by David Hare
Archie Just put it down.
Anna crosses to the desk and puts tea on it.
Archie What time is it?
Anna Two.
Archie Has she gone?
Anna Mmm-mm. (Pause.) You should have said goodbye to her.
Archie What?
Anna That was the decent thing to do.
Archie turns and moves towards the desk.
Archie There’s a broadcast here. I’ve just completed. I want it transmitted as fast as possible. You’ll also have to take on Eileen’s secretarial tasks. Get right down to it in the morning, will you?
Anna No, I won’t.
Pause. Archie looks at Anna.
Archie I set ma’self the task. Get through the war. Just get through it, that’s all. Put it no higher than that. Accept it. Endure it. But don’t think, because if you begin to think, it’ll all come apart in your hands. So. Let’s all have the time of our lives not bothering to think about a bloody thing. Just … get on with it. This house is the war. And I’d rather be anywhere, I’d rather be in France, I’d rather be in the desert, I’d rather be in a Wellington over Berlin, anywhere but here with you and your people in this bloody awful English house … but I shall spend it here.
(Pause.)
Anna Strange thing; as if to suffer and say nothing were clever. As if to do this degrading work were clever. As if that were clever.
Long pause.
Will you hold me? Will you touch me?
Archie No.
He looks down.
57. INT. BEDROOM. NIGHT
Anna sits dressed on her bed reading Archie’s script. We look at the pages. They are a mass of scrawled instructions and underlinings. There are Stars of David scratched in bright red ink, there are exclamation marks and enormous phrases like ‘Now look here’, and ‘Stress this’. Some phrases refer to disease and corruption. We look at Anna again. She regularly puts the sheets aside. Her face is dead.
58. INT. LANGLEY’S OFFICE. DAY
Langley working at his desk, looks up. Anna standing at the door. Bright morning light.
Anna There’s a broadcast here. I’m not sure it’s quite right.
Langley Come in.
Anna comes in and sits down opposite him at the desk.
Tell me about it.
Anna Well … apparently one of Goebbels’s newspapers has singled out for special praise the work of some doctors on the Russian front who run blood transfusion units and who’ve been successful in saving many, many lives.
Langley Yes.
Anna Now our idea in reply is to say that the units are getting their supplies of blood not from good clean fellow Germans, but from Polish and Russian prisoners who have not even had a Wassermann test. In other words, our job is to convince an army which we believe has just sustained the most appalling losses in the history of human warfare that those of them who have managed to escape death are on the point of being consumed with venereal disease.
There is a pause. Langley spreads his hands.
Langley It sounds a very good idea.
Anna You don’t think he’s mad? You don’t think, clinically, Archie Maclean is mad?
Pause.
Langley We don’t really know what’s happening on the Russian front. But people are telling us that one million Germans have died in Russia in the last eight months. And of those maybe half have been killed in battle. The rest have just curled up in their greatcoats and died. Of frostbite. Exposure. Well nobody in that party went of their own accord. They went because they were inspired to go. By that great genius Joseph Goebbels. And they stayed, in part, because of the work he is doing. And because of that work, they are still there. And they are still dying. Now if you want to tell me that you can’t draft that broadcast, then you had best return to your country estate, because we have as much duty to assist our side as he has his. And we must bring to it the same vigour, the same passion, the same intelligence that he has brought to his. And if this involves throwing a great trail of aniseed across Europe, if it means covering the whole continent in obloquy and filth … then that is what we shall do.
A pause. Anna quite lost. Langley looks across at her.
There has been a complaint about you. From Maclean. He spoke to me this morning. Your German is good and so is your application. But he feels from the start you have tried to compromise him. I put it another way. You have tried unsuccessfully to get him to sleep with you. Please. There is the question of legality – your age. Also Maclean knows something of your background, your family, how little you know of the world, and felt to take advantage would be indefensible. And he has come to feel that the pressure is now intolerable and rather than have to upset you in person, he has asked me to request you to resign.
Anna But it’s not true.
Langley I don’t care if it’s true. You have unbalanced one of our most gifted writers. That is unforgivable.
A pause. Langley takes out a clean piece of stationery from his desk drawer and pushes it across the desk with a fountain pen.
A letter of resignation.
Anna No.
Langley Otherwise I shall have to speak to your father, tell him what’s occurred.
Anna But it’s not true, it’s not what happened. None of it’s true.
Langley Then why did he say it?
Silence. We look at Anna.
Anna No.
59. BLANK SCREEN
Voice Five months later, in July 1942, Otto-Abend Eins made his final broadcast.
60. INT. BILLIARD ROOM. NIGHT
The Unit gathered round the table, minus Anna, Eileen and Archie. But Fennel is present this time, watching from the side. Karl is in full flood. Jungke is listening.
Karl Die deutsche Wehrmacht muss härter kämpfen, muss den Krieg mit einer Rücksichtslosigkeit führen, die sie bisher nicht gezeigt hat. Dieser Defaitismus frisst den Willen der deutschen Nation auf.
