by Matthew Ryan
MATTHEW RYAN’s work includes: Kelly (Queensland Theatre Company 2012), boy girl wall co-written with Lucas Stibbard (The Escapists/Melbourne Theatre Company 2012/Critical Stages National Australian Tour 2012/La Boite Theatre Company 2011/Hothouse Theatre 2011/Adelaide Fringe 2010/Metro Arts 2010/2009), The Harbinger co-written with David Morton (Dead Puppet Society/La Boite Theatre Company 2012), French Twist (Queensland Theatre Company 2011 as ‘Sacre Bleu’), Attack Of The Attacking Attackers! (The Escapists/La Boite Theatre Company 2008), Summer Wonderland (La Boite Theatre Company 2007), Chasing The Whale (La Boite Theatre Company 2005/ATYP 2000 as ‘The Dance of Jeremiah’) and So You Die A Little co-written with Tony Brockman (Pandemonium Theatre 1998). Matthew has developed a series of works for young performers through Backbone Youth Arts called Plays From The Top Of The Stairs. Matthew received the Queensland Theatre Company’s George Landen Dann award for Chasing The Whale (as ‘The Dance of Jeremiah’) in 2000, the Matilda Award for Best New Australian Work for Attack Of The Attacking Attackers! in 2008 and the Matilda Award for Best Independent Production in 2011 for boy girl wall. Matthew is a co-founder of the award winning theatre-making group The Escapists.
LUCAS STIBBARD makes theatre and performance, this has included work nationally and internationally as an actor, performer, writer, puppeteer, director, facilitator, host, dramaturge and memorably as stage manager for The Lala Parlour burlesque troupe. As a writer Lucas is best know for boy girl wall that he co-wrote with Matthew Ryan. Other works have included short stories for Stage X, articles for the union journal and a story in Men of Letters. Lucas has worked a performer for QTC, MTC, La Boite, Bell Shakespeare, STCSA and Windmill amongst others and is one of the founders of The Escapists, a collective whose work has included the Helpmann Award nominated boy girl wall, Elephant Gun, The Prometheus Project and the upcoming works Packed and Suburbia.
FIRST PRODUCTION
boy girl wall was first produced by The Escapists for Metro Arts Independents, Brisbane, on 14 August 2009 with the following cast and creative team:
NARRATOR Lucas Stibbard
MUSICIAN Neridah Waters
Realisers, Matthew Ryan, Lucas Stibbard, Neridah Waters, Sarah Winter
Composer, Neridah Waters
Lighting Designer, Keith Clark
The Escapists produced a season of boy girl wall for the Adelaide Fringe Festival and a return season at Metro Arts in 2010. It was produced for mainstage seasons at La Boite Theatre Company and HotHouse Theatre in 2011. It was produced for Melbourne Theatre Company’s Lawler Studio Season and a National Australian Tour (through Critical Stages) in 2012.
The set was redesigned by Jonathon Oxlade in 2011 for mainstage productions and all subsequent seasons.
The Escapists are Keith Clark, Jonathon Oxlade, Matthew Ryan, Lucas Stibbard, Neridah Waters and Sarah Winter.
CHARACTERS
NARRATOR, plays all roles
SETTING
The set of the original production was a simple black space with corners and edges highlighted with chalk. The redesign consisted of a collection of chalkboards rising up as a back wall and one large chalkboard as the stage.
PRE-SHOW PHONE WARNING
NARRATOR: [pre-recorded] Evening, everyone. Thanks for coming and welcome. The show is about to start so if everyone could just turn off your mobile phones that’d be aces—unless you need to leave it on for some kind of emergency—like you left the kids with a babysitter and you’re only now realising that those scabs on her arm were track marks. Or like… This is a true story actually. When I worked as an usher there was this one night that this girl’s phone went off, full volume in the middle of the show. She answered it, started talking excitedly, got her friend out of the audience. They both chatted loudly and then walked out of the theatre. I followed them out and, puffed up with self-importance I demanded to know what was so important as to NOT-TURN-OFF-YOUR-MOBILE-PHONE-HOW-DARE-SHE-RUIN-THE-MAGIC-OF-THEATRE. Her answer—‘I just got confirmation, they’ve found a match and I’m getting my new kidney’. So she and her friend left smiling and I was reminded that as fun as this is, it’s not going to change the world. Or help you regulate electrolytes. So, yeah, phones off unless you left your kids with a crack whore or you’re waiting for a vital organ. Cheers for listening and enjoy the show.
