THREE MAIN PLAYING AREAS:
Andy’s bedroom – well furnished.
Fred’s bedroom – shabby.
(These rooms are in different locations.)
An area in which Bridget appears, through which Andy moves at night and where Jake, Fred and Bridget play their scene.
Moonlight was first performed at the Almeida Theatre, London, on 7 September 1993. The cast was as follows:
ANDY Ian Holm
BEL Anna Massey
JAKE Douglas Hodge
FRED Michael Sheen
MARIA Jill Johnson
RALPH Edward de Souza
BRIDGET Claire Skinner
Directed by David Leveaux
Designed by Bob Crowley
BRIDGET in faint light.
BRIDGET
I can’t sleep. There’s no moon. It’s so dark. I think I’ll go downstairs and walk about. I won’t make a noise. I’ll be very quiet. Nobody will hear me. It’s so dark and I know everything is more silent when it’s dark. But I don’t want anyone to know I’m moving about in the night. I don’t want to wake my father and mother. They’re so tired. They have given so much of their life for me and for my brothers. All their life, in fact. All their energies and all their love. They need to sleep in peace and wake up rested. I must see that this happens. It is my task. Because I know that when they look at me they see that I am all they have left of their life.
Andy’s bedroom.
ANDY in bed. BEL sitting.
She is doing embroidery.
ANDY
Where are the boys? Have you found them?
BEL
I’m trying.
ANDY
You’ve been trying for weeks. And failing. It’s enough to make the cat laugh. Do we have a cat?
BEL
We do.
ANDY
Is it laughing?
BEL
Fit to bust.
ANDY
What at? Me, I suppose.
BEL
Why would your own dear cat laugh at you? That cat who was your own darling kitten when she was young and so were you, that cat you have so dandled and patted and petted and loved, why should she, how could she, laugh at her master? It’s not remotely credible.
ANDY
But she’s laughing at someone?
BEL
She’s laughing at me. At my ineptitude. At my failure to find the boys, at my failure to bring the boys to their father’s deathbed.
ANDY
Well that’s more like it. You are the proper target for a cat’s derision. And how I loved you.
Pause.
What a wonderful woman you were. You had such a great heart. You still have, of course. I can hear it from here. Banging away.
Pause.
BEL
Do you feel anything? What do you feel? Do you feel hot? Or cold? Or both? What do you feel? Do you feel cold in your legs? Or hot? What about your fingers? What are they? Are they cold? Or hot? Or neither cold nor hot?
ANDY
Is this a joke? My God, she’s taking the piss out of me. My own wife. On my deathbed. She’s as bad as that fucking cat.
BEL
Perhaps it’s my convent school education but the term ‘taking the piss’ does leave me somewhat nonplussed.
ANDY
Nonplussed! You’ve never been nonplussed in the whole of your voracious, lascivious, libidinous life.
BEL
You may be dying but that doesn’t mean you have to be totally ridiculous.
ANDY
Why am I dying, anyway? I’ve never harmed a soul. You don’t die if you’re good. You die if you’re bad.
BEL
We girls were certainly aware of the verb ‘to piss’, oh yes, in the sixth form, certainly. I piss, you piss, she pisses, et cetera.
ANDY
We girls! Christ!
BEL
The term ‘taking the piss’, however, was not known to us.
ANDY
It means mockery! It means to mock. It means mockery! Mockery! Mockery!
BEL
Really? How odd. Is there a rational explanation to this?
ANDY
Rationality went down the drain donkey’s years ago and hasn’t been seen since. All that famous rationality of yours is swimming about in waste disposal turdology. It’s burping and farting away in the cesspit for ever and ever. That’s destiny speaking, sweetheart! That was always the destiny of your famous rational intelligence, to choke to death in sour cream and pigswill.
BEL
Oh do calm down, for goodness sake.
ANDY
Why? Why?
Pause.
What do you mean?
Fred’s bedroom.
FRED in bed. JAKE in to him.
JAKE
Brother.
FRED
Brother.
JAKE sits by the bed.
JAKE
And how is my little brother?
FRED
Cheerful though gloomy. Uneasily poised.
JAKE
All will be well. And all manner of things shall be well.
Pause.
FRED
What kind of holiday are you giving me this year? Art or the beach?
JAKE
I would think a man of your calibre needs a bit of both.
FRED
Or nothing of either.
JAKE
It’s very important to keep your pecker up.
FRED
How far up?
JAKE
Well … for example … how high is a Chinaman?
FRED
Quite.
JAKE
Exactly.
Pause.
FRED
You were writing poems when you were a mere child, isn’t that right?
JAKE
I was writing poems before I could read.
FRED
Listen. I happen to know that you were writing poems before you could speak.
JAKE
Listen! I was writing poems before I was born.
FRED
So you would say you were the real thing?
JAKE
The authentic article.
FRED
Never knowingly undersold.
