EGGBOX

Eggbox: An Easter Play

A play with an unspecified number of acts, written to be acted by the audience and spectated by the actors who will leave the stage and replenish the space left by the original audience.

Rabbit: christen this “eggbox baroque”

a kingdom courted by its romance

in warp and precious frill of weft

plaintive misgivings concerning what was

and what is left

is now cloven, opulent and neurotic.

as if the pantry were an abattoir

of the writer’s hooked provisions. neat.

[vomits a pack of cards

a dickish flounce of marginalia]

the phrase ‘wistful trellis’ and the word ‘lozenge’

titter over flutes of bubbling extortion.

like jinx the gazebo Scooby –

this confected pretence is alien

but I upholster the humid evening

with its ornamentation. * sigh *

gemstones of learning

grow tepid in the half light.

           

 [cuts off left ear]

CHORUS: they yawn for better days.

Rabbit: [ after plugging left ear-stump with daisies]

 the thing is, there is seduction

 in these evasions.

 a sort of noxious allure

 in perfume…

 …that draws its strength from places

 and people that have never existed.

 the thing is so gracefully un-thinged

 as to be literary. here

 nibble guppies in the mangrove

 pearling necklaces of gas – collect,

 confect and then dissect: privilege

 teeming in the arduous thesaurus.

[the daisies have turned red]

CHORUS: Pondweed, pondweed, pondweed!

[ offstage heckles detailing the lateness of the hour

and the one-eared rabbit’s resemblance

                        to a furred aerial, bent

           

                                                and mournfully visible

                                                             in its harrowing publicity

 a special kind of redundancy. this is not

explicitly verbalised, the heckle in fact

only notes “fuck this watership clown

I’m outta here!” this is to be followed 
by vague murmurs of agreement, 
supplied by the audience

who were originally poised as actors

and are convinced of their own superior

abilities to enact the rabbit’s own particular

despondence]

Rabbit: i’ve eaten from the vestigial cobwebs of my youth…

             or something similar.

 it may have been important

             for someone somewhere at sometime.

 where is the space for the reader?

 when does the world appear?

 and what, if anything, is at stake?

             there is no risk in wrestling a bear if the bear

             is muzzled and with arms tied and

 not in fact a bear, but a large lack of bear

 to be played by a non-descript dog

 in a wheelchair, whose collar reminds us

 this was our contrivance all along.

CHORUS: [remains silent and considers leaving the stage]

Rabbit: [ the daisies have all but fallen out, those that remain are like sodden red weeds plastered to a whiskered jaw; the rabbit has lost a dangerous amount of blood. the rabbit

limps, coughs twice and exits stage left. we hear the sound of a small body collapse; the sound indicates several objects have been knocked over. a tin bucket rolls into view and comes to rest at centre stage.]

 CHORUS: [collective shrug

the chorus exit stage right.

having all left the stage, one member of the chorus returns

to retrieve the bucket

 – mutters something about a leak –

       curtains]

for three minutes nothing happens and the stage is empty. on the third minute a previously seated member of the cast-turned-audience rises and strides towards the stage to reprise a thwarted belonging upon the boards. a spotlight picks out her path, illuminated from chair to crawled slither beneath the theatre’s heavy curtain. the sound of a klaxon is heard. reappearance of the actress-turned audience member-turned actress. velvet swathes of red are drawn once again and the audience can make out what appears to be a pot-bellied duck in a scuba suit.

Platypus: rabbit nested his impression of the world

                with woollen hand-me-downs

                [sneezes violently]

bluffed allusion.

based-in surrey, scratched out

     in airy cartwheels where the archives natter

to recalcitrant tumours of bureaucracy

hear ye! hear ye! and such.

                 i have seen, done, heard, eaten,

     breathed, excreted, dreamt, swam,

     fucked and buried greater things

                 than were ever catalogued

                 in his bookish hollow.

                       

                 what’s wrong with surrey?

                 nothing, as long as you don’t

                 adopt the sensibility of a brooklyn

                 hipster weaned on beatnik misogony

                 and the erudite affectations

                 of a harvard-educated jelly bean

                 fond of domesticated transgression.

                 like so:

                 [ produces a serrated knife and begins to saw through her right arm]

                

                

CHORUS: [returns – shuffled reluctance – watch on

       as the platypus proceeds to dismember herself.

      they wait until she is just a duck-billed torso

      with one leg before bursting into urgent song]

the rabbit, rabbit, rabbit tried

to look at living with a napkin

but the rabbit, rabbit, rabbit died

in the fluffy throes of actin’

Platypus: rabbit wanted to write in a way

                that made cheese and bread

                into works of byzantine proportion.

                their crumbs – the winking sistene teeth,

                their crusts –  stern bastions of faith.

             

CHORUS: the rabbit, rabbit, rabbit ran

      but with gammy legs and leaking blood

      the rabbit, rabbit, was a man

      and sleeps now in the mud

Platypus: candy floss would make accessible

                what learning had edified. so the

                great philosophers could joust with

                with innuendo, cerebral imaginings

                could be worn lightly with a flowered

                turd in the lapel. and those left out

                of the conversation would know. that

                is not my world.

