Introduction
Pub Quiz is Life
Pitcairn
Great Britain
The Nap
Kiss Me
This collection first published in 2017 by Oberon Books Ltd
521 Caledonian Road, London N7 9RH
Tel: +44 (0) 20 7607 3637 / Fax: +44 (0) 20 7607 3629
e-mail: info@oberonbooks.com
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Collection copyright © Richard Bean, 2017
Pub Quiz is Life © Richard Bean, 2009; Pitcairn © Richard Bean,
2014; Great Britain © Richard Bean, 2014; The Nap © Richard
Bean, 2016; Kiss Me © Richard Bean, 2016
Richard Bean is hereby identified as author of these plays in accordance with section 77 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. The author has asserted his moral rights.
Introduction © Nicholas Hytner, 2017
All rights whatsoever in this play are strictly reserved and application for performance etc. should be made before commencement of rehearsal to United Agents, 12-26 Lexington Street, London, W1F 0LE (info@unitedagents.co.uk). No performance may be given unless a licence has been obtained, and no alterations may be made in the title or the text of the play without the author’s prior written consent.
You may not copy, store, distribute, transmit, reproduce or otherwise make available this publication (or any part of it) in any form, or binding or by any means (print, electronic, digital, optical, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of the publisher. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
PB ISBN: 9781786820990
E ISBN: 9781786821003
Cover image by Ansel Krut
Printed and bound by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CR0 4YY.
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The best time I had in a theatre in 2016 was at the Crucible Theatre, Sheffield, where I saw Richard Bean’s play The Nap. As the audience walked into the theatre, home for two weeks every spring to the World Snooker Championships, it saw:
A British Legion snooker room in Manor Top in Sheffield S12.
A young man comes in, a professional snooker player carrying nothing but a snooker cue case.
A snooker room, for him, is a church and so all his actions are reverential and ritualistic as if to do something wrong would be to upset the God of Snooker.
For some minutes, he prepares to play, feels the nap on the table, chalks his cue, tests the balls, sets up a trick shot, and plays it. Then an older man, who turns out to be his father, arrives and offers him a prawn sandwich.
DYLAN: I don’t eat owt wi’ a brain.
BOBBY: They’re prawns, they’re not novelists.
BOBBY moans about their surroundings.
BOBBY: What a dump. What a dump! What a dump. What a dump. What a dump. I mean … what … what … what … I mean … what a fucking dump. What a dump?! What kind of … I mean, look at that … if yer gonna … I mean, stand to reason, knowhatimean. I mean … what the fuck is … what a fucking dump. What a dump. Do you like it?
DYLAN: It’s perfect.
BOBBY: It’s not the Crucible, is it?
Here are just some of the brilliant things about the first few minutes of The Nap, all of them typical of its author:
The play itself is a wonderful idea, in retrospect obvious, but it was Richard Bean who suggested to Daniel Evans, the Crucible’s inspired artistic director, that he should stage a play about snooker at snooker’s Mecca. Richard has a highly developed nose for the kind of material that people want to see on the stage.
The opening stage direction couldn’t be more specific, even down to the postcode. Richard’s stage worlds are never fake. He always knows what he’s writing about, whether it’s Sheffield, Hull (Pub Quiz is Life), Bethnal Green (England People Very Nice), a tabloid newsroom (Great Britain), a bread factory (Toast) or a weekend cricket match (The English Game). The Nap is utterly respectful about snooker and snooker players, too. It requires its actors to be rigorously truthful about the way they inhabit the people whose lives are snooker, in the way Toast and Under the Whaleback demand proper respect for bakers and trawler men.
Richard knows his audience. I wish I’d seen Pub Quiz is Life, and I particularly wish I’d seen it in Hull. It was thrilling to be part of a Sheffield audience watching Sheffield on its own stage. It felt like the theatre was fulfilling one of its ancient purposes: to reflect the community to itself.
And it fulfilled another of theatre’s ancient purposes in making them laugh so often and so loud. They laughed from the moment Bobby came on, because Bobby was Mark Addy, who is one of Britain’s funniest (and best) actors. You always know you’re in for a good time when Mark comes onto a stage, and Richard’s plays are like magnets for great actors because they give them room to do all the things they do best. Mark Addy got a laugh just by coming into the room: he didn’t do anything, he made no signals, but the play allowed him to be disgruntled, and disgruntled is funny. Then the play gives him an excellent one-liner (‘They’re prawns, they’re not novelists’); then a comic aria based on three words, repeated ad infinitum (‘What a dump’); and finally, the big joke that everyone in the house had already told themselves, but another of Richard’s virtues is that he goes there. And in The Nap, he went there within minutes of the play starting:
BOBBY: It’s not the Crucible, is it?
Huge laugh. And the entire audience on side for the rest of a play, easily on side enough to take in its stride a one-armed transsexual called Waxy Chuff, who is the capo di tutti capi of world snooker, and who celebrates winning by crying:
This is beyond my wettest dreams.
It would be doing the play an injustice to insist only that it’s funny. It included ten unbearably tense minutes when the plot required Dylan’s opponent Danny Carr to make a break of one hundred and the audience slowly realised that John Astley – a proper snooker professional, but still – was actually intending to clear the table. The roar when he potted the final black was deafening, and testament to another of Richard Bean’s gifts: an iron grip on what makes theatre theatrical. He’d realised that theatre and sport had a lot in common, and was the first playwright in my experience to exploit on stage the excitement of sport, played for real.
Asking a snooker pro to clear the table is all very well, but read the last page The Nap and you may wonder how any playwright would dare to build his climax around an actor potting a snooker ball to win the World Championship. Jack O’Connell, who played Dylan, nailed it and the audience left the theatre on cloud nine. I was still marvelling at it when I collected my coat. ‘He doesn’t always pot the ball,’ said the cloakroom attendant. ‘They have an alternative ending if he misses. It doesn’t matter. He loses the championship but he gets the girl.’ And there’s another of Richard’s unfashionable virtues: he’s a romantic. There is, when he wants it, radiant warmth to his writing. ‘She’s my girlfriend. I love her,’ says Dylan, as the stewards try to throw out Rosa just before his final shot. ‘Unprecedented scenes here at the home of snooker,’ says the commentator on live TV. Boy loves girl. Richard goes there.
