David Hare Plays 2

by David Hare

  Peggy No, I don’t mind.

  She sweeps to her place, suddenly bitter, and sits down. Elaine smiles across at her.

  Elaine OK, darling?

  Angelis stands and surveys the whole scene. He nods at Stephen.

  Angelis Michael. Go on.

  There is a pause. Then Stephen, with the Script Girl beside him, starts quietly.

  Stephen ‘The thirst for ideals is at the very heart of things. We may say a people need ideals as they need bread. As great as the need for bread is the need for ideals.’

  Stephen walks up to where the other actors are. The Script Girl goes out, like a trainer leaving her athlete.

  ‘The writer serves that need. He should be happy to serve it.’

  He sits down opposite Mehta in formal debating position, and at once, as if on cue, Mehta gets up. SCENE EIGHT begins.

  Mehta What nonsense! I cannot listen to this man.

  Peggy Victor, you have agreed.

  Mehta I know, I know.

  Peggy It was you who insisted.

  Mehta I know what I have done … (He stands glowering across the room at Stephen.) I have tied myself to a night of stupidity. (He turns and walks away.) At lunchtime when you came to propose this confrontation, yes, I said, fine, because I knew I would win. As I shall win. Because my case is unarguably correct. But I had not reckoned –

  Peggy Victor!

  Mehta … on the sheer indignity. Even to have to listen to such peasant-like ideas.

  Stephen just smiles, calm, not rising to the bait.

  Stephen You speak all the time as if everything were decided. As if you, Victor Mehta, are a finished human being, and beneath you lies the world with all its intolerable imperfections. As if you were objective and had no part in its emotions. Yet some of its worst emotions you exhibit very clearly.

  Mehta Such as?

  Stephen Jealousy.

  Mehta What do you mean?

  Stephen If I mention a novelist, if I mention Graham Greene …

  Mehta A charlatan. Beneath contempt.

  Stephen Ah, well, you see. Exactly.

  Mehta What?

  Stephen Your views on other writers.

  Mehta No! An objective fact! A buffoon! A fool!

  Stephen You see! A ribbon of abuse. Pavlovian. At the very mention of the name.

  Mehta looks at him mistrustfully, caught out a little.

  Mehta So?

  Stephen So, in matters which truly concern you, you are far from objective. On the contrary, when things come too near to you, then you fight from your own corner …

  Mehta Like everyone.

  Stephen You fight those things that truly threaten you. In the way Greene threatens you because he is a good writer.

  Mehta Balls!

  Stephen In the way you will fight tomorrow for the right to make fiction. And why? Why do writers insist on their right to distort reality? You demand it in order to make better jokes.

  Mehta looks back at him. Then takes him on, beginning quietly.

  Mehta I was born in Bihar, of good family, my father a schoolteacher who died in middle age. My mother died when I was born. A brick-red, hot village on a plain. Baking in the sun. That was my life for fourteen years, seeking tuition where I could, seeking by the formulation of sentences not to escape from the reality into which I was born, but to set it in order. The setting of things in order, that has always been my aim.

  Stephen looks across to Peggy, but she is listening intently.

  It never occurred to me from that village that I should not one day seek civilization. The heroes of the world are its engineers, its doctors, its legislators – yes, there are things in the old Empire I admired, that I was bound to admire, because it is clear to any man born into boastful chaos that order is desirable, and the agents of that order must be practical men. I went to London, to the university there, to the country where once medicine, education, the law had been practised sans pareil, and found instead a country now full of sloth and complacency – oh yes, on that we’d agree – a deceitful, inward-looking ruling class blundering by its racialism and stupidity into Suez. This was bitter for a boy from an Indian village. (He shrugs slightly.) It seems when people become prosperous, they lose the urge to improve themselves. Anyone who comes new to a society, as I did, an immigrant, has his priorities clear: to succeed in that society, to seek practical achievement, to educate his children to the highest level. Yet somehow once one or two generations have established their success, their grandchildren rush the other way, to disown that success, to disown its responsibilities, to seek by dressing as savages and eating brown rice to discredit the very civilization their grandfathers worked so hard to create. This seems to me the ultimate cruelty …