1. THIS IS NOT A LOVE STORY
The NARRATOR appears in the audience wearing a suit. He approaches the stage.
NARRATOR: This is not a love story. At no point will Colin Firth come striding over the hill towards his poor but willful girl in an empire line, who has selflessly put her family first. Leonardo DiCaprio won’t meet a plucky Kate Winslet aboard a doomed ship. Nor will said doomed ship meet an iceberg resulting in the selfish bitch not sharing her floaties with him. Women hired to look after the children of brooding Austrian sea captains won’t sing songs about singing songs and then outwit Nazis with their friends from a nunnery. This is not a love story. This is a story about love. Which is to say, real love. Which is to say, it’s a million moments of misery and one good one.
2. BOY
NARRATOR: Consider light.
He throws some light from his hand into a light bulb that hangs in the middle of the space. The bulb lights up.
He takes out some chalk and starts doing maths and diagrams on the back wall/chalkboards.
Now, it can be found as a by-product of our sun’s nuclear reactions and is a form of electromagnetic radiation. That radiation is held to travel at a constant speed of 1,079,252,848.8 kilometres per hour and will travel the distance from sun to the Earth (not to scale) in approximately 8.3 minutes. Which means that the sun you see at any time is actually the sun as it was 8.3 minutes ago. Let’s go out further. Say thirty light years. Now that being the distance that sunlight will travel at our understood constant of 1,079,252,848.8 kilometres per hour in 30 years. Or. Lots. And if you happened to be viewing the Earth from that distance and if you had a sufficiently powerful instrument of observation to do so, you would actually be seeing the Earth as it was thirty years ago. So, let us imagine that an alien observer happened to train their fantastically powerful instrument of observation at the Southern Hemisphere. More specifically, Australia. More specifically, Queensland. More specifically, Brisbane. More specifically, the suburb of Herston. Even more specifically, through the window and into bed seven of the Royal Women’s and Children’s Hospital maternity ward. There they would see Ingrid and her baby boy, Max. This story is not about them. However, if our alien pervert were to shift their instrument of observation slightly to the left there they would see Daphne and her baby boy, Thomas. This story is about him. Thomas Thompson Junior. Obviously named after his father, who had been named after his father, who had been named after his father… [et cetera]
He walks in a line, devolving through Homo sapiens, Neanderthal man and into an ape. He crouches and scratches himself, eating fleas/lice.
In fact, by a strange quirk of fate that had become some sort of genetic memory, all the men on that side of the family had all been named Thomas since time immemorial. Or to be more accurate, since the Paleolithic era about 2.6 million years ago with the first of those Thomases who wasn’t Thomas so much as [like an ape] ‘ooh-ah’.
He evolves back along the line, becoming modern man again.
Which made Thomas, the one who had just been born, Thomas the 83,333rd or thereabouts. This story about him begins on a Tuesday. A mild-mannered and unsuspecting Tuesday. The Clark Kent, if you will, of Tuesdays.
He draws a liturgical weekly calendar on the floor. A chime as he becomes TUESDAY.
TUESDAY: Hello. Tuesday. I’m a day of the week. I’m the second day of the working week but the third of the liturgical which s
tarts on Sunday. My name comes from the Old English Tiwes daeg, named after the Norse word for their god, Tyr, who was like Mars or Ares, a god of war.
He growls, trying to be ferocious. Fails.
I like: being organised, post-it notes and dry toast. I pick up the slack after Monday a lot.
A chime as he becomes MONDAY, looking around, hung-over and lost, shielding his eyes from the bright lights.
MONDAY: Monday.
TUESDAY: I dislike, well, I’m not overly fond of Friday.
A chime and he becomes FRIDAY, drunk. He grabs his crotch and gives everyone the finger.
FRIDAY: Fuckin’ Friday!
TUESDAY: I’m not overly popular. I am trying to rectify this by offering cheap DVDs, movies and pizza. I don’t mind.
NARRATOR: Little did our unsuspecting Tuesday know that it was about to become a lot more interesting than it had ever imagined.
He lies down in bed, becoming THOM.
An annoying digital alarm sounds. THOM wakes with a start and looks around, realising much to his horror that he’s awake. He looks for his alarm clock and when he can’t find it, draws a digital display clock with chalk and hits it. The alarm stops.