In Kiss Me, Peter meets Stephanie under circumstances that seem to preclude romance, though over the course of a tightly written hour he slowly falls for her. Richard is voraciously curious, sniffing out stories in unlikely corners. The fictional meeting of a woman who lost her fiancé in the First World War and a man who has been sent by a psychiatrist to impregnate her is based on apparently true material that he encountered in the course of his reading. The play was performed at Hampstead Theatre’s small downstairs studio. If you hadn’t been told that the play was by Richard Bean, you wouldn’t have guessed: his range makes him impossible to pin down and often hard to identify, though at least three of the plays in this volume (Great Britain, Pub Quiz is Life and The Nap) could hardly be by anyone else.
Pitcairn, a brutal and impeccably researched historical drama, feels a world away from The Nap, but both are written by a playwright who puts a gripping narrative high up his agenda. You want to know what happens next. And you care about what happens because Richard’s peoples his plays so effectively – sometimes, necessarily, with deftly drawn caricatures; as often with fully complex, contradictory characters who are observed with forensic insight. Pitcairn has plenty of these, and it trades in big ideas and big ironies, too. But it works as much as anything as a good story.
The genesis of Great Britain was itself a story. After One Man, Two Guvnors opened at the National, Richard suggested ‘a big, scabrous, state-of-the-nation satire. Working title: Hacked.’ His friend and fellow dramatist Clive Coleman is also a journalist: he was covering the continuing legal proceedings around phone hacking at News International. We’d always known about the control the Murdoch press exercised over the political class. Now we knew about how close News International was to the Metropolitan Police: there was something increasingly ridiculous about the Met’s red-faced outrage at anyone who dared question its refusal to act on the mountain of evidence against News International. The arrest in 2011 of Rebekah Brooks, its chief executive, at last promised to reveal how far the Murdoch press had sewn up politics, law enforcement and the country.
With help from Clive, Richard wrapped up the play long before the legal system wrapped up the case: the trial of Rebekah Brooks and her co-defendants had been postponed, and didn’t start until 28 October 2013, more than a year after Richard first proposed the play. We knew we couldn’t schedule it until the trial was over, as even a satirical caricature of the case would contravene the laws covering contempt of court. We suspected that it would take no more than a public announcement of our intention to produce the play to land us in hot water. So we postponed it for six months, left an unidentified gap in the programme, and within the National we referred to it only as the new Richard Bean. When it finally opens, we thought, maybe only a few months after the verdicts come in, it will at the very least amaze by its topicality.
As rehearsals approached, the trial dragged on. We consulted an expert in contempt of court. He confirmed that it would put us on the wrong side of the law to announce, let alone perform, the play while the trial continued. He reassured us that the contempt laws didn’t extend to rehearsals: if we kept them secret we’d be OK. And that of course we wouldn’t be able to perform the play Rebekah Brooks was acquitted. This stopped us in our tracks. We have to perform it, I told him, as there’s a huge gap in the schedule for it. He said we’d lay ourselves open to a massive libel claim.
‘But we’re not seriously suggesting that Paige Britain is in fact Rebekah Brooks,’ I said, ‘or that Paschal O’Leary is Rupert Murdoch, or that any of the sleazy journos in the play are direct representations of the allegedly sleazy journos at the News of the World. Nobody is saying that anyone hacked the queen’s phone or had sex with the prime minister! We have no opinion about the guilt of any of the defendants – we’re happy to leave that to the jury. It’s satire!’
The expert confirmed that satire can be a defence in law, but his advice was not to risk it. The problem was not that the play suggested there was industrial-scale phone hacking, or that there was an unhealthy relationship between sections of the press, sections of the Metropolitan Police, and sections of the political establishment. None of that was in dispute. The problem was who the play seemed to identify as guilty of breaking the law.
‘So is Rebekah Brooks’ defence,’ we asked, ‘that she was too stupid or too incompetent to know what was going on at her own paper?’
More or less, we all agreed.
‘So what if instead of Paschal O’Leary promoting Paige Britain to editor, he promotes someone else who’s too dim to know what’s going on? If Paige Britain doesn’t make it to editor, she can’t be identified as Rebekah Brooks, can she? We’d have another editor, an innocent editor, and no suggestion that the editor has broken the law.’
Richard sketched out who the alternative editor could be: she’d love horses, she’d have long wavy hair, she’d be married to a soap star, she’d be stupid, she’d be innocent of any wrongdoing.
The trial, which had begun in October 2013, showed no sign of ending when rehearsals started on 28 April 2014. I told the cast that there were two versions of the play. In the one they had, Paige Britain, guilty as sin, becomes editor of the Free Press. In the second version, horse-loving Virginia White becomes editor, Paige Britain stays news editor, hacks and lies her way through the play, and poor, innocent Virginia is too dim to notice.
‘You’d better learn both versions,’ I said to the actors. ‘If the jury convicts the defendants, we’ll do the first version. If it acquits them, we’ll do the second. Meanwhile, not a word.’
But nobody outside the National knew the play was happening, so we hadn’t sold a single ticket, and the trial looked like it would run longer than The Mousetrap. We had a mole, of sorts: somebody an Old Bailey judge, and called him to ask what the word was on when the trial might end? Maybe the middle of June was the good news. The bad news was that the jury could take anything up to six weeks to consider its verdict.
‘And by the way,’ said the Old Bailey judge, ‘don’t even think of letting anyone know what you’re up to.’
On the day of what should have been the first performance, Mr Justice Saunders was summing up in the trial of Rebekah Brooks. We performed the play, now finally called Great Britain, to about fifty friends and family. I made a speech to them before it started: ‘If you tell ANYONE about this, you’ll be arrested and Mr Justice Saunders WILL SEND YOU TO PRISON FOR CONTEMPT OF COURT.’ They sat in total silence throughout the play.
‘Thanks for the speech,’ said Richard.
