ROY: Love is what you feel when you don’t have enough emotion left to hate.

His definition stuns everyone.

CHERRY: That’s an awful thing to say about love.

LEWIS: Why are you keen to do Così then?

ROY: It’s true. Hate is a much more pure emotion. We choose our enemies with greater care than our lovers. That’s why hatred lasts longer. You have enemies for life, but never lovers. Music is what love between humans should be. And we’ve thrown out the music from this opera.

LEWIS: We just won’t have time to learn the music.

RUTH: You should never have got him to do that shock treatment. He’s depressed now.

ZAC enters, dripping wet, with a cardboard box.

ZAC: Enter the genius.

LEWIS: You’ve finished the set model?

ZAC puts it on the table and everyone rushes to it.

ROY: [disappointed] It’s only white walls.

ZAC: Lewis said to keep it simple.

ROY: May as well be back in our wards.

CHERRY: You said you were a painter: there’s no garden, no seashore.

ZAC: I was a house painter.

LEWIS: Bit stark, Zac.

ZAC: It’s not all of it. I sit at the piano, not playing music day after day, and I think. And last night it came to me, while I was in bed, humming the Electric Prunes Mass in F minor, it came to me, a vision, a white light pouring into the ward like Annunciation Light—

ROY: [half to himself] Christ, he’s been nicking stuff from the pharmacy again.

ZAC: A blinding white light of an idea, a way to solve the problem of creating the world of the garden in the last act. [Showing them by rearranging the box.] Voila!

LEWIS: I like it.

JULIE: You’re a genius, Zac.

ZAC: I know.

JULIE: What are you on?

ZAC: A lower dosage. It’s amazing how much more bright the world seems.

RUTH: Are you going to use real trees?

ZAC: I can’t stand real things. If I could put up with reality I wouldn’t be in here.

ROY notices a wet rolled-up poster brought in with the box. He unfolds it and is horrified.

ROY: What’s this?

ZAC: My idea for the poster. Mozart in a strait jacket.

ROY: My God!

JULIE: Neat, Zac.

ROY: And this name? Who’s this person?

ZAC: Da Ponte.

ROY: Who’s he? What’s his name doing next to Mozart’s?

ZAC: He wrote the words.

ROY: What words?

ZAC: Così fan Tutte’s words. I thought you knew the opera backwards.

ROY: No one cares who wrote the words. Why do you think an opera has music—so no one will have to pay attention to the words!

LEWIS: But we’re speaking the words.

ROY is in despair. He walks away. The others turn their attention to the poster.

CHERRY: [horrified] It’s Cherry, not Cheery!

HENRY: Why is my nnnnname so small?

ZAC: I ran out of space.

CHERRY takes the poster and takes out a pen.

CHERRY: Give me this.

She starts to change it.