At the start of the day, Thom woke up. Which is a good way to start the day. In fact it occurred to Thom that starting your day without waking up could be difficult. Possibly fatal.
THOM faces the audience, sleepy. A chime.
THOM: Thomas Thompson Junior. Age 31. I work in I.T. I like: astronomy, the sound that rulers make when you flick them on the edge of a desk and cheese and pickled onion sandwiches before bed. I dislike: most of the dreams I’ve been having lately, flying and allocated seating at the cinema.
THOM gets ready for work as the NARRATOR narrates.
NARRATOR: And so it came to pass that our little baby Thomas, the 83,333rd or thereabouts grew up to be an average guy. Chances are you know him. Chances are you are him. Or him if he were a her. For the purposes of this story Thom looks conveniently like your Narrator. Same shape, same size, same height. Which is not to say that he is the Narrator. That would be weird. Roaming around in your own home talking about yourself in the third person in past tense to a group of people who aren’t really there. Fourth wall comedy. Thom got up, got dressed for work, all the while musing on the latest in a long line of strange dreams probably brought on by cheese and pickled onion sandwiches before bed.
He proceeds to act out the dream as he talks.
This one had involved a group of cats who, having seen the clip for Prince’s ‘Raspberry Beret’ on ‘rage’, decided to build themselves a man-suit that they could pilot from the inside—like a man-shaped Voltron piloted by cats. The cats drove their man-suit down to the local HMV, bought themselves a copy of ‘Around the World in a Day’, went home, put it on and danced.
He counts in some music and stops just short of dancing. He gets on a bus instead.
On his way to work, Thom wondered how it was cats had money to buy an album. He hopped off the bus, passed his nemesis The Human Statue…
A chime. The NARRATOR freezes as THE HUMAN STATUE. Then continues.
… and went to work.
3. HIS BOSS
MEL points, clicks and winks. The reactions of the other character are implicit.
MEL: Thom! Thom-boy! Thom-ato! How they hanging, buddy?
A chime.
Melvin Ellis. Mel. The Big M. Mel-u-min-i-um. The Mel-ennium Falcon. I’m a supervisor and trainer at Thom’s work. I also do a bit of improv on the side. I like: good bourbon, Zoo Magazine, and the fine films of Angelina Jolie. I dislike: fat chicks.
NARRATOR: Mel was a dick. A great big dick. Which is not to say that Mel had a great big dick. In fact if personality was any indicator of size, Mel was hung like a cashew. The only reason Thom put up with his annoying banter and general banality was that it seemed that Mel was happy to do no actual supervising. Which meant that Thom’s secret was safe. You see, the truth was Thom had absolutely no idea what he did for a living. He’d done IT at his mother’s insistence.
MOTHER: Forget astronomy, Thom. IT. IT’s the way of the future. IT’s a safe secure job.
NARRATOR: Thom’s mum told terrible puns.
He brings out an overhead projector and projects an image of graphs and statistics.
So Thom had studied IT and taken the first job that was offered to him out of university without really bothering to check what they did. He figured he’d work it out in a week or two. Then weeks became months. And the months went to parties, got drunk, shacked up with each other and begat years. By which time it was too late to ask anyone what they did. There was paper and statistics. Thom dutifully gathered this data and turned it into reports and charts without having to understand any of it. This did not come, however, without paranoia.
The NARRATOR lifts the projector lens into his face, film noir style.
MEL: So anyway, buddy, can I get an ETA on those AIFs, QAZIs and BZTs? Terry, the CI from CBT, wants them ASAP and on the QT, he’s already more than a little POed about the results of that last GSA.
NARRATOR: So Tom mastered being neither good enough to get noticed nor bad enough to warrant attention—a tightrope-walking act of average-ness that took up way more of his time than any of the reports or charts that he was asked to make.
MEL: One more thing, buddy. I can’t help but notice that you’ve been an A04 for like ten years now and that just doesn’t seem fair to me. So I had a chat to Terry, the CI from CBT, and he wants to have a chat with you on Friday. Yeah, yeah, yeah. No need to thank me. It’ll just be a quick ‘coffay’ and a chat about what you do, what we do and what you think about what we do. Okay-pokey? Smell you later.
THOM mouths ‘Fuck’.