The next day, the jury retired to consider its verdict. That night, another fifty friends and family pitched up. I toned down my speech, and they started to laugh. We stuck with the Paige Britain Guilty version because I thought it would be too confusing for the actors to keep two versions in their heads simultaneously. We played it eight times in secret to tiny invited audiences, and then it stopped to allow Sean O’Casey’s The Silver Tassie back into the repertoire.
On 24 June, two weeks after it was supposed to have opened, my assistant ran into my office and yelled that the jury was about to give its verdict. Two of the defendants were guilty but Rebekah Brooks and five other defendants were acquitted on all charges.
‘That’s a much better ending!’ I cried, ‘Rehearsals start this afternoon for the Not Guilty Version! Start selling tickets!’
We decided to wait until the next morning to announce the play and put it on sale, so it wouldn’t have to compete with news of the verdicts. At 9.00 a.m. on 25 June, we convened a press conference and told the assembled journalists that Richard Bean had written a play called Great Britain, that it would open on Monday night, that its first public performance would be its press night, and that I hoped they’d be there.
The entire run sold out within a few days, and when it finally opened, stupid, horse-loving Virginia White got one of the biggest laughs of the night when the cops arrived to arrest her and the rest of the staff of the Free Press, and she cried in panic, ‘What have we done?!’
After her trial, Rebekah Brooks went to the US to lie low. A year later she came back as CEO of News International, a development that was beyond even Richard’s satirical imagination.
I’ve directed three of Richard’s plays so far: Great Britain, One Man, Two Guvnors and England People Very Nice. As I write this, I’m looking forward to a fourth: when I needed a play to open the new Bridge Theatre in London, he was the obvious first port of call. This volume is a perfect introduction to the many reasons why.
Nicholas Hytner, 2016
PUB QUIZ IS LIFE
Acknowledgements
This play is dedicated to Mabel, the ex-landlady of the Rose and Crown N16, and the finest Pub quiz MC there will ever be. I would like to thank the following for their help in the research.
Mick Beecroft
Denise Anderton
Marcus Hails
Petta Godney
Norma Howarth
Nicola Baker
and to ‘Brown Trout’, ‘Tom’s Sebaceous Cyst’, ‘Scottish Pound Notes Are Welcome at the Bar’ and all the regulars and staff at the Rose and Crown in Stoke Newington. (Pub quiz every Tuesday, first question 8.30pm)
LEE
Male, mid thirties
MELISSA
Female, late thirties
MABEL
Female, fifties
WOODY
Male, late forties
BUNNY
Male, 70
BAZ
Female, thirties
ANGIE
Female, thirties
CATH
Female, twenty
MOURNER
MAM
Set
The set needs to be multi-location: the Pub, the Range Rover, the Street, and Bunny’s Flat.
The Pub is big, functional, and more modern than traditional. Upstage left is the bar area with the usual wines, optics, pumps etc. On the downstage side of the bar, stage left, is a bar stool, microphone and file of papers. This is the normal location for Mabel when on the microphone asking the pub quiz questions.
Upstage in the back wall are three doors. The main entrance/ exit to the street; a door to the LOUNGE, so labelled, and the toilets.
The set should suggest that the pub extends into the audience. Actors, particularly Mabel, will be trying to communicate to the audience as if they were the other teams in the pub quiz.
A blackboard announces the weekly calendar. Monday is ‘LADY’S DART’S’ (sic); Tuesday is ‘QUIZZ!!!’ (sic); Wednesday is ‘KARIOKE’ (sic); Thursday is ‘DART’S’ (sic); Friday is blank; Saturday is ‘HAPPY HOUR’. Another blackboard has a pub food menu.
Bunny’s council flat is on the fifteenth floor of a block overlooking the River Humber. It is accessible by the lift. Although it may be set above the pub it is important to define it as not being a flat above the pub.
It’s a typical old man’s flat; there is evidence of his dead wife’s influence, but no photos of her. A newish TV, books such as Reader’s Digest selections. Paintings or photographs of submarines and trawlers. An Airfix model of a submarine.
Pub Quiz is Life was first performed by Hull Truck Theatre Company at Hull Truck Theatre on 10 September 2009. The cast was as follows:
| LEE | Marc Bolton |
| MELISSA /ANGIE | Esther Hall |
| MABEL | Sarah Parks |
| BUNNY | David Hargreaves |
| WOODY | Adrian Hood |
| BAZ /CATH | Rachel Dale |
| MAM / MOURNER | Sarah Follon |
| Director | Gareth Tudor Price |
| Design | Foxton |
SCENE ONE (SEPTEMBER 2009)
The audience take their seats. The set is visible to them, though unpopulated, an audible but not ostentatious pub atmosphere is produced by sound effects. Then lights down. Then a spot on MABEL. She is an impressive woman, busty, brash, rather over-painted, like a ship’s figurehead.
MABEL: It’s Tuesday, at the White Horse. That can only mean one thing. Yesterday was Monday. Welcome to my pub quiz night adventure, an orgy, I wish, of trivia. A magical mystery tour without seatbelts down the highways and byways of the known universe. I’ll be stopping the bus every two hours for a pee. My name’s Mabel, and my quiz is much better than Master Mindyourownbusiness, cos Magnus Magnusson an’t got much of a cleavage, and I mek up all me own questions using only me general knowledge, and the internet’s wikipaedophilia. Any road, Magnus Magnusson’s dead, so that’s the end of that argument with a door. Anyone caught using a mobile phone will have their nuts crushed, they’ll be stripped naked, and nailed to a sun bed and left outside Hammonds. If you need me to repeat a question, I have been known to repeat, then put your hand up, and I’ll sort you out one at a time, as the actress said to the gathered synod. Round one, who played keyboards with the Hitler Youth Orchestra and the 1970s jazz fusion band Weather Report?
Snap to black, then lights up on the pub. It’s after the quiz. BUNNY, in his wheelchair, alone at a table. LEE, wearing an outdoor coat, is looking at a sheet of paper. MELISSA is playing the General Knowledge machine. LEE, standing, has in his hand BUNNY’s notebook.
LEE: What’s this question Dad? I can’t read your writing.
BUNNY: Where, on earth, does the wind always blow from the south?
LEE: You should’ve got that one.
