Flights (NHB Modern Plays) E-Book

John O'donovan

• Herausgeber: Nick Hern Books
• Kategorie: Poesie und Drama
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2020

Seitenzahl: 104

Beschreibung

On the outskirts of Ennis, on a dark and stormy night, three men gather for the anniversary of a childhood friend, killed in a road accident when they were seventeen. Expecting a crowd and tearing into the cans, the three slowly realise they're the only ones coming. As they drink to their uncertain futures – and their receding youth – they're forced to face up to the ghost that has held them together. Flights is a haunting and funny play about bereavement, brotherhood and breaking away from your past. It premiered in 2020 at glór in Ennis before transferring to Dublin and London, directed by Thomas Martin.

Leseprobe

John O’Donovan

FLIGHTS

NICK HERN BOOKS

London

www.nickhernbooks.co.uk

Contents

Original Production

Author’s Note

Acknowledgements

Epigraph

Characters

Flights

About the Author

Copyright and Performing Rights Information

Flights was produced by One Duck and first performed at glór, Ennis, Ireland, on 15 January 2020, with the following cast:

BARRY

Colin Campbell

CUSACK

Conor Madden

PA

Rhys Dunlop

Director

Thomas Martin

Set and Costume

Naomi Faughnan

Lighting

Zia Bergin-Holly

Sound and Composition

Peter Power

Movement

Sue Mythen

Production Manager

Eoin Kilkenny

Deputy Stage Manager

Emily Danby

Hair and Make-up Consultant

Val Sherlock

Producer and Stage Manager

Alan Mahon

Author’s Note

Flights is a play that’s very close to my heart. I’ve been writing it on and off for about five years now, using characters that are kind of like grown-up versions of characters I wrote about in my first ever full-length play. Like Sink, it is set very specifically in the here and now (the here being the west of Ireland) while at the same time being about generational memory and the inescapability of histories – both personal and public.

Initially Flights was not much more than a fairly funny short play about someone throwing his own going-away party (that almost no one shows up to); but while I was sketching out that early draft, I got some bad news that a guy from back home had died by suicide.

A few of us living over in England got together once we heard the news – we weren’t going home for the funeral so we went to a pub in London instead, aiming to share stories we had of him, and all the other people we’d known who’ve died prematurely over the years since school, whether through suicide, car accidents, drink or terminal illnesses.

It seemed like a lot – a dozen maybe? – definitely too many. But it also seemed kind of old hat, like we’d been here before. We already knew what to do: gather, tell stories, find out who to contact, ask if they wanted flowers or a donation, then get in touch with whoever we thought might need to be gotten in touch with and make sure again that we were all alright.

I’ve had a lot of conversations like that over the years. A lot of nights out on the beer in remembrance. Getting rounds in and sharing stories. Starting sombre, ending wild. Making sure to recall the funny stuff as well as the tragic bits. The anger and the pure silliness.

It becomes habitual, ritualistic. Something we remember when the anniversaries roll around. Something to keep in mind whenever we get the unwelcome phone call with the news.

That was the early impulse of Flights – a kind of tribute not just to all the friends who have died, but also to the friends that have gathered in their wake, who look out for each other, look after each other and remember to get in touch when the bad news spreads.

But the more I wrote, the more I realised that the story was not just about personal tragedy, but was also about the economic context in which these tragedies take place. As much as Barry, Cusack and Pa’s teenage lives were stalled by Liam’s death, they were equally paralysed in adulthood by the global recession; they made cautious choices, enforced by a lack of opportunities in front of them. And instinctively they learned that their lives were only useful insofar as they were put to work.

This is a punishing and limiting way to live, to be victims of an economy you are obliged to serve. Your creativity, your expression, even your physicality means nothing unless it’s being used to earn and spend money. This ideology produces such a reckless attitude to body and mind, it is no wonder people turn in on themselves, heedless of their safety and capacity, assaulting their physical and mental health while struggling to imagine another way to live.