  Peggy Yes …

  Mehta … the ultimate charade: that the young in the West should dare to turn their faces at this time to the Third World and cast doubt on the value of their own material prosperity. Not content with flaunting its wealth, the West now fashionably pretends that the materialism that has produced this wealth is not a good thing. Well, at least give us a chance to find out, say the poor. For God’s sake let us practise this contempt ourselves. Instead of sending the Third World doctors and mechanics, we now send them hippies, and Marxist thinkers, and animal conservationists, and ecologists, and wandering fake Zen Buddhist students, who hasten to reassure the illiterate that theirs is a superior life to that of the West. What hypocrisy! The marriage of the decadent with the primitive, the faithless with the barbarian. Reason overthrown, as it is now overthrown all over the world! An unholy alliance, approved, sanctified and financed by this now futile United Nations.

  Stephen Futile? Why futile?

  Mehta Futile because it no longer does any good. (He gets up again, shouting.) Words! Meaningless words! Documents! So many documents that they boast from New York alone there flow annually United Nations documents which, laid end to end at the Equator, would stretch four times round the world! Yes! Half a billion pages! And this … this week one of the year’s seven thousand major UN meetings. With working papers, proposals, counter-proposals, records, summaries. A bureaucracy drowning in its own words and suffocating in its own documents. The wastepaper basket is the only instrument of sanity in an otherwise insane organization. Last year a Special Committee on the Rationalization and Organization of the General Assembly was set up to examine the problems of excessive documentation. It produced a report. It was two hundred and nineteen pages long. I ask you, what fiction can there be to compare with this absurdity? What writer could dream up this impossible decadence? (He stands shaking his head.) No, there is only one thing I know, and one only: that in this universe of idiocy, the only thing we may rely on is the lone voice – the lone voice of the writer – who speaks only when he has something to say.

  Stephen Nonsense!

  Mehta A voice that is pledged to individual integrity.

  Stephen My God! What delusion!

  Elaine It is a bit rich.

  Mehta Why? (He turns. Firmly) Mankind has one enemy only and it is not poverty. It is self-deception. Yes … (He holds a hand up, anticipating Stephen’s objection.) That finally is my case against you, Stephen. If Miss le Fanu is to adjudicate …

  Elaine I am.

  Mehta Then please remember that my case stands or falls here: that often from the best intentions we tell ourselves lies. Here – my God! – a conference run by the United Nations is a monument built to commemorate self-deception on the grandest scale. We would like it to work and so we pretend it does, but in our hearts – when we are not on our feet, Stephen, not in rooms where words fly up – in our hearts we know the UN is a palace of lies, run by a bureaucracy whose only interest is in the maintenance of its own prosperity. Forty per cent of UNESCO’s income is spent in the administration of its own Paris office. A fact. A fact which I have mentioned in my books and for which I am attacked. I am told to point it out is bloody-minded and – what? – ‘unhelpful’. And yet to me, I am
telling you, not to point it out is worse. (He stands a moment, nodding.) Tomorrow I must speak because not to speak is not to be a writer, not to be a man. (Then he looks away to Stephen, opening his hands as if to say, ‘That’s it.’) That, there, is where I yield. I have had the floor.

  Stephen Indeed.

  Stephen looks at Mehta a moment. Then, when he replies, it is with a new and unsuspected warmth.

  We’ve pretended, you and I, that the debate between us is not to do with personality, only with issues …

  Mehta That’s so.

  Stephen But in fact, if I’ve learnt anything in the last twenty-four hours, it is that no argument is pure, it’s always a compound. Partly the situation, partly temper, partly whim … sometimes just pulled out of the air and often from the worst motives, Peggy, no offence …

  Peggy I understand. (She smiles.)

  Stephen I’ve grown up here. In this hotel. I came like a boy, a 27-year-old boy, and I can’t help feeling whichever way the contest falls, I’m going to leave a man, partly because I’ve grown fond of you, Victor.

  Mehta (deadpan) Really?