BUNNY: Aye.
LEE: What did you put?
BUNNY: Bridlington.
LEE: That’s ridiculous.
BUNNY: I was under terrible pressure.
LEE: How terrible can the pressure be, it’s a pub quiz?
BUNNY: I was dying for a piss.
LEE: The mad thing is you’ve actually been to the North Pole.
BUNNY: Aye.
LEE: When you were there, where was the wind coming from?
BUNNY: I dunno. I was in a bloody submarine. I rang your Janet, she said you went up to caravans. Any luck?
LEE: Yeah. One of the jiggers is leaving. Don’s put my name on his job. Pint of mild?
BUNNY: Half.
LEE goes up to the bar, nearly bumping into a MOURNER who has come in dressed in black.
MABEL: (To MOURNER.) You’re in the lounge bar love. That one there.
The MOURNER goes into the lounge.
LEE: Pint of Kronenbourg and half a mild please Mabel. Who’s died?
MABEL: Jimmy Parks’s lad, the one who worked at Flamingoland. One of their Bengal Tigers got him. Now he’s dead and gone.
(Singing.) ‘Don’t want nobody to mourn beside my grave.’
LEE: When I’m dead and gone, McGuinness Flint.
MABEL: Bonus point for the year.
LEE: Seventies. Nineteen seventy-one?
MABEL: Nineteen seventy, highest chart position, two. They had the funeral this afti, and this is the party. Kaw! It’s like a bloody wake in there. You’d think somebody had died.
LEE: You shouldn’t keep a Bengal Tiger in a cage.
MABEL: What else can you do with a Bengal Tiger? You can’t have it selling the ice creams. Three pounds fifty-seven varieties.
The drinks are poured.
LEE: Ta.
MELISSA wins on the General Knowledge machine. LEE pays.
LEE: Who’s that on the General Knowledge machine?
MABEL: You’re married LEE Bunting.
LEE returns to the table, clocking MELISSA as he goes. At his dad’s table LEE picks up an A4 sheet with about 10 celebrity pictures on it.
LEE: Did you get any of this picture round?
BUNNY: No. They’re all celebrities I’ve never heard of.
LEE: What have you written down there for number seven?
BUNNY: I thought it was the Berlin Wall before they knocked it down.
LEE: That’s Ann Widdecombe Dad.
BUNNY: I didn’t have me glasses.
LEE: Has Woody been in?
BUNNY: He’s at the KC. Hull City. He’s gonna call in later.
LEE: Did he drop your gear off?
BUNNY: (Taps a package on the table.) Aye.
LEE picks up the package, looks at the contents.
LEE: Don’t leave it on the table dad. Cannabis has been reclassified from Class C to Class B.
BUNNY: Woody never told us owt about that.
LEE: He’s not gonna is he. Just cos it’s for your MS, he’s not gonna do you an information leaflet. He’s Woody the dealer, not Boots the chemist. Is this the right stuff this time?
BUNNY: It’s cannabis resin yeah.
LEE: Good. That skunk he sold you was too strong.
BUNNY: It got me out the house.
LEE: Out the house?! You went to Mars and back in an afternoon. You were the first retired docker in space.
BUNNY: I walked that day. I walked unaided across East Park.
LEE: That wan’t walking Dad. That was a cross between Fred Astaire, and Hurricane Katrina. Drugs are wrong, you used to say to me, ‘just say no’. Twenty years later, look at you, busy puffing your way through two ounces of Lebanese every week… It’s only a matter of time before you discover Rastafarianism. In ten years’ time you’ll be the only eighty-year-old Hull bloke with dreadlocks. You can come off this when you get your Beta Interferon.
BUNNY: It lessens the pain, but I saw yer mam again last night.
LEE: What was she doing this time?
BUNNY: Sawing a leg off.
LEE: Sawing a leg off what?
BUNNY: Her own leg.
LEE: Where?
BUNNY: Below the knee.
LEE: I mean, where in the flat?
BUNNY: Living room.
LEE: Cannabis is a psychoactive narcotic Dad.
BUNNY: She hated me.
LEE: She didn’t hate you. She found you annoying.
BUNNY: She hung hersen, and it was my fault son.
LEE: Hanged. How many questions did you get right?
BUNNY: Four.
LEE: Four!? Out of sixty?
BUNNY: I woulda got five but Mabel wouldn’t let me have ‘palletising’ as an anagram. She said ‘palletising’ in’t in her dictionary.
LEE: Summat you’ve spent your whole life doing and it in’t even in the dictionary?
BUNNY: Dockers don’t write dictionaries, good job an’all. There’d be a lot more Fs.
Enter BAZ from the street. She is a woman of about thirty, rough, white dreadlocks, tattoos, track suit, midriff showing, bum tattoo, a broken arm in plaster. She is a disaster area. She has a carrier full of booze and fags. She gets a subtle nod from MABEL and enters the pub assertively.
BAZ: Alright Bunny!? Touch bruv!
She punches fists with BUNNY. BUNNY does this in a surprisingly skilled manner.
Alright Peace! In the wheelchair again eh?
BUNNY: Aye.
BAZ: Did you enjoy the para olympics last year?
BUNNY: No.
BAZ: What! I’m disappointed in you bruv! An’t you never heard of empathy!
BUNNY: I think it’s really boring, and a bit embarrassing.
BAZ: Alright bruv, don’t rub it in! They can’t help it you know. Lee?! Bredren! Back from Afghanistan eh? Peace! Or in your case, war!
LEE: Hi Baz.
BAZ: You’re home safe cos Jesus loves you, you know that don’t you?
LEE: Yeah, thank him from me will you.
BAZ: (Producing it from her bag.) Big bag o’ Drum.
LEE: You got any vodka, Grey Goose?
BAZ: I don’t buy nothing on spec. This is orders. I work in that chippy top of Barnsley Street, the one run by Kosovans. Come in, I’ll take your order.
LEE: Is Mabel alright about you selling bootleg in her pub?
BAZ: None of your fucking business is it Lee?
LEE: Yeah, you’re right. Carry on.
BAZ: Respect. Alright. Do you want a blue badge? Park anywhere, disabled bays, you know.
