KAOS Theatre
Here are some videos of productions that I have directed, written and adapted over my years with KAOS. Thanks to Phil Morle for working out how to convert them into Brightcove.
Copy the code and embed where you like.
« July 2006 | Main | September 2006 »
August 18, 2006
August 11, 2006
Old Bull
Here's a re-write of that OLD BULL story. I think this is better.
OLD BULL
Peek in through the key hole. In the distance Harry is in bed with Helena. There is only a sheet on the bed. Under the sheet Harry and Helena are naked. The sheet is as wrinkled as Harry’s skin, but on her it is as pale as child’s unexposed skin to the sun. If this was her first sunlight it would burn her raw, ready for that brown mole itch in later years. Doctor’s cancer gloom. But he has the brown spots and they are called age. And he can’t sleep, just sips from a nightlong glass of gin and tonic.
When she stirs he looks down and offers an egg for breakfast, “I’ll call down and they’ll bring one up.” But she says nothing. “It ain’t no bother, you want a dippy egg?” He can not help but speak to her as a child. But still her head to the pillow, not a word. She is still to creep back into her ear from her white pillowed cloud.
He breathes out impatiently and drops his glass, it splashes on her and the bed like a cheap cum shot, gonzo hand held porn. Fuck e says, fuck.
She looks at him. Her face does not change expression. “I’ll get something”
She goes to the table in the corner of the room. She takes out a cigarette from a packet lying there. She puts it to her lips and lights it. Dry pollution into the dawn, it makes her wince. Harry is watching her. She walks into the bathroom. There is flannel beside the sink. She picks it up. She sees herself in the mirror. She looks at herself. She is tired. Amazing, she’s tied to that bed. But the bed is more like a thing with its own engine, a cab out at all hours. She walks back into the room.
Harry has got out of bed. He has spent too much time in the pool, it seems, so his skin has flapped, his frame diminished like shrink fits, an old male walrus body without the fat. He walks over to the table and pours himself another drink. He watches her as she begins to mop up his spillage. He doesn’t have much respect for the room, “you don’t need to do that”.
“It’ll smell”.
“It’s vodka. It doesn’t smell.”
She will change the sheets anyway, which he does not know, but she is fastidious when it comes to cleaning. And on top of this she will have several showers today. She could never have a tan, this girl, never.
Harry takes a cigarette from the packet and lights it. He takes a long drag, “I’d better be off,” he says.
“OK’. She sits on the side of the bed and watches him. She is puffing away too. Their lungs mix if nothing else. He enjoys this, like the commercial, that Marlboro moment for time passing which makes the moment last, this long, long, old moment. He doesn’t see a bed there but a river then a rolling a field. He’s on that bank naked with her, in the secretive haze of the sun, brazen and young. But the room is a fog. He coughs himself back into old age.
Harry’s voice is on his chest and his breathing is heavy, “let me leave you some money”.
She looks at his flaccid party balloon, “leave it at the door”.
“You sure?”
“Yes.”
He looks at her breasts. They seem less somehow, “you should get out more. You’re looking pale. When was the last time you went out?”
“I went out yesterday, Harry.”
“Where did you go?”
She looks at the floor, she’s stuck to it like Spiderman shrinking from bullets into the wall. On this question her honesty is the bullets. “Shopping.”
“You should let me buy you something,” he says, flicking his voice like ash into an ashtray.
She smiles with out aiming at him, “that would be nice”.
“What would you like?”
“A surprise.”
“I could get you some new clothes.”
She pulls on her cigarette, it will burn out soon, it crackles.
He glances over to her light brown splintered wardrobe. Perhaps it is less anorexic on the inside, “something to go with what you already have.”
She looks at the frosted hair on his muscle less chest before his face. “Get me some pants, Harry.”
He takes a sip from his glass and then smiles. “What is it with women and pants?”
“They’ll make you happy, Harry.”
“What kind of pants would you like?”
“I don’t know. You choose.”
He looks at her. “Ok.”
Helena gets up from the bed and walks into the bathroom. She rinses the flannel out in the sink. She at looks at herself in the mirror. How many times today will she look into that mirror, her hair sometimes spruced, and then again reduced. She does not look anymore awake than she did before. She cannot work it out.
Harry appears in the doorway. He looks at her. Takes her in. She is pale un-exercised “you’re a pretty girl. You’re in your prime.”
She smiles into the weary reflection, “am I”?
“Yeah. You have a perfect little body.”
“Have I?”
“Yeah. I like its shape. You must work out.”
“I’m all natural Harry.”
“You got nice tight tits. Perfect.”
“Are they?”
“Yeah.”
“I think they’re bit small.”
“That’s what I like. Never been into big tits. If ya don’t want kids what use are big tits.”
Helena looks at her breasts, sizes one of them up with her hand. “I wouldn’t mind bigger ones.”