  Stephen And I think I’ve felt … some growing generosity from you, too, especially this evening. You’ve stopped calling me Andrews. You call me Stephen, perhaps because even if you don’t agree with me, you nevertheless now recognize me. Perhaps even as an element in yourself.

  Mehta A sentimental line of argument.

  Stephen Yes. If I am to win, I must attack the man.

  Peggy looks across to Mehta, slightly alarmed. But Mehta does not react.

  I am arguing that tomorrow you must go out and denounce your own fiction, because it will be your last remaining chance to rejoin the human race.

  A burst of reaction, even Mehta surprised.

  Mehta Oh, that’s marvellous.

  Peggy Gee, I must say.

  Mehta Well.

  Elaine It’s original.

  Stephen Everything you say, everything you propose is from a position of superiority and hopelessness. ‘What can one do?’ you say, grabbing at one depressing piece of information after another, almost – I put it to you – as if you personally were a man now frightened of hope.

  Mehta Absurd!

  Stephen Oh yes, the gleam that comes into your eye when you have some dismal statistic. ‘Sixty-five per cent of people who set out to cross roads get run over,’ you say with a satisfied beam, as if their presumption had been justly rewarded. Whereas you, of course … The position of the habitual non-road crosser has been wholly vindicated! (He gestures into the air.) From way up there you claim to see things clearly. ‘The truth,’ you say, ‘the lone voice.’ But in fact your so-called truthfulness is nothing but the projection of your own isolation, and of your own despair. Because you do a job which is lonely and hard, because you spend all day locked in a room, so you project your loneliness on to the world.

  Mehta No.

  Stephen Partly from anger at your own way of life, you try to discredit the work of other people – out there – a lot of whom have pleasanter jobs than you. (He pauses. Then, with a smile) Jealousy …

  Mehta No.

  Stephen There is jealousy there. The jealousy of a man who does not take part, who no longer knows how to take part, but can only write.

  Peggy looks across to Mehta, who has turned away.

  Oh yes. And the more you write, the more isolated you become. The more frozen.

  There is a pause.

  Mehta No.

  Stephen (smiles) You come here to this conference not to publicize your work, or to express your position – what would be the point? Your position is so complete, so closed, there is little point in expounding it. No, you come to scrape around – yes, like the rest of us, to scrape around for contact.

  A pause. Then Peggy suddenly seems embarrassed, confused.

  Peggy No, please, it’s …

  Stephen What?

  Peggy Unfair.

  Stephen Why?

  Stephen turns back, Mehta himself still impassive.

  Your wife, your child, you leave behind in England …

  He looks quickly to Peggy, who plainly knows nothing of wife or child.

  Oh yes. Come here. Five thousand miles. Make love to Peggy Whitton. Leave. The last emotions left. Jealousy, yes. And lust. What is left in you that is not disdainful, that is not dead? Only jealousy and lust.

  There is a silence. Elaine looks between them, warning.

  Elaine Look, Stephen …

  But Stephen is leaning forward to make his main point.

  Stephen You will never understand any struggle unless you take part in it. How easy to condemn this organization as absurd. Of course I’ve sat here and sweated and bitched and argued … often with Elaine …

  Elaine It’s true.

  Stephen I’ve run screaming from the points of order and the endless ‘I am mandated to ask …’ But why do you not think that at the centre of the verbiage, often only by hazard but nevertheless at times and unpredictably, crises are averted, aid is directed?

  Mehta I dare say.

  Stephen Why do you not imagine that if you stopped distancing yourself, if you got rid of your wretched fastidiousness, you could not lend yourself for once not to objection but to getting something done?

  Stephen sits back, contemptuous.

  Oh, no, it’s too hard. Never – the risk of failure too great. Like so many clever men, you move steadily to the right, further, further, distancing, always distancing yourself, building yourself a bunker into which only the odd woman is occasionally allowed, disowning your former ideals …

  Mehta You know nothing.

  Stephen … attacking those who still have those ideals with a ferocity which is way out of proportion to their crime.

  Mehta is suddenly stirred.

  Mehta No!