LEE: I’ve got a blue badge.
BAZ: No!? Who d’yer buy that off?
LEE: It’s a real one. I was given it.
BAZ: You’re not a disabled.
LEE: He is.
BAZ: So?!
LEE: I’m his carer.
BAZ: I’m trying to make a living, and you’re telling me there’s people just giving them away.
BUNNY: It’s off the council.
BAZ: Oh, riiight! MOT?
LEE: What would I want with a Belgian MOT?
BAZ: What makes you think it’s Belgian?!
LEE: Everything else you’re flogging’s from Belgium.
BAZ shows him an MOT with emissions statement.
BAZ: I need an old MOT, and your emissions statement. Forty quid.
LEE: That’s not much of a saving.
BAZ: Oh yeah! And that jalopy of yours is gonna pass first time is it?
LEE: How much money is my dad saving buying his Drum off you?
BUNNY: I’m not saving owt, you’re paying for it.
LEE: What am I saving then?
BAZ: Saving your tax innit. Eight quid please. What was Helmand Province like?
LEE: It was like a quiet night down Preston Road.
BAZ: Was you scared?
LEE: Yeah, but I like being scared. You should go. Everyone should go. If you go, take your own towel.
LEE pays BAZ.
BAZ: You gone weird Lee. You got that post-traumatic stress disorder.
LEE: No. I’m not mad, no.
BAZ: Don’t matter if you are, cos Jesus loves you. You see the great thing about Jesus right, is he –
LEE: – it’s alright Baz. I know about Jesus.
BAZ: And he knows about you.
BAZ exits.
LEE: Is she off the skag?
BUNNY: She’s stopped offering me sex.
LEE: Must be then. Which team won tonight?
BUNNY: Your teacher friends. I think they cheat. One of them’s gorra Bramble.
LEE: (Beat.) Blackberry. They’re not friends Dad. They know me because they humiliated me, patronised me, beat me. They prepared me for a life of hourly-paid wage labour, unemployment, or the army.
BUNNY: Aye, it was a good school, David Lister.
LEE: Mr Ellerington. ‘Hard-on’ we used to call him. Look at him, he hasn’t changed. Goatee beard, chalk marks on his flies, permanent erection. He’s got a hard-on now, looks like a giraffe fighting its way out of the wrong end of a one-man tent.
MABEL comes over, spying an empty glass.
LEE: Any good questions tonight Mabel?
BUNNY: HMS Belfast.
MABEL: What do HMS Belfast moored at Tower Bridge on the Thames and the London Gateway Services on the M1 have in common?
LEE: Both opened, launched by the Queen? Dunno.
MABEL: If HMS Belfast fired its guns it would hit London Gateway Services.
BUNNY: I’d do better if you asked questions on summat I knew summat about.
MABEL: What’s your specialist subject Bunny?
LEE: The containerisation of East Hull docks.
BUNNY: Alexandra Dock. Don’t know owt about George Dock.
LEE: How much did the teachers win tonight Mabe?
MABEL: Forty-two pound sterling.
MABEL moves on.
LEE: How does this quiz work?
BUNNY: It’s a five-week league, works like superleague. At the end of the month the top two teams have a play-off final. But every week there’s about forty quid up for grabs. I love it, but the teachers always win.
LEE: That forty quid could pay for your drugs. Remember, I’m not working. How many can you have in a team?
BUNNY: Four maximum. But it’s just me and Woody usually.
LEE: You, Woody, me, so we need one more.
MELISSA wins again. And immediately starts another game.
MABEL: Sh! Love! That’s a funeral party in there, and they’re all still a bit melancholyflowercheese, about the whole thing.
MELISSA: Sorry. I’ve won twice now. I’m beginning to feel a little ostentatious.
MABEL: If you’re not feeling well love, I’d go and have a lie down.
LEE stands, approaches MELISSA.
LEE: Hi. My name’s LEE.
MELISSA: Melissa.
LEE: Melissaphobia. A fear of bees.
MELISSA: One point. What do you call the side of a hill sheltered from the wind?
LEE: The lee side.
MELISSA: That’s another point. You’re doing well.
LEE: Do you like pub quiz?
MELISSA: I love Mabel. Is it every Tuesday?
LEE: Yeah. You’re not from round here are you?
MELISSA: I work in Hull. We were looking at a site today, just over the bridge.
LEE: What’s your specialist subject Melissa?
MELISSA: Men.
LEE: OK.
MELISSA: Men and unrequited love.
LEE: Cool. Would you like to join my pub quiz team? I wanna beat the teachers. They used to teach me, called me thick, I’m not thick.
MELISSA: It’s about revenge is it?
LEE: Yeah.
MELISSA: I’m with people from work.
LEE: OK. I apologise.
MELISSA: You don’t have to apologise.
LEE: Who do you work for?
MELISSA: Hull Advance. We’re the regeneration company.
LEE: Oh, you’re one of them are you?
MELISSA: On second thoughts, maybe you can apologise.
LEE: No, no, I didn’t mean anything by it. OK, nice to meet you, get back to work. Someone’s got to save Hull haven’t they, and the clock’s ticking, know what I mean.
MELISSA: Maybe I’ve had enough work for one day.
LEE: Course you have. Do you want to meet my dad?
MELISSA: I’ve been in Hull six months, that’s the best offer so far.
LEE: Dad. This is Melissa.
MELISSA: Hi. I thought Mabel was wrong not to allow your palletising answer.
BUNNY: Oh, you know what the word means do you love?
MELISSA: It’s a noun drawn from the past participle of the verb to palletise, describing the action of using pallets in logistics.
BUNNY: Fucking hell. What’s logistics?
LEE: It’s the new word for warehousing and storage.
BUNNY: Oh aye, they’re trying make it sound clever are they?
WOODY: (Off / singing.) ‘Mauled by the Tigers! You’re getting mauled by the Tigers’
LEE: And this is the fourth member of the team, Woody.
WOODY enters, singing. He’s in full head-to-toe Tiger costume.
WOODY: ‘Mauled by the Tigers! You’re getting mauled by the Tigers’/
MABEL: Shhhh!!!