“They won’t work for me, so don’t bother.”
“Don’t bother what?”
“Getting the op. You got nice tits, you don’t want fucking udders.”
She looks at him through the mirror. Time stops for no man. Time will be hers and like she says she’s all natural, there is nothing that a bit of time won’t give her. When he’s banging on the walls of his coffin she’ll still be here, banging, Fatter though, with bigger tits. Huge ones. She wants to mature and have veins in them. These men that she now suckles make such demands.
His gaze drops to the floor for a moment looking for that reason to stay and he catches sight of his toenails and before he knows it he remembers that dreadful act of trimming, trimming toenails, dead matter flicking to the floor, clicking off the scissors, yellow with a sand paper fray. Toenails continue to grow after death, yes, break through the coffin roof, “I’ve got to go to work”.
She looks at his lack of mass in the mirror, “why don’t you stay”?
“I can’t.”
“You could stay a little longer.”
“I wish I could.”
She raises her eyebrows into the mirror, observing herself, floating nose to nose, she could be dead and looking in. “We could do something nice”.
He smiles, but he sees those corpse’s feet.
She tries again, “we could lie in bed all day long”.
He drains his glass, the long night last drop. “I’d better go.”
He goes back into the bedroom and begins to dress. He puts on a pair of boxer shorts. They seem bigger than him.
She stands in the doorway, “here, let me”. She picks up his neatly folded trousers from the chair in the corner and then walks over to him. She holds out the trousers. He steps into them. She pulls them up. She begins to do up his zip and then starts to fondle his groin. She looks into his eyes, “stay”.
“No. I’ve got a fucking headache.” And he has, life in Armageddon, fighting for his self, which has found a fissure, Yellowstone screaming steam. Began as a hairline ten years before. Ten years. How can a year tighten around you so slowly you hardly notice? How?
She pulls his penis out like she's pulling out his wallet.
“I ain’t got time.”
She starts to kiss it.
He looks down on her. He breaths out. His flat chest rises twice. Heavy. He is old but desire has not left him. He dreams of the day that he wakes up and he is abandoned by his sex drive. To be left to concentrate on smoking cigarettes and drinking. To walk down to the corner shop and just purchase a packet and not want to run his hands over the girl, the child behind the counter. All these children. Everyone looks a child to him now.
Helena does it for him. She does it in the way that he watches his porn, face full of eyes and lips, young bodies, perfect swapping spit and semen, night after lonely night, hidden away, all opposite, that little peek hole in his monitor. What did he do before his computer? “Oh go on. If you’re quick.”
She drops his organ, fumbles it, “you have a problem with mornings”?
“It was a long night.”
She looks into his eyes and then takes his penis in her hands, her magic curative palms “have a lie in Harry.”
“I can’t.”
“You can be late for work.”
He breathes out but he can’t get it up.
She rubs him, “it’d be nice.
He is embarrassed by his cock. “I’d better go.”
“You can’t drive Harry, you’ve been drinking all night.”
“I got the bus.” He looks down at his cock, wishing it up. It’s those dead toenails and the thought of that belly.
She has him in her hands, “I’ve some way to go yet, Harry”.
He looks at the striped red and white wallpaper, faded Wonka candy, “I can’t concentrate.”
“What’s there to concentrate on.”
He feels desperate, his heart bursting, more steam gushing “At my age, babe, everything takes that little bit more.”
“I’ve never noticed your age Harry.”
That can never be true.
“You’re not old. I’m just young.”
He sits on the edge of the bed, eyes moistened to the truth. “If you listen carefully, sweetheart, you’ll hear my cock creaking.”
Sometimes she can look so hard, unfeeling, words just bouncing off her, hardened to sympathy like the punch proof helmet she always wished she had.
He looks into her eyes, “I bet you thought it was this shitty bed”.
“It only creaks a little bit, Harry.”
“Yeah, well, there you go.
The striped walls bend in and out, giving the illusion that for a moment the walls expand before they snap shut, solid steel tight, the room is a cage and he’ll have to knock to let himself out. “Oh go on, Harry. Go on. Fuck off. I want to go to bed. Leave ya money at the door.”
He hates being sworn at, it always hurts him. “Come on. Don’t be like that.”
“Like what, mate.”
“Like that.”
“I’m not doing anything.”
“Well that’s the nail on the head, love.”
“Ya going, or staying?”
He re-calls words and moving pictures, orders that soften a women’s mind before their cunt, hard talk, street denigration, filth, “kiss my cock and we’ll see.”
“Fuck off, Harry. I’m going back to bed.”
He walks over to the table and pours himself another drink. He looks back at Helena lying on the bed, “Christ, sometimes I forget how small you are.”
She turns away from him.
