German Skerries

by Robert Holman

  Robert Holman

  GERMAN

  SKERRIES

  NICK HERN BOOKS

  London

  www.nickhernbooks.co.uk

  Contents

  Title Page

  Original Production

  ‘Lines of Desire’ by Barney Norris

  Dedication

  Characters

  German Skerries

  About the Author

  Copyright and Performing Rights Information

  German Skerries was first presented at the Bush Theatre, London, on 25 January 1977, with the following cast:

  JACK WILLIAMS

  Paul Copley

  MARTIN JONES

  John Normington

  MICHAEL HADDAWAY

  Mark Penfold

  CAROL WILLIAMS

  Caroline Hutchison

  Director

  Chris Parr

  Designer

  Miki van Zwanenberg

  Lighting Designer

  Buz Williams

  A new production was staged at the Orange Tree Theatre, Richmond on the 3 March 2016, in an Orange Tree Theatre/Up in Arms co-production in association with Reading Rep. The cast was as follows:

  JACK WILLIAMS

  George Evans

  MARTIN JONES

  Howard Ward

  MICHAEL HADDAWAY

  Henry Everett

  CAROL WILLIAMS

  Katie Moore

  Director

  Alice Hamilton

  Designer

  James Perkins

  Lighting Designer

  Simon Gethin Thomas

  Sound Designer & Composer

  George Dennis

  Dialect Coach

  Mark Langley

  Lines of Desire

  Robert Holman’s German Skerries is a portrait of being alive as being unmoored. We are introduced to four people buffeted by the winds of the world: bird watchers observing ships coming in and pipes being laid as the roar of the future drowns their coastline. From our vantage point in 2016, the way that weather lashes them is all the more poignant. Holman didn’t know it, but his play chronicles the last breaths Redcar took before Thatcher; we didn’t plan it, but we’re staging it in the first few months after the steel plant was shut down, the blast furnace turned off. Trapped in the amber of the script, something in the way the characters address the world seems to see it all coming, the way things will be out of their hands:

  JACK. We’re being told there’s a depression, I don’t see much of it about..

  I try to understand what I can.

  As Michael, the character whose life is most dramatically overturned by the big world in this story, has cause to reflect, most of life seems to go on without us all, far beyond our understanding or control: ‘You’re supposed to know the answer, aren’t you. When everything is put in its place. Well, at the end of the day I don’t know any more than I did before.’ Everyone in the play seems keenly aware of how much bigger the world is than their experience of it. You hear it in Martin’s observation of the cormorant in flight: ‘there’s no man on earth could do that.’ The marvellousness of what’s around Martin and the cloudiness besetting Michael’s understanding are the same thing, an apprehension of the vastness of their surroundings.

  From this insight, Holman weaves a study of the limits of lives, the way we’re bounded by circumstance into little more than a stone’s throw of experience. His characters dream:

  JACK. When I was a kid, I ’ad this dream. T’put all me stuff in a JCB an’ drive off. Roamin’ thee ole world. All I ’ad t’do was put a clean shirt in the scoop. Sounds daft dun it?

  But dreaming is all they ever plan to do about it.

  JACK. You know what I’m gonna tell my kiddies? About ambition? You see, it doesn’t matter if you do anythin’ about yer ambitions, so long as you’ve ’ad ’em. Then you’ve always got something to think about.

  Attempting to exceed one’s own little lot seems, on this spit of land and far from everything, like an act of breathless audacity. No one understands this with more urgency than Carol, cast by her environment as the supporter of her husband Jack. She tries to bring the good in him into the light, but can’t really be sure it’s the right thing she’s doing:

  CAROL. I sometimes feel I’m pushing you into things.

  JACK. Lamp posts?

  CAROL. You know what I mean.

  The play shows two young people encountering the outer limits of their dreaming for the first time, and wondering how they might be able to extend them; another man who has found ways to keep his dream life alive; and a man who hasn’t, who is lost in the quotidian, dragged deep under into worry and regret.