WOODY kisses MABEL, and moves on, ignoring her.
WOODY: ‘Mauled by the Tigers! You’re getting mauled by the Tigers’
WOODY opens the lounge bar door and stands in the doorway.
‘Mauled by the Tigers!’
WOODY walks into the lounge bar. MABEL shuts the door on him.
(Off.) ‘You’re getting mauled by the Tigers. Mauled by the –’
There is a crash of breaking glass, and the collapsing of a table. The singing stops.
End of scene.
Scene change. MABEL isolated in a spot.
MABEL: What was the last British Rail steam service? Shoulda been easy enough for any geriatric Hull gits in tonight. And I gave you a bloody clue. ‘PS’. PS stands for Paddle Steamer, yes! The PS Farringford, Humber Ferry, was the last British Rail steam service, and the very ship on which I met my fourth husband, Eddie. Eddie had got the draw string of his cagoule caught in one of the paddles and he was going round and round with the paddle wheel. He was in the Humber for thirty seconds, and then he’d pop up on the wheel and chat me up for thirty seconds before going under again. By the time we’d got to New Holland he’d asked me to marry him, and not expecting him to survive, I’d stupidly said yes.
SCENE TWO (HALF AN HOUR LATER)
In BUNNY’s flat. A coffee table set with a mug and a cup and saucer set. LEE and BUNNY (in wheelchair) just inside the door.
BUNNY: Who’s she then?
LEE: Melissa works for Hull Advance. One of them regeneration companies.
BUNNY: Is it them what’s gonna knock down the old fruit market?
LEE: It’s not an old fruit market dad, it’s a strategic development area. It’s gonna be a thousand-acre open-air piazza. Bob Carver’s gonna open a sushi restaurant. Get out your wheelchair. I want you to walk to the settee.
BUNNY: It hurts.
LEE: I know it hurts. You don’t get Beta Interferon unless you’re walking.
BUNNY: You’re hard on me.
LEE: You were hard on me. As a kid.
BUNNY starts to walk. It’s painful. He sits on the settee and starts to smoke a pre-prepared joint from a tin on the coffee table.
BUNNY: I never hit you son.
LEE: You knocked one of me teeth out.
BUNNY: It was loose. It was a milk tooth.
LEE: A grown man punching a ten year-old is child abuse.
BUNNY: Everybody used to hit their kids.
LEE: You could’ve been different.
BUNNY: People back then, didn’t think so much, about anything. You was who you was, and you were how you were, and that was that.
LEE: Did you ever hit me mam?
Silence.
What’d she done?
Silence.
BUNNY: I don’t want to talk about your mother. She might make an appearance.
BUNNY takes a long and skilled toke on the joint. Holds in the smoke. And releases it slowly.
LEE: Where was she the last time you saw her?
BUNNY: She jumped up from behind this settee. She had a chainsaw.
LEE: She never went near power tools in her whole life.
BUNNY: Mebbe she’s been on a course.
LEE takes the joint from BUNNY and takes a toke.
BUNNY: See that there, her cup and saucer.
LEE: It’s a cup and saucer, yeah.
BUNNY: I use a mug. She’s been in, while we’ve been at the quiz.
LEE: Has your occupational therapist seen her?
BUNNY: No.
LEE: Has she attacked meals on wheels with an axe as they come in the door?
BUNNY: No.
LEE: Has your physio seen her?
BUNNY: No. But he’s blind.
LEE: Has he felt her?
BUNNY: No.
LEE: Have you ever seen her when you’re not out of your head on psychoactive drugs?
BUNNY: What are you suggesting Lee?
LEE: That you’re smoking enough puff every week to bring Bob Marley back from the dead.
BUNNY: Can I come and live with you?
LEE: No, you can’t.
BUNNY: Your Janet dun’t like me does she?
LEE: She dun’t like me half the time.
BUNNY: That’s cos you had a vasectomy. Women always wanna have at least one girl. She not talking to you?
LEE: I’m not gonna discuss my sex life with me own father.
BUNNY: I think you should give that flower shop idea of hers a go.
LEE: I don’t want to run a flower shop.
BUNNY: You could run it together.
LEE: That’s her dream. I’m off.
BUNNY: Don’t get mixed up with Woody. You’ll find work soon enough.
LEE: I didn’t pay him for your gear. Is it working?
BUNNY: Aye, but it’s her I’m worried about.
LEE: It’s the drugs Dad, it’s not real. Tarra.
He leaves. The cup and saucer begin to rattle. BUNNY watches. The cup and saucer then moves slowly along the coffee table and then flies off the end. BUNNY is terrified.
End of scene.
SCENE THREE
In the pub. WOODY is sat there with an elastoplast on both eyes and a packet of frozen peas against one of them. LEE is already sat there beside him, he’s counting out notes.
LEE: Here’s your money.
WOODY: I only take cheques. Make it out to South Cave Cakes.
LEE: Your wife’s cake shop?
WOODY: Yeah. It’s doing well.
LEE: I an’t got a cheque book on me.
WOODY: Friday lunch then. At your ‘team talk’.
LEE: I think a meeting will help. Clarify roles.
WOODY: You not found work?
LEE: I’ve only been back two weeks.
WOODY: Got two kids an’t you?
LEE: Yeah. Jamie, he’s eight, Paul’s ten.
LEE shows a leaf in his wallet with photos.
WOODY: What are the schools like round here?
LEE: Alright.
WOODY: Kids is all there is Lee. Mine are off my hands now. It was expensive but it was worth it. I put both of them through Pocklington, gap year, university. Tilda’s in publishing now, London, and Millie’s singing with Opera North.
LEE: Wow. My Jamie’s supposed to have a talent for piano.
WOODY: You got to get him a piano then, lessons.
LEE: How much is a piano?
WOODY: Two grand, three grand. I pay well. I need someone with army training. I got a problem. It’s called North Hull Estate.
LEE: The Wild West.
WOODY: I like a good western, but this is more like Apocalypse Now. As a soldier I reckon you must know how to keep cool under pressure.
LEE: No thanks Woody.
WOODY: I’m looking to take early retirement. I miss performing you see.