He looks at his glass and then down to his cock. This is his one life, this moment will never repeat itself, so he softens to it. Hell, why leave, what’s a half hour extra at his age? Next week he might not be able to get it up, this need will be gone. It might all be a memory, this libido of his. “How about that old whore’s breakfast?”
Helena listens to the sound of a motorcycle shoot by. When it is at a distance she turns over. “Go on then, pull it out.”
“You could be more enticing.”
She has an errant look in her eye, Christ, does he think she hasn’t lived. “So”?
“I’m trying to be nice,” he says.
“I’m not your wife, Harry.”
“It doesn’t work on my wife.”
“Then you ain’t trying hard enough.”
“You don’t know her.”
“Well, maybe you should try harder mate. Get her some flowers.”
“I do that fucking anyway.”
“Get her something else, then.”
He looks at her. He looks at the floor. “I’m all out of ideas.”
She looks at him. “You might need to change that.”
“Yeah?”
“Yes, mate.”
He hates his wife, it wasn’t always like that, but she swears “well what should I get her”?
“Get her a pair of nice pants. Something like that.”
He bites his lip.
“A nice pair of silk pants. She’ll appreciate it.”
“She might, I won’t.”
“Why not?”
“You ain’t seen her, love.”
“That ain’t the point, Harry. It’ll make her feel different about herself. It’ll make her think that you see her as she sees herself inside and that’s different to the thing we look at in the mirror everyday. It’ll make her feel special. And if you do that to her, it’ll rub off. It’ll rub off on you.”
He looks at her for a long while and then his eyes drop to the floor. “But she looks like shit, sweetheart. She’ll just squidge out of those pants.”
Helena fingers his fat, “I like a bit of squidge”.
“There’s squidge and then there’s squidge, love, and my wife’s a fucking tyre.” A tyre that can’t bend over for herself. A tyre that struggles with a wounded hip. A tyre that swears and abuses. A tyre that he cannot love any more. Perhaps he should have seen it coming, her temper, her madness, the pound of flesh each year. But you don’t, it creeps up like nobody’s business. Before you know it the legs are swollen, the ankles troubled and red. And the pain translates into temper. A terrible temper. Christ, she can curse. She was always the one to tell you how do it, never able to paint the ceiling herself. Screaming when it was never done, screaming when it wasn’t done right. And so we come to those nails, bending to trim those nails, her legs slightly open and the skirt ridden up, red face puffing, do it like this, like this, snip it quicker, quicker. But at least she doesn’t ask for it anymore. Not that, he couldn’t. It would take more than a pop of Viagra. “It ruins my fucking holidays. We can’t go anywhere nice. I don’t want to see her on a beach. Always fucking Scotland.”
“I’d like to go to Scotland.”
“No you don’t, it’s fucking cold. I’d like to go to Spain.”
“Why don’t you leave her?”
“Can’t afford it.”
“Why not?”
“House prices have shot up.” He goes to the dressing table for the pack of cigarettes, takes one and puts it to his mouth. He looks at the floor for a moment before he lights it. He is a man of habit. A vow is a fucking vow.
Helena taps the bed, “why don’t you come and lie down”.
“I’ve got to go to work.”
“Until you finished that fag.”
Of course, this makes sense, just till the end of the fag, just till it burns out, on the bed she looks so little and so loveable. “Lie down Harry.”
He lies stiffly down.
“You should try and relax.”
“I’ve just got a lot on, love.”
“Let me give you a massage.”
“I’ve got to go.”
“It’ll take a minute. Turn over.”
He looks at her and then begins to turn over.
“Harry... the fag, mate.”
“Eh? Oh yeah.” He quickly turns over like a boy and puts the cigarette out.
“Take your shirt off.”
He takes his shirt off and turns onto his stomach. She climbs onto his large back and begins to massage his shoulders.
“How’s that?”
“It’s nice.”
“Your such a big man.”
“Got the shoulders of a bull.”
“A great big bull, Harry. A real bucking broncho.”
He smiles to himself.
She kisses his back. “Is that nice?”
“Oh aye, love. You’ve got good hands.”
“Have I Harry?”
“Yeah, you should be a doctor.”
“I can’t be a doctor.”
“A nurse then.”
“I don’t have any GCSEs.”
“You don’t need qualifications. Just walk into a hospital, give a doctor a massage and you’ll be in. They’d be daft not to employ you. You’re a natural. There’s more to health than they let on, so don’t let them tell you otherwise. You know how to touch the soul and that’s a gift, can’t get that from an aspirin. You’ll give years to a man’s life but you’ll have to keep that arse of yours under raps - not good for a weak ticker. Ah, that’s good, baby, you got good hands, a real fucking natural.” He closes his eyes, the picture of his wife gone, her death on the wind and he smiles to himself, softly, softly. “There’s still life in this old bull yet!”
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.5 License.