  What’s extraordinary about German Skerries is that this is just the beginning of the play’s achievement. By recording these dreamers, Holman is also performing an act of rescue, detailing ways of life that might disappear completely if he didn’t write them down, desire lines which appear on no other map of the world. Even within the confines of the play, the story that led to the rocks at the mouth of the Tees being called the German skerries is already vanishing, stored ‘in an archive somewhere’, known by very few. And I think he performs an act of politicised worship as well: in celebrating the small rituals and patterns of one culture, giving love to one world, he offers the idea that all lives and cultures are precious and important, to be celebrated in all the uniqueness of their different rhythms. Martin asks, ‘I often wonder why we have to be concerned with the way we all live – I don’t know why we don’t just get on with it.’ The play around him knows the answer. It is in concerning ourselves with the lives of others that we might see a way to living more completely. Holman’s play shows us people on the edge of life – on the brink and diving in, but also at the margin. For the duration of an evening at the theatre, he puts them at the centre of the world. And perhaps he asks us to consider that the double meaning I’m proposing for their marginality, the simultaneous sense of something precipitous and knife-edged and something far-flung, might be central to all our experiences of life: that we’re all adrift in the same boat.

  Barney Norris, 2016

  This edition is for David Eldridge.

  Thank you for your friendship.

  Characters

  MARTIN JONES, fifty-nine

  JACK WILLIAMS, twenty-three

  MICHAEL HADDAWAY, thirty-four

  CAROL WILLIAMS, twenty-three

  The play takes place on an area of rough land known as South Gare at the entrance of the River Tees. South Gare juts out into the North Sea.

  The Present Day

  SCENE ONE

  Friday 22 July

  SCENE TWO

  Saturday 23 July

  SCENE THREE

  Monday 8 August

  Scene One

  Grass, one or two stones, and some half-bricks from a low wall which is falling down. Near the wall is a wooden hut: painted on the door in white lettering, ‘Teesside Bird Club’, and scrawled down one side in aerosol paint, ‘Boro Boot Boys Rule’ and ‘Jack Charlton for Prime Minister’. An electricity cable runs through the air to the hut. Resting against the other side are two oars. Propped by the wall is an old battered rowing boat.

  July 22nd. A hot, humid, sticky afternoon.

  JACK WILLIAMS is sitting on the grass. He is twenty-three and is wearing dirty jeans, a white T-shirt and ICI working boots. He is a small, lightly built man. Beside him is a copy of The Hamlyn Guide to Birds of Britain and Europe , a pair of binoculars, a notepad and a bag of Fox’s Glacier Fruits. He is looking out to sea through his telescope.

  Behind him, beside the hut, is MARTIN JONES. He is fifty-nine and wearing a dark, baggy suit. He too is lightly built. He is resting a ladies’ bike agains
t the hut.

  JACK lowers his telescope for a moment. They see each other. JACK nods shyly.

  MARTIN. Hello.

  JACK looks through his telescope. MARTIN takes off his cycle clips and opens the saddlebag. He takes out an inflatable cushion and a pair of binoculars, puts the clips inside, and fastens it. The cushion and binoculars are on the ground. MARTIN stands for a moment. JACK lowers his telescope.

  Much about this afternoon?

  JACK. Not a lot like.

  MARTIN. It must be the weather that’s to blame. The fine weather.

  JACK. It’s a dead loss.

  MARTIN stands for a moment. JACK puts his telescope on the grass. MARTIN takes a Yale key from his pocket and tries to open the hut door. JACK watches him. Eventually the door opens. MARTIN pushes his bike inside. He comes out and closes the door.

  MARTIN. I always have the same trouble. I think it’s those young hoodlums. (Walking forward.) Trying to get in and whatnot. I wish they’d leave the hut alone.

  He is standing beside JACK.

  Have you been here long?

  JACK. ’Bout an hour.

  MARTIN walks back to the door and picks up the binoculars and cushion.

  (Pointing out to sea.) I’ve bin watchin’ that ship.

  MARTIN (walking back). Yes, I can see it. It will be waiting for the tide.

  JACK. Reckon so?