LEE: You gonna start playing bass again?
WOODY: Rock and Roll’s a young man’s game. Comedy. Stand-up.
LEE: Yeah, you always like your stand-ups.
WOODY: Writing my own material. Gonna do the talent night, end of the month.
LEE: How many jokes have you written?
WOODY: One.
LEE: Good luck. Did you see where Melissa went?
WOODY: She rang for a taxi. You worked for me before you know. On Longhill. You wouldn’t have known you were working for me.
LEE: The foreman at Coachman’s is a mate of mine. He says one of the jiggers is going to give his notice in Thursday.
WOODY: Caravans? How much an hour?
LEE: Eight quid.
WOODY: Tut! I got part-time too you know. You got an attic?
LEE: I’m not gonna store stock for you Woody, alright.
WOODY: Hydroponics.
LEE: Skunk?
WOODY: It’s farming Jim, but not as we know it. No pig shit, no sheep shagging, and you can stay in bed ’til lunchtime.
LEE: What are the risks?
WOODY: If it snows you’re fucked.
LEE: Why is snow a problem?
WOODY: Hydroponics heats up the attic, melts the snow on the roof. Soon as it snows the cops are up in the air in the helicopter.
LEE: No thanks Woody.
WOODY: What’s the problem Lee? I mean, how often does it snow?
LEE: I’ve got a flat roof.
LEE stands.
End of scene.
SCENE FOUR
MELISSA and LEE on the street outside. LEE has just clicked off his mobile phone.
LEE: You’re getting a taxi from East Hull to Cherry Burton?!
MELISSA: I’ll put it on expenses. That Heart of Darkness question –
LEE: – Joseph Conrad. Mister Kurtz.
MELISSA: Yes, you got it right.
LEE: And you were very impressed.
MELISSA: I’m sorry, Lee, if I sounded patronising, I can only –
LEE: – do you expect soldiers to be thick?
MELISSA: What I said was that it was ‘brilliant’ that you’d read Heart of Darkness. If you’re paranoid about –
LEE: – I’m paranoid now am I?
MELISSA: One wouldn’t normally expect a squaddie to be able to quote from a classic novel.
LEE: What do you think we do in our downtime? Play computer games and watch porn?
MELISSA: Yes. (Beat.) Sorry.
LEE: It’s the only proper book, novel, I’ve ever read.
MELISSA: Why did you read it?
LEE: I saw Apocalypse Now, the film. I loved it. Dad said it was based on a book. He had a copy. I read it and then I went out and bought my own.
MELISSA: You went out and bought a book? Sorry! And pub quiz reduces your favourite novel to trivia, one quotation, ‘the horror, the horror’.
LEE: I don’t care.
MELISSA: OK. I’m impressed. You’re unique and special, a soldier who reads Conrad.
LEE: I was a soldier. I like it when you get angry.
MELISSA: Are you making a move Lee?
LEE: What’s Hull Advance doing in East Hull. Are we gonna get regenerated?
MELISSA: A dry ski slope, down that street there.
LEE: A dry ski slope, down Clough Road?
MELISSA: Are you suggesting that the people of Hull don’t deserve a dry ski slope?
LEE: Skiing is summat you do after work, with your disposable income.
MELISSA: You’re bitter aren’t you?
LEE: Two pints of bitter. Na. We haven’t had full employment here since the fishing finished.
MELISSA: Fishing was a very dangerous way to make a living.
LEE: It’s better for men to die with dignity fishing, knowing who they are, than to die on welfare, on drugs, on a dry ski slope.
MELISSA: Nobody dies on dry ski slopes.
LEE: You don’t know much about Hull do you, just you fucking wait.
MELISSA: Would you respect me more if I told you that I went to the roughest comprehensive in North East Surrey?
LEE: I’m all for regeneration me. I like bistros.
MELISSA: Hull could be a top ten town. We have two hundred thousand ABC1s living in the Wolds villages who shop in Sheffield or Leeds.
LEE: So the future of Hull is in the hands of people who don’t live here?
MELISSA: Regeneration has given Hull a music venue, St Stephens shopping, a brand new theatre.
LEE: I’d go to the theatre if I thought that I might see someone like meself up on stage.
MELISSA: And what are you like Lee?
LEE: I’m not a king.
MELISSA: Plays aren’t always about kings.
LEE: They’re all about unemployed soldiers now are they?
MELISSA: Yes, actually. What did the army train you to do?
LEE: Some Personnel Officer asked me that this morning. I told her I’d been trained to kill a man with my bare hands.
MELISSA: What did she say to that?
LEE: She said there’s not a lot of call for that at Jacksons.
MELISSA: Did you kill any Taliban?
LEE: Three that I know of.
MELISSA: I’ve never been alone with a killer. But you’re a killer with a heart, I mean, I think what you’re doing with your dad is brilliant.
LEE: I don’t even like him.
MELISSA: I don’t talk to my parents at all. They wanted grandchildren.
Taxi pips.
My taxi.
LEE: You know town end of Bev Road?
MELISSA: Sorry?
LEE: Beverley Road. Three years ago this bloke opened a sex shop and at Christmas he put decorations up on the outside, Santa with a sleigh, Rudolph. But running a sex shop put a strain on his heart and so he closed the place down, but he left Santa and Rudolph outside, up on the shop front. Three years they’ve been up there now, rain, sleet, sun. Santa’s smile has got wiped from his face, Rudolph is frozen, sodden, lying dead next to a pink vibrator.
Taxi pips.
That’s not the kind of thing you see in a top ten town. Forget your Wolds villages and their ABC1s and get that fucking Santa sorted.
MELISSA kisses him. It’s a proper kiss. During which BAZ enters and notices what’s happening. BAZ exits, saying nothing.
MELISSA: (As she’s leaving.) I’ll see you here, Friday lunch time.
MELISSA sees BAZ.
LEE: Yeah, team talk.
LEE watches as the taxi drives off. A moment’s thought.
(Quietly, to himself.) Just say no.
