The Ostraka Plays - A Companion Read online

control. Bill Alexander arrives a few years after WWII at the manorial estate of ‘Averroes’ deep in the Sierra Morena hills in Spain. He has been hired by this Averroes to catalogue and then sell a vast collection of dusty books and manuscripts. While there, Mira, the wilful daughter of this Averroes, seduces Bill against her father with the promise of love and freedom. What follows is a battle of wills as Bill attempts to navigate the truth between father and daughter. Except of course Bill is not all he seems to be - and neither for that matter is Averroes and Mira. The play is very much a ‘Propsero and Miranda with Ferdinand - except Ferdinand turns out not to be Ferdinand at all but Caliban in disguise’. Deeper secrets lie at the heart of this play too. There is a cruel murder which changes everything and yet which seems not to change anything at all. The more Bill falls into the dark world of this Spain lost in the foothills between the lands of Don Quixote and Lorca, the more his own reality and truth unravel also. In the end, Bill is left blind and crippled by a deep uncertainty about who he actually is - and it is this sense of unravelling that I wanted to leave the audience with also. Hence a mystery crucial to the play which is left unexplained at the end. Conventional drama will always attempt to tie up the loose ends - but in a play which examines the very unravelling of character I felt it was important not to tie everything up and so in some small way allow the audience itself to experience a little of what Bill himself is going through.

  A LITTLE WINTER LOVE

  This is perhaps the most thematically complex of the plays written so far. In one short and violent night the survivors of battle and siege root around in the ruins of Basing House attempting to survive, escape or even stage one last rebellion against the new forces of Puritanism. It is a play in which the last shards of Elizabethan Theatre fall in disarray. Here Inigo Jones struggles to rehearse and stage the last Masque of Royalty even as his nemesis, Major Harrison moves to mock him. As the long night drags on, men become women and the mad over throw the sane even as the sane don madness as an escape. The House itself crumbles into a new landscape and within these forms new shadows emerge: even the dead now drift seeking revenge.

  There is something tragic about one man’s obsession to stage a Masque within a ruin - especially when it is a Masque obsessed with dreams and phantasms; a Masque detailing another Ark separate from the one built by Noah; an Ark where imagination itself finds refuge. It is of course that last defiant act against the end of theatre and freedom and a certain licentiousness now doomed to the pages of history - much like the head of Charles the First. Here in this play other forces swirl around Inigo’s struggle to stage that Masque and as they do so, the House itself mocks them. At the heart of this play then rests the notion of revolution and what happens in that awful moment when the old world tumbles into chaos and before the new order can assert itself. That moment when all the gates are open and every demon and fool capers in freedom. Chaos abounds but in that chaos can lie the seeds of a deeper revolution - against order itself. Basing House becomes then a crucible in the night; a staging ground, as it were, where morality and imagination war against whatever new order may come to chain them all.

  Here in this play, clothes are thrown off, character is abandoned, social order is reversed. Even theatre itself is liberated into the gibbering of the mad. And out of all that chaos, the love of one man for one woman encircles all.

  CONSTANTINOPLE, ITS DREAMS

  This is a play in eight short scenes. Each scene is a facet of that magnificent city of Constantinople, once the greatest city know to the world. Each facet is a dark exploration of those souls lost in that city now itself lost from history. Constantinople: a place where people drown in books, where they are overwhelmed by a past too huge to comprehend, where every action is merely an echo of countless others many times repeated, wherein decadence is elevated to the level of style. It is a play where the character of the City itself takes centre stage.

  Here you will see marionette makers reveal their Art to devastating consequences; you will see madness attempting to cut itself free from books; you will see skin itself used to stage a rebellion against an Emperor; you will see a mapmaker allowing one tiny little hole in his map to stand as the only freedom he can write in the city; and so on. Here in this play, character after character struggles with the presence of a city so vast and ancient it drowns them all.

  And even in the Fall of that City, that madness continues as the books are carted away and into the West to preserve a History so old even its statues have eroded into dust. This is the legacy of Constantinople: the weight of a past too heavy to unburden. It imprisons even as it releases - and all those characters caught up in that past are always ostracised from truth and freedom.

  THE WRACKED

  This is perhaps the most ambitious play of the series - in that I have attempted to create a piece of what is called ‘Monumental’ or total theatre: that is, a piece of dramatic writing where every element in the writing is attempting to delimit and detail the directorial signature. Here stage directions, action and dialogue are all wedded together so that to tamper with or cut out any one element will seriously derail the piece as a whole. This is also a play which plays with its narrative structure in a wilful and complex manner: characters move back and forwards through the dramatic time in reverse order; the stage environment is mapped and shaped to echo into the following scenes; characters and effigies blur so that what you see becomes a strange hybrid realm peopled by shadows and caricatures. At the heart of this play lies Tomas De Torquemada: the Great Inquisitor of Spain, whose desire for Credo twists the realm into a phantasmagorical space where armies invade wardrobes and shadows eat and up and drown out real people. This is History as a horror story experienced by one man whose madness overrules all. It is a Spain in which the People of the Three Holy Books are torn out and scattered by obsession and desire. Where giant puppet effigies sway over nervous courtiers and characters emerge from the future to slay their ancestors in a fit of pique.

  This play is not an easy play - it slides across the page in a miasma of enveloping characters and actions. It takes you into a world of red sand and mirrors and hanging effigies whose empty eye sockets swivel about unblinkingly upon all. It is a play in the end about that single moment where the end emerges to drown you out while you are still unfinished as a character.

  It is only in this play of them all written so far that I place myself as a character.

  THE DAY AFTER YESTERDAY

  This is a short play, about an hour long, with thirty short scenes, many of which feature characters who never re-appear. It is set on a shore cluttered with ruins of a forgotten civilisation battered by an uncaring sea. Along this shore wanders an endless stream of refugees, all struggling to articulate old actions and truths. Drifting in and out of these refugees are the last gods - now bored and filled with ennui. This is the world that is left to those heroes and demi-gods we once worshipped or were told about. The world of Phaedra, Oedipus and Medea. The world of Tragedy now abandoned to an anaemic place of echo and mockery. Here along this shore a slight figure also walks - the New God whose touch is redemption and whose words bring salvation from all their tragic masks. This is the last echo of Tragedy and also its pathetic Fate in a world which has abandoned them forever into the dry texts of plays and stories.

  It is a place where Tragedy has come to die, alone and bereft.

  A TIGER’S LEAP

  The Great Library of Alexandria after its fiery destruction by Monks and Zealots now remains as a Ruin in the city. As such, the new Roman elite attempt to re-consecrate it into a nunnery not realising that Hypatia herself still lurks in the ruins and will defy them all. Here in these ruins the survivors scrabble and bicker attempting to hang onto the Old Order even as it moves in to sweep them away - but underlying all is that great writer Edmund Gibbons whose pen will resurrect the Library and Hypatia herself into History. What follows is a battle over the fate of the Library and the doom of Hypatia caught between martyr and victim.
Her escape from that dilemma leaves her abandoned and alone beyond the pen of Gibbon.

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