  MARTIN. Yes.

  JACK. I’ve seen yer bike before like. A’ve alwez wondered ’oose it was.

  MARTIN. Well it seems silly sometimes, it’s safe in the hut. I don’t walk very far, I’m more of a sitting-down man.

  JACK. Yeah.

  MARTIN. If nobody’s inside –

  A slight pause.

  JACK. What’s yer name?

  MARTIN. Martin.

  JACK. Jack or John, dependin’ which yer prefer. Yer not on the committee like?

  MARTIN. No.

  JACK. Yer not a snob then.

  MARTIN. No, I’m a common-or-garden me.

  JACK. Jus’ wondered – seein’ yer y’know. Yer don’ get many down on the Gare on a Fridi. People goyn out an’ that, f’the evenin’.

  MARTIN. The birdwatching hasn’t been very good.

  JACK. A thought it might ’ave been your duty.

  MARTIN. I’m not very active on that side of the club. I don’t know who is on today.

  JACK. No like?

  MARTIN. I’m glad – let other people get on with it. The world is full of other people who want to. I think you feel like me.

  JACK. A’m alwez gettin’ the wrong impression.

  MARTIN. Not to worry.

  MARTIN puts his cushion on the grass. JACK looks out to sea.

  JACK. ’E is bloody good, the captain o’that ship.

  MARTIN puts his binoculars round his neck.

  MARTIN. What’s he been getting up to?

  JACK. Look a’that – the way ’e keeps it still in the water.

  MARTIN looks through his binoculars for a brief moment.

  One o’the crew keeps runnin’ up an’ down the side. (Looking through his telescope.) I keep thinkin’ o’that joke – ’opin’ ’e’ll throw somethin’ over – and ’ave it come flyin’ back.

  MARTIN (smiling). Has he?

  JACK. No – a don’t give up though. I’m tryin’ a’put the thought in ’is mind.

  MARTIN. Why that? What about the poor sailor?

  JACK (still looking through his telescope). It’d be a laugh. ’E’s not gonna do it.

  JACK lowers his telescope. MARTIN picks up his cushion and starts to blow it up.

  Yer should see some of them foreigners down the docks. In the pubs. Puttin’ funny things in their beer. I drink Tartan mesel’ like – what they put in that would frighten yer. Blackcurrant and all bloody sorts.

  MARTIN holds the nozzle to stop the air coming out.

  MARTIN. That’s not very kind of you.

  JACK (thinking). I’n it?

  MARTIN blows another lungfull of air into the cushion.

  With all them. Spaniards and Poles, yer can’t get in some nights.

  MARTIN fastens the cushion.

  Not that I go anyway like – they’re so bloody rowdy – yer tekk yer life in yer hands.

  MARTIN. Well then.

  JACK. Every evenin’ ends in a fight down there.

  MARTIN puts his cushion on the grass.

  All the biggest coppers roamin’ about at ’alf past ten.

  MARTIN (sitting down). My legs are tired. D’you come here often, Jack?

  JACK. Now’n agen like.

  MARTIN. I do too.

  JACK. It’s good, isn’t it?

  MARTIN. Yes, it is. It’s very peaceful. It’s not very often I meet someone.

  JACK. No like?

  MARTIN. It is possible to wander on your own, which is what I like doing.

  JACK (shyly). Yes.

  A foghorn sounds from the distance.

  (Looking out to sea.) There she is – shiz movin’.

  MARTIN looks out to sea. JACK picks up his telescope and looks through it.

  There’s that bloke agen.

  MARTIN looks through his binoculars.

  See ’im? (Passing the telescope to MARTIN.) ’Ere, yer’ll get a better view with this.

  MARTIN looks through the telescope.

  MARTIN. He’s the pilot. (After a moment’s pause.) If you look the other side you can see a tug coming round.

  JACK looks through his binoculars.

  JACK. Eh, yer can.

  MARTIN. Now can you see the cable?

  JACK. Yeah.

  MARTIN. The tug will tow it in.

  JACK. Bloody great.

  A slight pause.

