know why but I felt like I was about to climb out of myself you know.
Beat.
OLDER MAN: So I told him then.
YOUNG MAN: What?
OLDER MAN: Everything. I told him everything.
YOUNG MAN: What?
OLDER MAN: How I met you. What we did.
YOUNG MAN: Who?
OLDER MAN: You. That. I told him all that. And I was calm now. I wanted him to know me.
YOUNG MAN: I don’t understand.
OLDER MAN: I know but I just wanted to be honest. From now on. I just want to be good. To be good and moral. I think I’d have died if I didn’t.
YOUNG MAN: Fuck.
OLDER MAN: I know.
Beat.
OLDER MAN: I told him what we did. All. What we do. The fucken and that. And he looks at me like I don’t know.
Beat.
OLDER MAN: I told him I loved you. I told him I loved you more then I loved him. I told him that.
YOUNG MAN: Why?
OLDER MAN: Cause I do.
YOUNG MAN: You don’t.
OLDER MAN: I meant I only I cared for you only. I talk to you.
YOUNG MAN: So?
OLDER MAN: So he goes for me. He tries to batter me. He’s crying.
YOUNG MAN: Fuck.
OLDER MAN: And then I rang you then. There. After I left.
Beat.
OLDER MAN: Pulled the whole fucking thing around my ears I have. Haven’t I? Now I don’t know what’s worse. Having done what we do. Or having said it out loud.
Very long pause.
OLDER MAN: Can we start.
YOUNG MAN: What?
OLDER MAN: This. Can we do this. I won’t talk anymore.
Beat. The YOUNG MAN stands now confused.
OLDER MAN: What?
YOUNG MAN: Why did you say that?
OLDER MAN: What?
YOUNG MAN: That you love me.
OLDER MAN: Cause I do.
Small beat.
OLDER MAN: I care about you. I want to help you.
YOUNG MAN: You don’t know me.
OLDER MAN: Nearly.
YOUNG MAN: No.
OLDER MAN: Oh.
Beat.
YOUNG MAN: This is just this. It isn’t real. It’s money.
OLDER MAN: Yeah?
YOUNG MAN: That’s all.
OLDER MAN: Right.
Beat. The OLDER MAN is a little broken.
OLDER MAN: I’ll pay you still.
YOUNG MAN: I know you will.
OLDER MAN: How much?
YOUNG MAN: You said a hundred.
OLDER MAN: Yeah.
Beat.
YOUNG MAN: What do want me to do then?
OLDER MAN: The same. Like before.
YOUNG MAN: OK.
OLDER MAN: Fuck me and that.
YOUNG MAN: OK.
Beat.
OLDER MAN: And I’ll leave you alone then I swear. I’ll try.
Beat.
OLDER MAN: Only first though.
YOUNG MAN: What?
OLDER MAN: I want to hold you first.
YOUNG MAN: Yeah?
OLDER MAN: I want to hold you just. Just a minute just.
YOUNG MAN: Right.
OLDER MAN: Is that OK?
YOUNG MAN: Yeah.
OLDER MAN: Thank you. Thank you.
The OLDER MAN moves to the YOUNG MAN.
He holds onto him. He cries. Blackout.
THE ART OF SWIMMING
BY
LYNDA RADLEY
This script contains information and material from the archives of Mercedes Gleitze.
With the permission of, and kindly supplied by, her family.
All rights whatsoever in this play are strictly reserved and application for performance etc. should be made before commencement of rehearsal to Macnaughton Lord Representation, 44 South Molton Street, London W1K 5RT. T: 44 (0) 20 7499 1411, F: 44 (0) 20 7493 2444. No performance may be given unless a licence has been obtained, and no alterations may be made in the title or the text of the play without the author’s prior written consent.
The Art of Swimming was produced by Playgroup and first performed at the Arches, Glasgow, on 26 and 27 September 2006.
Performed by Lynda Radley
Music composed and performed
by Michael John McCarthy
Directed by Tom Creed
Designed by Claire Halleran
Lighting Designed by Tom Creed
It was subsequently performed at the following venues and festivals:
Cork Midsummer Festival, Half Moon Theatre,
Cork,
June 2007
Kinsale Arts Week, Municipal Hall, Kinsale, July
2007
Edinburgh Festival Fringe, Traverse Theatre,
Edinburgh, August 2007
Dublin Fringe Festival, New Theatre, Dublin,
September 2007
Bewley’s Cafe Theatre, Dublin, February 2008
Amsterdam Fringe Festival, Compagnietheater,
Amsterdam, September 2008
The English Theatre, Sculpture Museum on the Sea,
The Hague, April 2009
Citizens Theatre, Glasgow, May 2009
It won the Bewley’s Cafe Theatre Little Gem Award and was nominated for the Fishamble New Writing Award at the Dublin Fringe Festival 2007, was short-listed for the Meyer-Whitworth Award in 2007, and was nominated for a Total Theatre Award for Innovation at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe 2007.
