Play With a Tiger and Other Plays. Doris Lessing

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ [gently]: Perhaps the irony was the truth.

      ANNA: No, no, no. It was not.

      DAVE [laughing at her, but gently]: You’re a romantic, Anna Freeman. You’re an adolescent.

      ANNA: Yes, I’m an adolescent. And that’s how I’m going to stay. Anything, anything rather than the man and woman, the jailed and the jailer, living together, talking to themselves, and wondering what happened that made them strangers. I won’t, I’ll die alone first. And I shall. I shall.

      DAVE [holding her]: Hey, Anna, Anna. [gently laughing] You know what Dr Melville Cooper-Anstey would say to that?

      ANNA: Yes.

      DAVE: And what all the welfare workers would say?

      ANNA: Yes.

      DAVE: And what all the priests would say?

      ANNA: Yes.

      DAVE: And what the politicians would say?

      ANNA: Yes. [she tears herself from him] Don’t rock the boat.

      DAVE: [taking her up]: Don’t rock the boat. [he switches off the lights]

      [They look at each other, beginning to laugh. The following sequence, while they throw slogans, or newspaper headlines at each other should be played with enjoyment, on the move, trying to out-cap each other.]

      ANNA: Don’t rock the boat – work.

      DAVE: Produce goods and children for the State.

      ANNA: Marry young.

      DAVE: The unit of society is a stable marriage.

      ANNA: The unit of a healthy society is a well-integrated family.

      DAVE: Earn money.

      ANNA: Remember the first and worst sin is poverty.

      DAVE: The first and best virtue is to own a comfortable home full of labour-saving devices.

      ANNA: If you have too much leisure, there are football matches, the pools and television.

      DAVE: If you still have too much leisure be careful not to spend it in ways that might rock the boat.

      ANNA: Don’t rock the boat – society might have its minor imperfections, but they are nothing very serious.

      DAVE: Don’t dream of anything better – dreams are by definition neurotic.

      ANNA: If you are dissatisfied with society, you are by definition unstable.

      DAVE: If your soul doesn’t fit into the patterns laid down for you –

      ANNA: Kill yourself, but don’t rock the boat.

      DAVE: Be integrated.

      ANNA: Be stable.

      DAVE: Be secure.

      ANNA: Be integrated or –

DAVE:		Die! Die! Die!
ANNA:

      DAVE: The trouble with you, Anna, is that you exaggerate everything.

      ANNA: The trouble with you Dave, is that you have no sense of proportion.

      DAVE: Proportion. I have no sense of proportion. I must scale myself down … I have spent my whole life on the move … I’ve spent my youth on the move across the continent and back again – from New York to Pittsburgh, from Pittsburgh to Chicago, from Chicago … [by now he is almost dancing his remembering] … across the great plains of the Middle West to Salt Lake City and the Rocky Mountains, and down to the sea again at San Francisco. Then back again, again, again, from West to East, from North to South, from Dakota to Mexico and back again … and sometimes, just sometimes, when I’ve driven twelve hours at a stretch with the road rolling up behind me like a carpet, sometimes I’ve reached it, sometimes I’ve reached what I’m needing – my head rests on the Golden Gates, with one hand I touch Phoenix, Arizona, and with the other I hold Minneapolis, and my feet straddle from Maine to the Florida Keys. And under me America rocks, America rocks – like a woman.

      ANNA: Or like the waitress from Minnesota.

      DAVE: Ah, Jesus!

      ANNA: You are maladjusted Mr Miller!

      DAVE: But you aren’t, do tell me how you do it!

      ANNA: Now when I can’t breathe any more I shut my eyes and I walk out into the sun – I stand on a ridge of high country and look out over leagues and leagues of – emptiness. Then I bend down and pick up a handful of red dust, a handful of red dust and I smell it. It smells of sunlight.

      DAVE: Of sunlight.

      ANNA: I tell you, if I lived in this bloody mildewed little country for seven times seven years, my flesh would be sunlight. From here to here, sunlight.

      DAVE: You’re neurotic, Anna, you’ve got to face up to it.

      ANNA: But you’re all right, you’re going to settle in a split-level house with a stable wife and two children.

      DAVE [pulling ANNA to the front of the stage and pointing over and down into the house]: Poke that little nose of yours over your safe white cliffs and look down – see all those strange coloured fish down there – not cod, and halibut and Dover sole and good British herring, but the poisonous coloured fish of Paradise.

      ANNA: Cod. Halibut. Dover Sole. Good British herring.

      DAVE: Ah, Jesus, you’ve got the soul of a little housewife from Brixton.

      ANNA [leaping up and switching on the lights]: Or from Philadelphia. Well let me tell you Dave Miller, any little housewife from Brixton or Philadelphia could tell you what’s wrong with you.

      DAVE [mocking]: Tell me baby.

      ANNA: You are America, the America you’ve sold your soul to – do you know what she is?

      DAVE [mocking]: No baby, tell me what she is.

      ANNA: She’s that terrible woman in your comic papers – a great masculine broad-shouldered narrow-hipped black-booted blonde beastess, with a whip in one hand and a revolver in the other. And that’s why you’re running, she’s after you, Dave Miller, as she’s after every male American I’ve ever met. I bet you even see the Statue of Liberty with great black thigh-boots and a pencilled moustache – the frigid tyrant, the frigid goddess.

      DAVE [mocking]: But she’s never frigid for me, baby. [he does his little mocking dance]

      ANNA: God’s gift to women, Dave Miller.

      DAVE: That’s right, СКАЧАТЬ