  ’E ’as to work for ’is money that guy – there ’e is agen. (After a moment’s pause. Excited.) Someone’s with ’im this time.

  The foghorn sounds from the distance.

  That’ll be the captain like?

  MARTIN lowers the telescope.

  MARTIN. I think the captain will be on the bridge.

  JACK (still looking). Yer reckon?

  A slight pause.

  Shiz movin’ anyway.

  MARTIN. It’s a Russian boat.

  JACK (to himself). Great.

  MARTIN. Here, have this. I’ve seen what I wanted to see.

  JACK takes the telescope, he looks through it.

  JACK. Ta.

  MARTIN. It’s a very careful operation bringing a boat that size in.

  JACK. D’yer know all about this?

  MARTIN. I’ve a friend who used to be a pilot.

  JACK. Yeah?

  A slight pause.

  MARTIN. D’you know about the German Skerries?

  The foghorn sounds, very loud.

  JACK (excited). Look a’that, thess another tug comin’ round! Fantastic!

  MARTIN. Can you see those rocks to your left? They’re the German Skerries.

  The foghorn sounds, very loud. JACK looks to his left.

  JACK. Yeah, I can.

  MARTIN. At high tide you can just see the tip of them. The pilot has to steer clear.

  A foghorn sounds, very loudly.

  JACK. I can see ’em now.

  MARTIN. At low tide you can see them far better.

  JACK looks back to the ship.

  That’s why Teesmouth is very dangerous – because of those rocks bang in the middle.

  JACK (excited). Yer wouldn’t believe it, would yer? Look a’the cables.

  MARTIN raises and looks through his binoculars for a brief moment.

  If one a’those snapped someone’d get it. A wouldn’t like it t’ be me.

  MARTIN (smiling). The captain doesn’t know he has an audience.

  JACK. You wouldn’t think it, would yer?

  MARTIN. What’s that?

  JACK. That two little tugs could pull a bloody great thing like that.

  MARTIN smiles. The foghorn sounds, more quietly. A slight pause.

  It’s comin’ up to
those rocks.

  He watches through his telescope in silence. MARTIN walks to the hut door and tries to open it with his key. Again he has difficulty. The door opens. The sound of a flute. It runs up through a scale. Sudden, short and snappy. Like the sound of a bird soaring into the sky.

  JACK moves quickly. He flops onto his back. With his feet in the air he makes a ‘V’ shape by crossing his ankles. The end of the telescope rests in this. He is like this for a split second.

  Cormorant.

  The cormorant flies above his head. He does a backward roll, ends in a standing position, his telescope still on the bird.

  (Excited.) Look at it go.

  MARTIN stumbles back to his binoculars, picks them up and looks. He finds the bird.

  Cormorant. Look a’that.

  A pause.

  It’s a divin’. I’nt it beautiful.

  A pause.

  It’s bombin’ the water. Look at it swoop.

  MARTIN. There’s no man on earth could do that.

  A pause.

  JACK. Oh man, look a’that – it’s caught a bloody eel!

  A slight pause.

  MARTIN. It’s a piece of wire.

  JACK (anxious). What’s it doin’?

  MARTIN. It’s a piece of wire, it’s got it fast in its stomach.

  A slight pause.

  JACK. Where’d it get that from?

  MARTIN. When it dived.

  JACK (quietly). Poor bugger.

  MARTIN moves quickly to his left, following the bird. He nearly stumbles over.

  MARTIN (excited). There it goes, it’s shaken it free.

  JACK follows it. They watch in silence for a moment.

  JACK. It’s landed on the German Skerries.

  The sound of the foghorn, quietly. A slight pause.

  The boats crossin’ ’em now.

  A slight pause.

  MARTIN. Look how it’s ruffling its feathers. It must be hurt.

  He lowers his binoculars and walks to the hut. The door is still open. JACK is watching the cormorant.

  JACK. It’s alright though.

  MARTIN takes a Thermos flask from his saddlebag. He leaves the door open.

  MARTIN. I’ve a flask of coffee. Would you like some?