1.
Stage directions are in bold.
The narrator’s voice is in plain text.
Mercedes’ voice is in italics.
Preset: A gramophone plays popular music of the 1920s and 30s. Various boxes and bric-à-brac are upstage, piled together.
I walk on stage, cross to the gramophone and switch it off.
(Thereafter music is played live on accordion, typewriter and laptop from among the boxes.)
During the following I takes stones and shells from a drawstring bag and set out a small square, big enough only for me to stand in.
Good Evening Ladies and Gentlemen and welcome to my performance. In order for it to work, I will need you to sometimes imagine that I am Mercedes Gleitze: the first British woman to swim the English Channel. This I did in 1927, aged twenty-six, and it took fifteen hours and fifteen minutes.
If it helps you to have a more fulfilling theatrical experience, you can imagine that I did decide to spend the exorbitant amount of money they were asking for in the second-hand clothing shop where I found an authentic period swimming costume – you know, one of the ones that comes down to here (indicating thighs) and looks like something a wrestler might wear. It was navy blue and made out of cotton jersey.
I am wearing a black vest and black trousers. I have rolled up the trousers creating an approximation of the costume described.
I am taller than I am, obviously, and broader, with a long mane of dark hair. I am famed for my beauty as well as my talent.
I say:
I step into the small stone square.
(The sound of breathing and the sea) In the open sea you have no idea what’s coming next. You must make your peace with currents and tides. You must learn how to track them. You have to swim straight, but you cannot waste too much energy on looking up, so you learn blind how to navigate a straight, liquid line. You must learn how to swim in the dark.
You can think only miniscule thoughts – Stroke. Pull. Stroke. Pull. Stroke. Pull. – Don’t think and there’s nothing to distract you from the cold. Think too much and your mind will find a way to convince you to stop. So you focus on direction, navigation, drinking, urinating, pacing, hours, minutes, and seconds. Your inner engineer must travel internally; monitoring each temperature change, feeling each fluctuation, assessing the quality of each breath. Each stroke. Pull. Stroke. Pull. Stroke. Pull.
You speak to your lungs and you say, ‘You are bigger than this.’
You speak to your heart and you say, ‘Don’t beat faster, slow down.’
You speak to your spine and you say, ‘Keep rotating.’
You speak to your legs and you say, ‘Keep kicking.’
You speak to your arms and you say, ‘Keep pulling.’
You speak to your joints and you say, ‘Look, you can have your revenge when I’m old.’
Each time your mind wanders towards the pain you must pick it up and pluck it away from the brink like a wayward child.
Every time an image of failure comes to you, you must cast it back into the blue.
If you feel the swell of early celebration you had better check yourself because your strokes will have turned sloppy and you’re breathing too fast.
You just have to be, letting your conscious mind take care of the machine and your subconscious float to the surface like a cork.
You just have to swim.
I step out of the square and address the audience.
(Fairground music) Imagine that you are an audience. You are an audience at Blackpool Tower Circus in the early 1930s. World War One is a receding memory. World War Two hasn’t happened yet. You are surrounded by glint and gilding the likes of which you have never seen before. You are probably poor, but not as poor as the poorer poor who can only imagine being here.
During the following I bring out a small step-ladder. I also fetch a metal bucket and remove a circle of red satin from within it. This is spread on the floor in front of the ladder, and I place the bucket in the centre of this circle.
Tonight you have seen many exciting entertainments. Some of you may choose to imagine yourselves as children. You may feel sick with sweetness or excitement. With tears in your eyes, you may be remembering the face of a clown which terrified you earlier; the fear now solidifying into a lifelong phobia. Perhaps you just felt sexual stirrings brought on by the slitherings of an acrobat in an improper costume. Maybe you are feeling an acute pang of inadequacy caused by feats of the strong man, and now you are boring your wife and dampening your children’s imaginations by explaining to them that it is all just a sham. You may be sitting there wishing that the bear had bitten down on its tamer’s neck. You may now be craving a pony that you will surely never find under the Christmas tree. You may be bored.
Suddenly, rain pours down from overhead, and the ring fills with water as huge fountains gush downwards.
