LEWIS: It’s not so bad. My grandmother went mad. I went once to the asylum to see her. In her mind she was living in the year before I was born. She thought I was Eric, my father. And he had just married Mum and she was about to have me.

JULIE: You pretended to be your father about to father yourself?

He nods; both are amused.

Don’t ever tell a psychiatrist that story, they’d have a heart attack on the symbolism of it all.

They both laugh.

In a way you’re sort of testing yourself by coming here?

LEWIS: I guess so. I liked my grandmother, I knew she had gone mad, but she was still my grandmother.

JULIE: It must be strange to be doing plays with amateurs like us?

LEWIS: All I’ve done is act a bit at university and did some direction. My friend, Nick, is the one who knows all about theatre, only he’s more interested in politics. He says politics is the real theatre.

JULIE: He shares a house with your girlfriend, Lucy. Doug has told the whole hospital everything about you. [Noticing the newspaper] You’re a radical?

LEWIS: [amused] Lucy would never call me that. She and Nick edit the newspaper. It’s a special edition publicising the moratorium march against the war.

JULIE: [looking at second page] Lucy White… that’s her?

LEWIS: Yes.

JULIE: Uses a nice shampoo in her hair. Earnest. Serious. Not many jokes?

He shakes his head, bemused.

A laugh is as good as a fuck, they say. You two are into free love?

LEWIS: Doug said that?

JULIE: Spread it all over the asylum.

LEWIS: Lucy’s not into marriage—

JULIE: You are?

LEWIS: We sometimes talk about commitment—

JULIE: [amused] Fidelity, like in Così?

LEWIS: But it never gets far.

JULIE: She’s not into it?

LEWIS: She’s into politics. She hates talk about love. She thinks its icky. ‘Love is the last gasp of bourgeois romanticism’, she says. She hates me doing an opera about love and fidelity while thousands of Vietnamese are being killed by American troops.

JULIE: Does she play around?

LEWIS: [laughing] No.

JULIE: You trust her?

LEWIS: [uncertainly] Yes.

JULIE: Do you trust men not to play around?

LEWIS: Men are—

JULIE: Flesh and blood. Women are flesh and blood too—that’s what the opera says, doesn’t it? Am I irritating you?

LEWIS: I was wondering what you were getting at.

JULIE: I don’t like men’s double standards, I guess. Men want women to deceive them because it’ll prove their worst thoughts about women—and they have a lot of bad thoughts about women. And then they become so righteous, like Guglielmo and Ferrando. I would love to hit up right now. You know what a psychiatrist is? A Peeping Tom with a fancy title. [She laughs.] I don’t sit in the rec room watching television, I read this stupid libretto, trying to remember the lines.

They both laugh.

It’s so wonderfully silly. [Referring to the newspaper photograph] She’s very pretty, but should change her hairstyle. It makes her look like a coffee shop folk singer.