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Sample Scene
Sweeney slowly turns around, staring at his accusers and struck dumb.
Cleric, Hag & Trickster
Resign! Resign! Resign!
Sweeney cowers to the ground, dropping his badges of office one after another – his mobile, organiser, briefcase, laptop. His suit and cards are stolen by Trickster. Stripped, he is wearing a tailed shirt with feathers and boxer shorts
The Journey
Sweeney slowly stands, then suddenly explodes, kicking over the chairs at random
Sweeney
Bastards – two faced bastards. They were laughing at me.
Stripped of everything how can I return? No car, no money, no reputation, no
lifestyle. He who goes home is laughed at, pitied – and I will not be pitied. I loath
them all… yet not Eorann – but what will she see in me now – half a man? I fly to
wander like a binless baglady out across the world, filled with loathing for those
places known to me and yearning for those I have yet to reach.
Music
Sweeney runs a circuit of the auditorium
Running, running, running on pavements too hard for my bare feet – open up my wings to fly across the bushy clefts of tower blocks and the roofy valleys of the penthouses. Clinging to the chimney crags, I scoop birdcrumbs in my bare hands. I scrabble up the icy windows of the corporate banks.
No longer human I must fly from everything I hold to be of worth, and hide my face
where no-one will remember me. Better to have died than be stripped… of my
position.
Here I shall go mad and hallucinate a different person. Here I shall sway in the cold
gale, perched upon a mobile phone transmission mast.
Hag enters, removing her shawl to become Eorann. Sweeney watches from his perch, but they cannot see him
Eorann
I knew he would leave me. He was bored with me. Better madness than losing him to someone else. I knew, when he drove to that meeting he would not be coming home.
Trickster and Cleric enter, whispering together, ignoring Eorann.
Trickster
Who would have thought he had it in him? To make an exhibition of himself like that!
Cleric
He must undergo treatment, and be made to see the error of his ways
Eorann
Come back Sweeney. Who cares what others think.
Sweeney
I do.
Cleric
He’ll conform in the end. They always do.
Trickster
To live a life ruled by bells
Cleric
He can’t go far. They will trace him by his card withdrawals.
He can’t survive without money
Trickster waves the wallet he has palmed
Trickster
He's lost his cards already
Cleric and Trickster exit laughing, arm in arm
Sweeney
The man you seek
Sits on a howling mast
You shall not catch him
He will fly to the west
Trickster re-enters and settles down to watch. Sweeney swings madly around his pole
A jilted lover of the City,
Devotion addled into hate,
Seeks that which he hereto loathed
The wilderness
To escape from people
Is my one desire
To hollow out the depths
Where no-one goes
Trickster
The secret clearing in the wood
Where nuthatch and the laughing woodpecker
Consume nothing but-
Grubs
Sweeney
Your entrance?
Trickster
Yes, this is my entrance,
Wild man of the woods
Sweeney
Am I mad? Do I dream my flying?
Trickster
This is real –
This is the dreamworld, the otherworld, your dreamtime
Fly with me to the far west
With only memories of what you were before,
Living a life out of time –
Mad Sweeney
Sweeney
My feet leave no print upon the grass
Only by dewbrush
Can you trace my passing
Trickster
Out across the stricken cornfields
Bleached by greed
Waiting for Parsifal to save the Fisher King
And make the wasteland bloom
Fly Sweeney fly.
Fly with the wild geese through the people of the world.
Fly to the otherworlds.
Sweeney
Field and wood, bog and mountain
Never shall I find rest
But fly away from myself
Trickster
The drained marsh, nitrogen green
The sheep hammered upland wood
Everywhere the print of man
Save fair Glen Bolcáin where the madmen roam
Living upon Watercress
Sweeney
Howling, biting flies the wind to Glenn Bolcáin
Madmen geese whirl darkly as a man rips watercress beneath its waters
The spring floats on rough rocks,
Green dripping.
Whiffling feathers drop the geese to land in safety in the foxfree undergrowth
Trickster
Damp bottomed on their island in the pool, the ticking clock
within them whispers Arctic Arctic Arctic Arctic
But the green man shovels watercress into his green mouth
He thinks not of goals, only travel
A man must eat a lot of watercress to stay alive,
Even a madman
By the spring he rants and raves, naked save for his imagined feathers,
Sweeney
The geese stir
Someone shot at them today
Trickster
A sane farmer protecting his income in his field of winter
wheat
This spring in the frantic ticking summer of the Arctic, a gander
will search out a younger mate
No time for sadness, only eggs
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