End of scene
SCENE ONE (LATER THAT WEEK, FRIDAY LUNCHTIME)
A food menu on the blackboard. LEE, BUNNY, WOODY (with plaster over the eye) and MELISSA at a table. On the table are empty plates from lunch, maybe the odd chip. BUNNY and LEE can still be eating if needed. On WOODY’s plate is an uneaten battered fish skin and the odd chip.
WOODY: (To MELISSA.) Are you vegetarian?
MELISSA: No, but I only eat happy chickens.
WOODY: I think organic farming’s cruel. If the animals are happy, yeah, killing ’em must be wrong. Factory farming’s much better, cos at least when you kill ’em you’re putting them out their misery.
LEE: (Beat.) Is that the joke you’ve written?
WOODY: Yeah.
MELISSA: It’s funny, but it’s rubbish. (She spots MABEL.) Mabel! Could you possibly do me a receipt for lunch please?
MABEL: You want all four of them on one ticket?
MELISSA: That’d be perfect.
LEE has clocked this example of exploitative expenses. MABEL moves off.
Why do you want to do stand-up?
WOODY: I want a change of career.
MELISSA: But you seem to me to be very successful. That Lexus in the car park, that’s yours isn’t it?
WOODY: No, I borrowed it off the enemy.
LEE: His wife.
WOODY: It’s a good car that Lexus. Goes like taramasalata off a shovel.
MELISSA: What’s your line of business?
WOODY: Buying, selling, distribution.
MELISSA: Because it’s useful for me to know which sectors of the economy are flourishing in Hull. Are you involved in manufacturing?
WOODY: No. That’s all overseas.
MELISSA: What kind of products?
WOODY: Alternative lifestyle solutions, pyramid selling, yeah.
MELISSA: That’s my card. Next week I’m running an ‘investors in youth forum’ at Bridlington Spa. Do you know Bridlington Spa?
WOODY: Brid Spa, yeah, that’s where I started.
LEE: He was in a band. Bass.
MELISSA: Cool.
WOODY: Cool? No we weren’t cool, no. We were shit.
MELISSA: Hull Advance want to see successful entrepreneurs going into the schools, talking to the kids.
WOODY: I already have people doing that.
MELISSA: The danger is that for the kids on the big estates the only person they see driving a Lexus is the local drug dealer.
WOODY: Normally I drive a Range Rover. And I live in South Cave.
MELISSA: Where is South Cave?
WOODY: It’s south of North Cave.
MABEL comes over to take the dishes.
MABEL: There’s your receipt, love.
MELISSA: Thank you.
WOODY: Lovely haddock that Mabe.
MABEL: I wouldn’t know. I haven’t eaten fish since I signed on to that Estonian cruise ship fully intending to present my own particular brand of tasteless erotica. But they forced me to do a cabaret act as a female impersonator.
MELISSA: But you are a woman.
MABEL: And in fact, unlike some people I could name, I always have been. The ship turned out to be a floating brothel for the Russian fishing fleet. That’s where I met me first husband, Leff. He was a winch operator from Murmansk who had webbed feet that he could tuck behind the back of his head. I hope that image hasn’t ruined your lunch. I nursed him for ten months as he slowly died from passive smoking, like Roy Castle.
MABEL is genuinely moved, hanky, sniffs.
WOODY: Count your blessings Mabel, at least he never played the bugle.
MABEL moves off.
So why am I here on a Friday lunch, Lee Bunting?
LEE: I want to win the league. It’s an injustice that the teachers always win.
WOODY: Pub quiz and injustice, you can’t have one without the other. I was in Spain, at the villa last year, and the local had a quiz, one of the questions was ‘where in England would you find the Land of Green Ginger’.
BUNNY: ’ull!
WOODY: Of course. But they wouldn’t give me a point.
LEE: What had you put?
WOODY: Bottom o’ Whitefri’gate.
LEE: There is a lesson there. OK. First off guys, thanks for coming in –
WOODY: – you sound like an officer.
LEE: We can win this quiz. But it does need focus.
WOODY: Prince Harry in Afghanistan! The Taliban are here, here, here and here!
MELISSA: We’ve all agreed to this meeting.
WOODY: You can’t do homework for pub quiz!
LEE: Setting the questions for pub quiz is a form of self-expression. What are Mabel’s obsessions? What is the wallpaper of Mabel’s life?
WOODY: Wood chip.
MELISSA: She’s going to Crete for her holidays.
LEE: Brilliant. Melissa, can you swat up on Minoan Culture.
WOODY: Fucking hell!
LEE: Woody, you’re our music man. What is the soundtrack to Mabel’s life?
WOODY: Glen Campbell, Neil Diamond, Glen Campbell, Gary Glitter and Glen Campbell.
LEE: Get all their lyrics, all their stories, go on the internet –
WOODY: I’m not looking up Gary Glitter on the internet.
BUNNY: Mabel likes her flags from when she was on cruise ships.
LEE: You were in the navy so can you swat up on flags please.
MELISSA: She always has questions about Hull and it’s part of my job to learn about Hull and Hull people so I’ll take that one.
LEE: Brilliant. Now, the other thing is how we work as a team. As a training exercise –
WOODY: – fucking hell.
LEE: – I’m gonna set you a question.
WOODY: You’ll be giving us an half-time bollocking sat on the grass next.
LEE: What are the rooms in Cluedo?
WOODY: (Loud.) Conservatory.
LEE: Very good Woody, but keep your voice down.
WOODY: It’s Friday lunchtime. It’s not quiz night.
LEE: This is a role-play, we’re training.
WOODY: Fucking hell.
MELISSA: Library, Dining Room –
LEE: Good. Dad?
BUNNY: What’s Cluedo?
LEE: It’s a board game Dad. Just say some names of rooms in a house.
BUNNY: Toilet.
LEE: No. There’s no toilet.
BUNNY: What kind of house an’t gorr a toilet?
LEE: Alright, dad. I take your point.
MELISSA: Kitchen.
LEE: Brilliant.
WOODY: Study. Snooker Room.
MELISSA: No, Billiard Room.
LEE: Yeah, Billiard Room, not Snooker Room, well done Melissa.
WOODY: Fucking hell.
BUNNY: Pantry?
LEE: No Dad.
MELISSA: Hall.
BUNNY