Langley cues Lotterby, who then bangs his rifle butt against the inside of the door very loudly, so loudly the door almost splinters. Then the door is thrown open from the other side and Archie is revealed standing with a machine-gun. He runs into the room and jumps on top of the billiard table.
Um Gotteswillen!
Archie Also. Otto. Wir haben ihn gefunden.
He points the machine-gun at Karl.
Karl Nein, nein! Bitte! Nicht!
Langley cues again. Archie fires the machine-gun deafeningly loud. Karl reels back clutching himself and moaning. His chair goes over and he falls to the floor.
Archie Also …
Archie strides to the wireless equipment and in a huge gesture rips the cables out. Moves to stand over.
Otto ist tot.
With a creak Karl sits up from his dead position. His face breaks into a huge grin.
61. EXT. HOUSE. DAY
The house seen from the outside. Its main doors are opened and out from it come the Soldiers and their Sergeant carrying out office and wireless equipment. Fennel, with his Naval Commander, follows them and gets into his car. Langley shakes his hand.
Voice The work of the department continued until the end of the war when all its official records were destroyed. Many of the most brilliant men from the Propaganda and Intelligence Services went on to careers in public life, in Parliament, Fleet Street, the universities and the BBC.
62. EXT. COUNCIL ESTATE. DAY
Fennel moves in an election van, speaking on the back of a jeep which is plastered with photos of himself and the slogan ‘Let’s Go With Labour’.
Voice John Fennel resumed a career in politics which took him in 1968 to a Cabinet rank which he lost with Labour’s subsequent defeat in 1970.
63. EXT. NURSING HOME. DAY
Langley in his bathchair being wheeled across a lawn by an obviously expensive Private Nurse. He looks ill and drawn.
Voice Will Langley went on to become a world-famous thriller writer in the mid-fifties. His work helped to establish a genre notable for its sustained pass
ages of sexuality and violence. He died in 1962.
64. EXT. GOLF COURSE. DAY
Amateur film. The sound of a projector. Eileen Graham on the golf course, looking much older, in a sensible skirt and windcheater. She fools around for the camera.
Voice Eileen Graham started a chain of employment agencies specializing in temporary secretaries. She is President of the Guild of British Businesswomen. She has never married.
65. INT. VIEWING THEATRE. NIGHT
Archie Maclean viewing rushes. He is sitting forward, the beam of the projector behind his shoulder.
Voice Archie Maclean was transferred that year to the Crown Film Unit, where he made distinguished documentaries. He became known in the fifties for his award-winning feature films …
66. INT. SLUM HOUSE. DAY
A sequence from Archie’s black-and-white film, made in the late fifties. A small boy watches as his father is washed in a tin bath by his mother.
Voice … which he both wrote and directed. The most famous example is A Kind of Life, a loving and lyrical evocation of his own childhood in Glasgow. But his most recent work starring some of Hollywood’s best loved names …
67. EXT. SEA. DAY
A sequence from one of Archie’s latest films. A runaway car speeds off the end of a pier and crashes into the water.
Voice … has commanded little of the same critical attention or respect.
68. BLANK SCREEN
Voice Anna Seaton.
69. STILLS SEQUENCE
Anna in a sequence of black-and-white stills is seen in an advertising agency leaning over an artist’s shoulder to look at a drawing of a comic dog.
Voice Entered advertising in 1946 where she remained for ten years, increasingly distressed at the compromises forced on her by her profession. In 1956 she resigned and announced her intention to live an honest life.
70. STILLS SEQUENCE
A semi-detached in Fulham, seen from outside.
Voice She told her husband she was having an affair with another man, and could no longer bear the untruths of adultery. Her husband left her.
71. STILLS SEQUENCE
A brightly lit hospital seen from outside.
Voice After a period of lavish promiscuity she suffered an infected womb and an enforced hysterectomy.
72. STILLS SEQUENCE
Grosvenor Square demonstrations, 1968.
Voice She became a full-time researcher for the Labour Party, until she left during the Vietnam demonstrations and went to live with a young unmarried mother in Wales.
73. STILLS SEQUENCE
Anna, much older, playing on a Welsh hillside with a small girl and a dog.
Voice Having travelled to see Maclean’s latest film at a seaside Odeon, she was driven to write to him for the first time since 1942, complaining of the falseness of his films, the way they sentimentalized what she knew to be his appalling childhood and lamenting, in sum, the films’ lack of political direction. The last paragraph of her letter read:
74. INT. HOUSE. DAY
Shots of the empty rooms inside the house after the Unit has gone. Dining room. Drawing room. Bedroom. Gun room. All empty, standing deserted.