JAKE
Precisely.
Silence.
FRED
Listen. I’ve been thinking about the whole caboodle. I’ll tell you what we need. We need capital.
JAKE
I’ve got it.
FRED
You’ve got it?
JAKE
I’ve got it.
FRED
Where did you find it?
JAKE
Divine right.
FRED
Christ.
JAKE
Exactly.
FRED
You’re joking.
JAKE
No, no, my father weighed it all up carefully the day I was born.
FRED
Oh, your father? Was he the one who was sleeping with your mother?
JAKE
He weighed it all up. He weighed up all the pros and cons and then without further ado he called a meeting. He called a meeting of the trustees of his estate, you see, to discuss all these pros and cons. My father was a very thorough man. He invariably brought the meetings in on time and under budget and he always kept a weather eye open for blasphemy, gluttony and buggery.
FRED
He was a truly critical force?
JAKE
He was not in it for pleasure or glory. Let me make that quite clear. Applause came not his way. Nor did he seek it. Gratitude came not his way. Nor did he seek it. Masturbation came not his way. Nor did he seek it. I’m sorry – I meant approbation came not his way –
FRED
Oh, didn’t it really?
JAKE
Nor did he seek it.
Pause.
�d like to apologise for what I can only describe as a lapse in concentration.
FRED
It can happen to anybody.
Pause.
JAKE
My father adhered strictly to the rule of law.
FRED
Which is not a very long way from the rule of thumb.
JAKE
Not as the crow flies, no.
FRED
But the trustees, I take it, could not, by any stretch of the imagination, be described as a particularly motley crew?
JAKE
Neither motley nor random. They were kept, however, under strict and implacable scrutiny. They were allowed to go to the lavatory just one and a half times a session. They evacuated to a timeclock.
FRED
And the motion was carried?
JAKE
The motion was carried, nine votes to four, Jorrocks abstaining.
FRED
Not a pretty sight, by the sound of it.
JAKE
The vicar stood up. He said that it was a very unusual thing, a truly rare and unusual thing, for a man in the prime of his life to leave – without codicil or reservation – his personal fortune to his newborn son the very day of that baby’s birth – before the boy had had a chance to say a few words or aspire to the unknowable or cut for partners or cajole the japonica or tickle his arse with a feather –
FRED
Whose arse?
JAKE
It was an act, went on the vicar, which, for sheer undaunted farsightedness, unflinching moral resolve, stern intellectual vision, classic philosophical detachment, passionate religious fervour, profound emotional intensity, bloodtingling spiritual ardour, spellbinding metaphysical chutzpah – stood alone.
FRED
Tantamount to a backflip in the lotus position.
JAKE
It was an act, went on the vicar, without a vestige of lust but with any amount of bucketfuls of lustre.
FRED
So the vicar was impressed?
JAKE
The only one of the trustees not impressed was my Uncle Rufus.
FRED
Now you’re telling me you had an uncle called Rufus. Is that what you’re telling me?
JAKE
Uncle Rufus was not impressed.
FRED
Why not? Do I know the answer? I think I do. I think I do. Do I?
Pause.
JAKE
I think you do.
FRED
I think so too. I think I do.
JAKE
I think so too.
Pause.
FRED
The answer is that your father was just a little bit short of a few krugerrands.
JAKE
He’d run out of pesetas in a pretty spectacular fashion.
FRED
He had, only a few nights before, dropped a packet on the pier at Bognor Regis.
JAKE
Fishing for tiddlers.
FRED
His casino life had long been a lost horizon.
JAKE
The silver pail was empty.
FRED
As was the gold.
JAKE
Nary an emerald.
FRED
Nary a gem.
JAKE
Gemless in Wall Street –
FRED
To the bank with fuck-all.
JAKE
Yes – it must and will be said – the speech my father gave at that trustees meeting on that wonderfully soft summer morning in the Cotswolds all those years ago was the speech either of a mountebank – a child – a shyster – a fool – a villain –
FRED
Or a saint.
MARIA to them. JAKE stands.
MARIA
Do you remember me? I was your mother’s best friend. You’re both so tall. I remember you when you were little boys. And Bridget of course. I once took you all to the Zoo, with your father. We had tea. Do you remember? I used to come to tea, with your mother. We drank so much tea in those days! My three are all in terribly good form. Sarah’s doing marvellously well and Lucien’s thriving at the Consulate and as for Susannah, there’s no stopping her. But don’t you remember the word games we all used to play? Then we’d walk across the Common. That’s where we met Ralph. He was refereeing a football match. He did it, oh I don’t know, with such aplomb, such command. Your mother and I were so … impressed. He was always ahead of the game. He knew where the ball was going before it was kicked. Osmosis. I think that’s the word. He’s still as osmotic as anyone I’ve ever come across. Much more so, of course. Most people have no osmotic quality whatsoever. But of course in those days – I won’t deny it – I had a great affection for your father. And so had your mother – for your father. Your father possessed little in the way of osmosis but nor did he hide his blushes under a barrel. I mean he wasn’t a pretender, he didn’t waste precious time. And how he danced. How he danced. One of the great waltzers. An elegance and grace long gone. A firmness and authority so seldom encountered. And he looked you directly in the eye. Unwavering. As he swirled you across the floor. A rare gift. But I was young in those days. So was your mother. Your mother was marvellously young and quickening every moment. I – I must say – particularly when I saw your mother being swirled across the floor by your father – felt buds breaking out all over the place. I thought I’d go mad.