There’s this patronising, anachronistic idea about men that they don’t know what they’re feeling – that if they just expressed themselves they wouldn’t be so fucked up. But some of the things they feel – rage, weakness, fatigue, apathy – aren’t the kinds of things that people want to hear about. It’s all well and good telling fellas they need to talk, but when there’s no one – trained or otherwise – prepared to listen, many will know it’s easier to keep their mouths shut.

And these feelings are not peculiar: rage, weakness, fatigue and apathy are sensible responses to living under austerity capitalism.

So I don’t think it’s a crisis of masculinity alone; more that there’s a crisis in health services, in housing, in employment and work–life balance – in other words, the same crises that have been devastating Ireland for more than a decade. Young men, like all young people, have been part of a generation disproportionately punished by austerity economics; the idea that their problems would disappear if they weren’t too proud or macho to talk their way out of it is at best naive, and at worst an invidious piece of victim blaming that ignores economic causality and favours individual recrimination over systemic improvement.

To me, Flights is not a play about men not being able to articulate themselves; it’s not filled with brooding, unsaid feelings. Silence is not their problem; if anything they have too many words. It’s not the inability to speak, but the fact that they are speaking to a world that has no interest in listening that’s troubling them. It’s not unsayable truths but unavoidable facts that finally do for them: that not seeing a place for themselves in their country, or in the world, it should come as no surprise that they might want to take themselves out of it.

Flights starts and ends as an act of remembrance: three fellas come together in a world that’s changing around them; old before their time, they’re fading out of their own lives. Consumed with the history of their grief – and bereft of their own potential – they are more adept at remembering the past than they are at seeing clearly what’s happening to them now.

If I could wish anything for them, it is that as much as they would never forget their friend and the promise they once shared, I hope they never forgive the economics that has left them behind, stewing, with their best days far behind them, lying stalled and stagnating, finished before they ever got started.

John O’Donovan,

January 2020

Acknowledgements

With thanks to Ailbhe Hogan, Michael Dee, Kieran Gough, Séamus Hughes, Cillian Roche, Kristina Izidora Sucic, Paul Mescal, Fionn Walton, Aaron Monaghan, Stewart Pringle, Clive Judd, Brad Birch, Jessica Stewart, Annabelle Comyn, Deirdre O’Halloran, Orla Flanagan and all at glór, Cian O’Brien and all at Project Arts Centre, Marie McCarthy and all at Omnibus Theatre, Matt Applewhite and all at NHB, Nick Quinn and all at The Agency, Marty Rea and all at Druid, Theatre503, the Irish Theatre Institute, the King’s Head Theatre and The Lir Academy.

Special thanks to Thomas Martin for his help in breathing life into every draft of the play, and to Alan Mahon for resuscitating it when it looked like it was beyond hope.

John O’Donovan

‘Pity me’ I cried out to him,

‘Whether it’s a ghost you are or a man.’

Dante Alighieri, Inferno

We all partied.

Brian Lenihan TD, Minister for Finance,

November 2010

Characters

BARRY

CUSACK

PA

Three friends in their early-to-mid thirties. Cusack is well dressed in fairly expensive outdoor-casual type clothes, Pa is dilapidated, Barry is in between.

Setting

Outside Ennis, Co. Clare, Ireland. An almost abandoned building, one main room, with a toilet, off, to the back. A dartboard on the wall. Tape on the floor to mark the oche. There are several slabs of lager and cider somewhere nearby and off, and a pile of about two or three black refuse bags visible in the space. It doesn’t even have faded glamour, but there’s something of a hermitage or sanctuary about it.

Time

31st of May 2019 and, sometimes, seventeen years previously.

Notes

Some effort has been made to recreate an Ennis accent through spelling, etc. but it’s not exhaustive, and rhythm is probably more important than specificity.

Lines given in square brackets indicate words not said, but meant by gesture.

’s can mean an ellision of ‘was’ as well as ‘is’.