Anna (VO) It is only now that I fully understand the events that passed between us so many years ago. You must allow for my ignorance, I was born into a class and at a time that protected me from even a chance acquaintance with the world. But since that first day at Wendlesham I have been trying to learn, trying to keep faith with the shame and anger I saw in you. In retrospect what you sensed then has become blindingly clear to the rest of us: that whereas we knew exactly what we were fighting against, none of us had the whisper of an idea as to what we were fighting for. Over the years I have been watching the steady impoverishment of the people’s ideals, their loss of faith, the lying, the daily inveterate lying, the thirty-year-old deep corrosive national habit of lying, and I have remembered you. I have remembered the one lie you told to make me go away. And I now at last have come to understand why you told it. I loved you then and I love you now. For thirty years you have been the beat of my heart. Please, please tell me it is the same for you.
75. EXT. HOUSE. DAY
The house seen from outside.
Voice He never replied.
The house sits in the sun. A few seconds, then:
76. END CREDITS
Chopin’s Waltz No. 3 in A Minor
PLENTY
For Kate
Characters
Susan Traherne
Alice Park
Raymond Brock
Code Name Lazar
A Frenchman
Sir Leonard Darwin
Mick
Louise
M. Aung
Mme Aung
Dorcas Frey
John Begley
Sir Andrew Charleson
Another Frenchman
Plenty was first performed at the Lyttelton Theatre, London, on 7 April 1978. The cast was as follows:
Susan Traherne Kate Nelligan
Alice Park Julie Covington
Raymond Brock Stephen Moore
Code Name Lazar Paul Freeman
A Frenchman Robert Ralph
Sir Leonard Darwin Basil Henson
Mick David Schofield
Louise Gil Brailey
M. Aung Kristopher Kum
Mme Aung Me Me Lai
Dorcas Frey Lindsay Duncan
John Begley Tom Durham
Sir Andrew Charleson Frederick Treves
Another Frenchman Timothy Davies
Directed by David Hare
Settings by Hayden Griffin
Costumes by Deirdre Clancy
Music by Nick Bicât
SCENE ONE
Knightsbridge. Easter 1962.
A wooden floor. At the back of the stage high windows give the impression of a room which has been stripped bare. Around the floor are packing cases full of fine objects. At the front lies a single mattress, on which a naked man is sleeping face downwards.
Susan sits on one of the packing cases. In her middle thirties, she is thin and well presented. She wastes no energy. She now rolls an Old Holborn and lights it.
Alice comes in from the street, a blanket over her head. She carries a small tinfoil parcel. She is small-featured, slightly younger and busier than Susan. She wears jeans. She drops the blanket and shakes the rain off herself.
Alice I don’t know why anybody lives in this country. No wonder everyone has colds all the time. Even what they call passion, it still comes at you down a blocked nose.
Susan smokes quietly. Alice is distracted by some stray object which she tosses into a packing case. The man stirs and turns over. He is middle-aged, running to fat and covered in dried blood. Susan cues Alice.
Susan And the food.
Alice Yeah. The wet. The cold. The flu. The food. The loveless English. How is he?
Susan Fine.
Alice kneels down beside him.
Alice The blood is spectacular.
Susan The blood is from his thumb.
Alice takes his penis between her thumb and forefinger.
Alice Turkey neck and turkey gristle, isn’t that what they say?
A pause. Susan smokes.
Are you sure he’s OK?
Susan He had a couple of Nembutal and twelve fingers of Scotch. It’s nothing else, don’t worry.
Alice And a fight.
Susan A short fight.
Alice takes the tinfoil parcel and opens it. Steam rises.
Alice Chinese takeaway. Want some?
Susan It’s six o’clock in the morning.
Alice Sweet and sour prawn.
Susan No thanks.
Alice You should. You worked as hard as I did. When we started last night, I didn’t think it could be done.
Alice gestures round the empty room. Then eats. Susan watches, then gets up and stands behind her with a key.
Susan It’s a Yale. There’s a mortise as well but I’ve lost t
he key. There’s a cleaning lady next door, should you want one, her work’s good but don’t try talking about the blacks. You have a share in that garden in the centre of the square, you know all those trees and flowers they keep locked up. The milkman calls daily, again he’s nice, but don’t touch the yoghurt, it’s green, we call it Venusian sperm.
Pause.
Good luck with your girls.
Susan turns to go. Alice gets up.
Alice Are you sure you can’t stay? I think you’d like them.
Susan Unmarried mothers, I don’t think I’d get on.
Alice I’m going to ring round at nine o’clock. If you just stayed on for a couple of hours …
Susan You don’t really want that, nobody would.
Pause.
You must tell my husband …
Alice You’ve given me the house, and you went on your way.
Susan Tell him I left with nothing that was his. I just walked out on him. Everything to go.
Susan smiles again and goes out. There is a pause. The man stirs again at the front of the stage. Alice stands still holding the sweet and sour prawn.
Brock Darling.
Brock is still asleep. His eyes don’t open as he turns over. Alice watches very beadily. There is a long pause. Then he murmurs:
What’s for breakfast?
Alice Fish.
SCENE TWO
St Benoît. November 1943.
Darkness. From the dark the sound of the wireless. From offstage a beam of light flashes irregularly, cutting up through the night. Then back to dark.