Andy’s room.
ANDY
I’ll tell you something about me. I sweated over a hot desk all my working life and nobody ever found a flaw in my working procedures. Nobody ever uncovered the slightest hint of negligence or misdemeanour. Never. I was an inspiration to others. I inspired the young men and women down from here and down from there. I inspired them to put their shoulders to the wheel and their noses to the grindstone and to keep faith at all costs with the structure which after all ensured the ordered government of all our lives, which took perfect care of us, which held us to its bosom, as it were. I was a first-class civil servant. I was admired and respected. I do not say I was loved. I didn’t want to be loved. Love is an attribute no civil servant worth his salt would give house room to. It’s redundant. An excrescence. No no, I’ll tell you what I was. I was an envied and feared force in the temples of the just.
BEL
But you never swore in the office?
ANDY
I would never use obscene language in the office. Certainly not. I kept my obscene language for the home, where it belongs.
Pause.
Oh there’s something I forgot to tell you. I bumped into Maria the other day, the day before I was stricken. She invited me back to her flat for a slice of plumduff. I said to her, If you have thighs prepare to bare them now.
BEL
Yes, you always entertained a healthy lust for her.
ANDY
A healthy lust? Do you think so?
BEL
And she for you.
ANDY
Has that been the whisper along the white sands of the blue Caribbean? I’m dying. Am I dying?
BEL
If you were dying you’d be dead.
ANDY
How do you work that out?
BEL
You’d be dead if you were dying.
ANDY
I sometimes think I’m married to a raving lunatic! But I’m always prepared to look on the sunny side of things. You mean I’ll see spring again? I’ll see another spring? All the paraphernalia of flowers?
BEL
What a lovely use of language. You know, you’ve never used language in such a way before. You’ve never said such a thing before.
ANDY
Oh so what? I’ve said other things, haven’t I? Plenty of other things. All my life. All my life I’ve been saying plenty of other things.
BEL
Yes, it’s quite true that all your life in all your personal and social attachments the language you employed was mai
nly coarse, crude, vacuous, puerile, obscene and brutal to a degree. Most people were ready to vomit after no more than ten minutes in your company. But this is not to say that beneath this vicious some would say demented exterior there did not exist a delicate even poetic sensibility, the sensibility of a young horse in the golden age, in the golden past of our forefathers.
Silence.
ANDY
Anyway, admit it. You always entertained a healthy lust for Maria yourself. And she for you. But let me make something quite clear. I was never jealous. I was not jealous then. Nor am I jealous now.
BEL
Why should you be jealous? She was your mistress. Throughout the early and lovely days of our marriage.
ANDY
She must have reminded me of you.
Pause.
The past is a mist.
Pause.
Once … I remember this … once … a woman walked towards me across a darkening room.
Pause.
BEL
That was me.
Pause.
ANDY
You?
Third area.
Faint light. BRIDGET.
BRIDGET
I am walking slowly in a dense jungle. But I’m not suffocating. I can breathe. That is because I can see the sky through the leaves.
Pause.
I’m surrounded by flowers. Hibiscus, oleander, bougainvillea, jacaranda. The turf under my feet is soft.
Pause.
I crossed so many fierce landscapes to get here. Thorns, stones, stinging nettles, barbed wire, skeletons of men and women in ditches. There was no hiding there. There was no yielding. There was no solace, no shelter.
Pause.
But here there is shelter. I can hide. I am hidden. The flowers surround me but they don’t imprison me. I am free. Hidden but free. I’m a captive no longer. I’m lost no longer. No one can find me or see me. I can be seen only by eyes of the jungle, eyes in the leaves. But they don’t want to harm me.
Pause.
There is a smell of burning. A velvet odour, very deep, an echo like a bell.
Pause.
No one in the world can find me.
Fred’s bedroom.
FRED and JAKE, sitting at a table.
JAKE
What did you say your name was? I’ve made a note of it somewhere.
FRED
Macpherson.
JAKE
That’s funny. I thought it was Gonzalez. I would be right in saying you were born in Tooting Common?
FRED
I came here at your urgent request. You wanted to consult me.
JAKE
Did I go that far?
FRED
When I say ‘you’ I don’t of course mean you. I mean ‘they’.