‘Ah’, is a non-committed affirmative, a kind of ‘Ya’, without the Y.

‘Sure’ is usually the Irish discourse marker, with a very short stress.

Swearing is common but not stressed.

Finally, in the game in Act Three, it probably won’t be possible – either technically or in terms of stage time – to play exactly as written, so use the text there as a guide to how it should feel and what its outcomes should be.

This ebook was created before the end of rehearsals and so may differ slightly from the play as performed.

ACT ONE

A dark and stormy night. Rattling branches, rain. Some white streetlight from outside barely lights the space.

CUSACK enters, hurrying out of the weather. Can’t believe no one’s here. Sees PA passed out across the oche. Doesn’t try to wake him. Looks further in to see if anyone is around, sees no one and so turns to leave.

BARRY enters from the bathroom, holding unlit candles, scaring the shit out of CUSACK, who in turn scares the shit out of BARRY.

BARRY. Jesus Christ.

CUSACK. Who’s there?

BARRY. Cusack? Is that you?

CUSACK. Sake, man, you scared the shit outta me.

What’re you doing in the dark?

BARRY. Sure the lights [don’t work].

You alright?

CUSACK. Oh I’m grand, ya, thanks Barry. I need to change my jocks like but I’m fine.

Is this everyone?

BARRY. Ya.

CUSACK. Just you?

BARRY. Well [and Pa].

CUSACK. Fuck sake, what happened?

BARRY. I dunno. He seemed grand when he came in. Bit wired.

You hardly have a light have you?

CUSACK. I hardly do. Is it drink just?

BARRY rifles through PA’s pockets for a lighter. He finds one and starts placing candles around the place. The space grows more atmospheric. The dialogue continues throughout.

BARRY. Dunno. He was delighted to see me, which was nice.

CUSACK. You shoulda known something was wrong so.

BARRY. Then he sat down. Next thing [he was like this].

CUSACK. At least he’s here. Any word from the lads?

BARRY. No, I couldn’t get signal.

CUSACK. Fucking Pointers, man. State a’ the place.

BARRY. I thought I got through there from the sweet spot in the jacks but I haven’t a clue could they hear me.

CUSACK. Show’s your phone.

BARRY shows his phone.

Ya, surprised you don’t need dial-up with that. Hang on.

CUSACK takes out his (better) phone. Finds signal.

Sake.

They’re all in town. (Shows BARRY the screen.) Brodericks by the look of it. About… ten minutes ago.

BARRY. Pricks. They know what day it is.

CUSACK. Ya.

Sure…

BARRY. What?

CUSACK. We could head in there and meet’m.

BARRY. Ah we can’t like.

CUSACK. Why not? Point of staying here when everyone’s there.

BARRY. What if he wakes up?

CUSACK. He wakes up most days, I’m sure he’ll cope.

Hmon – it in’t his anniversary.

BARRY. Ah no. Leave it a while anyway.

CUSACK. Man, please…

BARRY. It’s one evening. We can give him that.

CUSACK. One evening? I haven’t been out since the birth.

BARRY. Anyway, they could be just having pints in town before they come out here.

CUSACK. D’you think?

BARRY. They said they’d come like. They know what day it is.

CUSACK. – .

They’d want to.

BARRY. D’you want a drink?

CUSACK. God ya. What do you have?

BARRY. Lots. Well, lots of cans.

CUSACK. I’ll have a can so.

BARRY gives him a beer. He opens it.

To your holy soul and your swollen hole.

CUSACK skulls the can.

BARRY. You’ll be fucked if you drink like that.

CUSACK. Promise? Gimme another one there. I’ve six months to make up for.

BARRY. No one made you stay at home.

CUSACK. No one made me? Aoife made me. D’you think if she’s staying in I’m allowed out?

BARRY. You’re out tonight.

CUSACK. Cos it’s tonight. Game?

BARRY. Go on.

They start throwing darts, casually, though very well, without really keeping score.

She didn’t want to come out with you?