CHORUS: marsupial cynicism is as anthrax in the ready-brek.

                  our lines are profoundly frivolous, the writer is expendable.

Platypus:  so rabbit would have an experience, like he would

                 attend a party and get drunk and wake up with

                 an unremarkable headache but with the inclination

     that his apprehension of its unremarkable quality

     was remarkable. to remark upon this state of affairs

                 would require, he believed, a tissue paper effect

                 through which slabs of experience could

                 be made to shimmer.

     for instance, drinking two cans of lager became falconry

     and the cut-price candles drooling wax on ikea furniture

     became lamentable arabesques of the unfathomable.

     a packet of cheese and onion became amethyst.

     instant coffee insisted upon

     a more meditative correlative

     found, at last, in a rustic jar of hibiscus tea.

CHORUS: a killer in the dovecote! a plague confined to this foul bungalow!

           

            [ unsure of their relevance in the Platypus’ lengthy monologue, the chorus

              resorts to obscurantist references in what one member assures the others is
                             a verifiable and entirely authentic testament of the occult]

Platypus: this party was rabbit’s first and last experience of love.

                he was dancing to a song he didn’t like when he first

                saw her. a thrill of knowing that she was looking at him

                as he was looking at her, with enough subtext to ensure

    their looking was just the placeholder for something more.

    the rest of the party was subsequently imbued with a warm

    significance, everything felt as though it was the natural

    and inevitable reward of that initial moment.

    though, of course, this was heightened

    by the falconry. rabbit wandered from room to room,

    would catch her

    waiting for him

    to join a conversation, to move past

    and trail hopeful fingers near her own. to feel the

    brushed contact and its response, glowing. their

    flirtations required no effort and became drowsy

    gestures toward an attraction now inseparable

    from the situation in which it formed – colours of the room,

    music bodily ingested, the open doors and laughter,

    stars as they fell out of the house, swaying

    hand in hand into the dark garden – its grass

    already wet with dew.

    rabbit and his love

    were savouring the heavy breath and

    coiled suspense of their bodies. if it was less

    slurred and further from the frank debilitation

    of their mutual tangle, such rhythms

    could be mapped in dance.

   it was almost, it was so almost, and then it was.

   it was happening. what they both had known

   and both had wanted, back in that first look, it was

   now simply and freely being. rabbit’s love was naked

   and so he too removed his clothes, everything was

   joined and sliding from its decorum back in

   the regular sobriety of time and space, and instead

   now voicing its glad blurring in a hot catching

   of tongues and the touch of eyes that previously only

   thought to look but that were now as each other exchanged,

   rolling into a way of drinking the feeling of dew beneath them

   and heat between them and the almost – but not yet –  spinning

   stars above them

rabbit noticed two other figures looming over them, two

interlopers in their perfectly blundered act.

“Fuck off” …words that seemed to crush the drunken

 flight of urgency and bring it staggering from waves

of now and need and you and you and and –

into the awkward jab of pebbles underfoot.

the two figures watched rabbit, rutting

his drunken body further and further into a heaped

flowerbed. flailing and thrusting, groping at

handfuls of dirt, crying out, panting, and completely alone.

rabbit’s lover was only ever seen and felt by rabbit

and was a very persuasive extension of his current

and precarious state of rabbit-mind. a hallucination.

he would see people. people and forms and newly

imagined forms of people, some of them dead

or returning from death.

CHORUS: [back on board with the platypus and having discredited any testimony

       pertaining to the occult]

from the oatmeal depths of a russet grave to its risen body, gilded with

an apricot tiara, kissed on each and every diamond by gracious

dawn – O sweet and darkling ambrosia – O spores of uncommon

undead distraction – be Lazarus – be lusty – be free!

Platypus: he saw them all. saw them, felt them, loved them.

            [ saws off her remaining leg and with a sharp intake of breath drops to

              hit the stage like a sack of potatoes, resigned to brute objectivity, to the dull weight

             and cumbersome earth from whence they came]

            no more poems in the eggbox. He saw them wander. He called them.

            called them into his arms. called them names. called them rabbit and

            platypus. he spoke fondly of his fingers, knitting them in steeples

            over his heart. these are the fingers. the singers. fluttering.

            the chorus of my action. and he saw them, called them, heard them all.

            wished us together in a stitched mortar of lines, stolen from other

            writers. from other ways of seeing. and those god-awful poems of his.

the word ‘lozenge’, ‘arterial’, and ‘dendritic’ thrumming in

the jumped up swamp of over-indulged but nevertheless friendly

bacteria. and that precocious inability to listen. gut flora.

that behind the affectation was a posture and behind that a painted eggshell.

rabbit saw platypus as seen by himself as neither rabbit nor platypus

but still seeing, and it was exhilarating to know that so much,

so much of this time and space, so much of the audience and acting,

of the script and lighting, of those long curdled expectations,

that so much could be so handsomely invested in what

it would now appear had never once appeared

to anyone other than him.