[To the women] You are worried—you think I am a doctor—

ROY: [to LEWIS] Stop her directing or you’ll create a monster—

RUTH: You’re Cherry, pretending to be Despina, pretending to be a doctor—

LEWIS: Ruth! Go with the flow.

CHERRY: This is a magnet equipment which the great Doctor Mesmer discovered in Germany and then became famous in all of France. [A beat.] I’ll shoot a bolt of electricity through you, Roy, so you can show Lewis how to act it.

ROY: I don’t want to.

LEWIS: Come on, Roy.

ROY: Mozart is about love, not madness.

CHERRY: Act!

ROY gives in and she pretends to put bolts of electric currents through him.

One volt, two volts, three volts.

ROY starts to convulse as if real shocks are being sent through him. It looks so real that JULIE and HENRY are concerned for him and empathise. CHERRY, though, is enjoying this.

LEWIS: [becoming concerned] Are you all right, Roy?

CHERRY: Forty, eighty, a hundred—

LEWIS: Roy!

He stops convulsing and smiles triumphantly.

ROY: Had you all going there, didn’t I? Method acting. Had a lesson in it when I did Rep.

CHERRY: Okay, the both of you.

She pretends to put electricity through both of them. LEWIS and ROY convulse.

Two hundred. Three hundred. Four hundred…

She snaps her fingers, signalling RUTH and JULIE to say their lines. HENRY joins in at the appropriate moment.

JULIE:

They’re moving.

RUTH:

Twisting

HENRY:

Ssssshaking.

JULIE:

They’ll hit their heads.

RUTH:

They’ll bash their heads.

CHERRY:

Hold their heads steady.

RUTH & JULIE:

We’ll do that.

CHERRY:

Hold tight. Courage.
Now, they’re safe from death.

JULIE:

They’re looking around.

RUTH:

They’re recovering their strength.

HENRY:

The doctor’s worth all the gold in Peru.

CHERRY claps her hands to end the demonstration.

CHERRY: Much more effective than a Mesmer magnet, isn’t it? More theatrical.

LEWIS: We may as well go to the end of the scene.

CHERRY: We did that yesterday, it’s all that kissing and stuff. This seems realer, doesn’t it?

RUTH: Yes, the more real it is, the more real it is.

ROY: We have a theatre reviewer in our midst.

CHERRY: And it makes me less of a fake and you see why a woman’s heart would soften towards a man if she saw what was happening to him in shock treatment.

JULIE: It’s supposed to be a comedy.

RUTH: Comedy is better when it’s real.

CHERRY: It makes you two seem less foolish.

JULIE: But we are. That’s what love is, being foolish.

CHERRY: Lewis?

LEWIS: I suppose you’re right. The boys’ winning of the girls’ hearts should be hard won.

CHERRY: [triumphantly] Most women fight hard to keep men out of their pants. You may like being foolish, but most women are not.

JULIE: [to LEWIS] I’ve always thought that love was being foolish and stupid. It’s about being on the edge and I like being on the edge. It’s not divine madness like some people think, there’s no such thing as divine madness, madness is just madness. Love is hallucinating without drugs.