I reach into the bucket and pull out a watering can with which I pour water into the bucket.
There is a collective intake of breath as a swimming pool is formed.
The ringmaster says: And now Ladies and Gentleman, Boys and Girls, in an exhibition of scientific swimming I present to you the first British woman to swim the English Channel, the first person to swim the Straits of Gibraltar and the world record holder for endurance swimming at forty-six straight hours: the talented, the powerful, the beautiful Miss Mercedes Gleitze. Bathing costume worn by Miss Gleitze kindly supplied by JF Orry Ladies Department, Blackpool; for all your swimming needs.
Imagine I’m the closest thing to a celebrity that you have ever seen.
Now imagine that this carries me up to a diving platform high above you. I take up position.
I climb to the top of the ladder and stand looking into the bucket.
I say:
Gegrüßet seist du, Maria, voll der Gnade,
der Herr ist mit dir.
Du bist gebenedeit unter den Frauen, und gebenedeit ist die Frucht
deines Leibes, Jesus. Heilige Maria,
Mutter Gottes,
bitte für uns Sünder jetzt und in der Stunde
unseres Todes.
Amen.
Now imagine that that bucket of water is the circus ring swimming pool and I am about to break its flickering surface.
2.
I climb down. During this segment I bring forward a small, old-fashioned, folding table. I carry a leather-covered box to the table. When I open it I discover swimming logs, an old photograph and a folded cloth.
Still damp, she signs the many photos and scraps of paper you bring to her: mementos that will be loved and looked at for a while. Before they slowly lose their significance. Before she slips out of memory and is forgotten. She retires, marries a sheet metal engineer of Irish extraction, settles down and becomes a philanthropist, setting up a home for the poor. During the Second World War she once more lives through the eerie duality of her German parentage and British citizenship, especially when she receives a letter from the war commission telling her that The Mercedes Gleitze Home for Destitute Men and Women has been destroyed by enemy bombing. She has three children, grows older and, in 1981, she
dies.
These mementos, now mori, these photographs and autographs, are occasionally excavated from behind ornaments on the mantelpieces of dying grandparents, or unearthed from the hiding places of children who have long since grown up. Someone makes a decision: to throw them away or to keep them. To look up this exotic name on the internet or to assign the found object to another box on another mantelpiece where the image of Mercedes inside patiently awaits another grieving grandchild eager to know more about the dead relative they spent the last few years ignoring. The celebrity that once filled Blackpool Tower Circus with raucous applause and indefinable wonder survives in sporting legend, the Oxford Biographical Dictionary and in the memories of her family and friends.
I found her in Cork City Library in the summer of 2005. A beautiful woman wrapped modestly in a towel smiling demurely at me. She was surrounded by civil servants and the caption underneath said that she just had swum for thirty hours in a baths which has long since disappeared from Eglington Street, Cork. That was all: her name, the date (1930) and the feat. A few nights before I had found myself constructing sentences around the idea of long distance swimming while falling asleep. And then this beautiful woman inexplicably appears in a book of old photographs. And I’m a botanist collecting samples. I’m a butterfly collector pinning down wings. I hang what I imagine on the bones of her biography. I’m a scientist trying to create a formula for this name: Mercedes Gleitze.
I carefully and meticulously unfold the cloth and spread it over the table.
3.
I bring out an old-fashioned picnic basket and place it on the table. When opened, the lid of the basket reveals a seascape with a tiny kite made of cheese suspended from a wire at one edge of the lid.
I say to her:
From aged eighteen months to ten years you lived with your grandparents in Herzogenaurach, Germany, but at age ten your mother travelled to Germany to take you home. You returned to your birthplace of Brighton where you were reunited with your sisters, your father and the sea. (Fairground music) You lived at the gable end of a row of terraced houses and you could see it through the window of your small attic bedroom. You inhaled it on your walk to school. It clung to the clothes on the washing line. You could smell it on your skin. While your mother helped you to improve your English you learned, without learning, how to walk into a wind but stay steady on the rocks, how deep is too deep and not to tense when you float. Come summer you watched with fascination as families poured out of London trains on sultry afternoons. You wondered at the wonder that appeared on their faces with that first look at the horizon. You observed behind a wry smile as they cried over kites lost to the wind, as they reddened, as they headed out when they should have been coming in and as they were led indoors just when the air was ripe for adventures, as they sank, as they swallowed water, as they had their ears clipped and their legs smacked and their noses wiped.
The Oberon Anthology of Contemporary Irish Plays Page 6