NARRATOR: Boy. Tick.
4. GIRL
The NARRATOR draws the second apartment as he talks.
NARRATOR: Consider radio waves. Now, like light, radio waves are a form of electromagnetic radiation and so they too travel at our wonderful understood constant of 1,079,252,848.(what?) kilometres per hour. Which means that if our alien pervert happened to have a radio telescope they might now be picking up this:
Disco music plays. Cheesy disco light abounds. The NARRATOR dances as he attempts to enact the next sequence involving both characters and a crowded dance floor.
In 1979 this was the favourite song of one Demis Papadopoulous. Demis didn’t have time to worry about alien perverts and fantastical technology.
DEMIS: Pfah!
NARRATOR: Because he had spent the whole night dancing with a lovely lady named Kathleen. And against all expectations she had agreed to come home with him. Here’s how it happened.
DEMIS: I am Demis.
KATHLEEN: What?
DEMIS: Demis. Papadopoulos. It’s Greek. Very common. Like Jones.
KATHLEEN: Kathleen. Jones.
DEMIS: Nice to meet you, Kathleen. I like your pants.
KATHLEEN: What?
DEMIS: Your pants. I like them.
The NARRATOR stops the scene.
NARRATOR: Consider for a moment, the sheer unlikely good fortune that must have come about to allow all of Demis Papadopoulos and Kathleen’s ancestors to have lived long enough to mate. That at no point did any of them get stabbed, shot, eaten, blown up or eat the wrong berry before they reached sufficient physical maturity to do so. Add to that that Demis somehow managing to survive ‘the pants comment’ and the odds of Kathleen Jones stumbling in the front door of Demis Papadopoulos’ flat with her high heels in her hand would make Pascal’s head explode. Nine months later, they had a baby girl. This story is about her.
A bell starts to ring insistently, waking ALETHEA. She wakes, draws an old analogue clock and slaps it. It continues to ring. She draws the hands onto the clock and hits it again. The alarm bell stops. A chime.
ALETHEA: Alethea Jones. Alethea’s Greek. It means ‘truth’. I’m 29 years’ old. I’m a writer and illustrator of children’s books. I like: sleeping in, riding my b
icycle Penelope, playing on my computer Dave and naming inanimate objects. I dislike: the morning, [air-quotes] ‘self-help’, [air-quotes again] ‘these’, and people who call me Althea.
NARRATOR: Alethea, when at all possible, tried to avoid starting the morning altogether. Like fat people avoid salads or coeliacs avoid wheat. In fact maybe that was it, she thought, as she stared at her puffy and deformed morning face in the mirror. Maybe she was just morning intolerant. That would explain the gas. For the purposes of this story, Alethea also looks conveniently like your Narrator, except prettier and more feminine. I don’t want you to waste too much time thinking of me as her. Alethea’s first— You’re doing it, aren’t you? You’re all thinking of me as a woman. That’s fine.
He pretends (lamely) to be a woman.
Alethea’s first children’s book, entitled Building Better Monsters, had won her some reasonable acclaim and a couple of awards. She had always wanted to be a writer and getting to set her own hours of work to avoid the morning altogether was no small part of it. Alethea had long ago realised that there were in fact two types of people in the world. Night-time people, like herself. And morning people, like her publisher, Marko.
A chime. MARKO does slow annoying and grossly sexual lunges.
MARKO: Marko Grosetti, 37 years’ old. I am a publisher. I like: exploiting artists using my general business arts degree and complete lack of talent and their complete lack of business acumen, tight running shorts and the morning—it’s my favourite time of day.
The NARRATOR takes out pink bike handlebars with basket and streamers attached.
NARRATOR: Alethea put her beloved notebook (that was about to become incredibly important to this story, so keep up) into the parcel basket of her bicycle Penelope and rode off to an early morning breakfast meeting at her publisher’s. Tired, half asleep, and more than a little pissed off at having to endure food she didn’t want with a man she didn’t like at an hour that she wasn’t overly familiar with, Alethea took a wrong turn and ended up going down a myriad of West End back streets before realising seven minutes later that she was in fact lost and late. Which are two things you never want to be because that means you’re in the wrong place at the wrong time. And there, high above her head in a tree, in his nest made of human hair and the skin of babies, The Magpie of Montague Road stirred. The Magpie of Montague Road was a black-feathered demon!