  Stephen Yes! Well, move, move to the right if you wish to. Join the shabby crew if you want to. Go in the way people do. But at least spare us the books, spare us the Stations of the Cross, the public announcements. Make your move in private, do it in private, like a sexual pervert, do it privately. Move with a mac over your knee to the right, but spare us, spare your audience, spare those who have to watch one good man after another go down.

  Peggy Stephen, it is too much.

  Elaine Please.

  Stephen No! (He has stood up.) The revenge of the old! All the time! The history of the world is the revenge of the old, as they paint themselves into corners, loveless, removed, relieved occasionally in hotel rooms by the visits of strange women, who come to tell them that, yes, they are doing well and, yes, they may now take revenge on those who are still young. People, countries, the same thing; the world now full of young countries who are trying imperfect, unwieldy new systems of ordering their affairs, watched by the old who are praying that they will not succeed … (He shakes his head. Then suddenly) If you wish to rejoin us, if you wish to be human, go out tomorrow and parrot whatever rubbish you are handed and at least experience an emotion which is not disdain.

  Mehta I would not give you the pleasure.

  Stephen I shall not be here.

  Mehta What?

  Stephen A midnight train leaves for Ahmadabad and on to Jaipur. Frankly … (He smiles and crosses the room.) … my time is being wasted here.

  Elaine Stephen …

  Stephen has collected his abandoned briefcase.

  Peggy What are you doing?

  Stephen has turned to Peggy.

  Stephen Peggy, I’m sorry. Your offer, it was kind, more than tempting. But all afternoon, all evening, I realized … also absurd. My own fault. For years I’ve apologized. A shambler, a neurotic, I’ve accepted the picture the world has of an idealist as a man who is necessarily a clown. No shortage of people to tell him he’s a fool. And we accept this picture. Yes, we betray our instincts. We betray them because we’re embarrassed, and we’ve lost our conviction that we can make what’s best in us prevail. (He smiles, his briefcase closed, and he is
now ready to go.) Well, enough – I’m sorry –

  Peggy (smiles) Stephen …

  Stephen … of all that. (He takes her hand a moment.) No more apology. Hold to my beliefs. (He turns to Elaine.) Elaine, I owe you lunch.

  Elaine (getting up to embrace him) Stephen …

  Stephen Thank you. Send my best to America. I withdraw from the contest. What you must do only you can decide.

  He turns and goes out. The three of them left behind. There is silence. Mehta looks down at the envelope in his hand. Toys with it a moment.

  Mehta (darkly) I should not have come here. I am going upstairs.

  He goes out. The two women are left alone on the stage. Peggy looks down.

  Peggy Now I’m going to get drunk.

  And as she looks up, the lights fade to darkness, as much like a film fade as possible. There is a pause in the dark. Then the sound of banging at the back. From far away Mehta’s voice, a stick beating at the door, and SCENE NINE has begun.

  Mehta Hello. Please. Is there anyone?

  At once, in the darkness, the sound of an Assistant scurrying across the set.

  Assistant Coming! Coming!

  At the very back of the stage, far further than we realized the stage reached, a door opens, and brilliant light pours through it. Silhouetted in the doorway stands Mehta.

  Mehta I am Victor Mehta.

  Assistant Ah, yes. You were expected earlier. (He turns, panicking slightly.) Everyone! Please! Is there a light there? (He turns to Mehta.) Please wait.

  Mehta I am waiting.

  A single light comes on in the grid and we see the stage is now black. An empty film studio. Angelis is rushing on, in the last stages of pulling his trousers up.

  Angelis Ah, my goodness, you are here. We were expecting you earlier.

  Mehta has come right down. He is a more formidable man in a camelhair coat, heavier, less dapper. Angelis shakes his hand.

  An honour.

  Mehta You are pulling on your trousers.

  Angelis A friend. (He elaborates needlessly, embarrassed.) In make-up.

  Mehta I see.

  Angelis A drink?

  An Assistant has brought a chair, but Mehta has wandered away.

  Mehta Mr Angelis, I cannot pretend I am glad to come here.