ROY: People will hear.

CHERRY: They won’t. I heard that the ward assistants are putting the doped-up ones and catatonics in the front rows.

ROY: That’s not going to help my performance. I feed off audience reaction!

Realising ROY is panicking, LEWIS leads him away to talk to him in private.

RUTH: [to JULIE, taking the opportunity to go through the blocking] Do we take six or seven steps in the garden scene? You know the one, where we give in to the boys when they’re disguised. [Starting to count out steps with a bemused JULIE] One, two, three—

LEWIS: Roy, it’s okay to have stage fright. I get it.

ROY: It’s never happened to me before. Sweat. Dry mouth. Terminal memory loss.

LEWIS: I’ll whisper the lines to you.

ROY: I can’t. Can’t. Can’t do it.

LEWIS: Yes, you can.

ROY: Can’t go on and make a fool of myself.

LEWIS: You won’t.

ROY: Everyone will be staring at me!

LEWIS: That’s the point, that’s why you’re on stage. If they didn’t stare at you, I’d be worried.

ROY: Why?

LEWIS: It’d mean you weren’t giving a good performance. I want you to be noticed all the time.

ROY: Generally that’s what happens to me when I’m on stage. [A beat.] You’re all right, Jerry. [To the others, exultant] I’m back! [As he hurries off, to RUTH and JULIE] Let’s go through some lines as I slip into my character.

RUTH and JULIE follow him out, NICK has entered unseen.

LEWIS: [to CHERRY] Are his parents coming tonight? Maybe that’s why he’s so nervous.

CHERRY: He hasn’t got any parents, he’s an orphan.

LEWIS: But I thought his mother and father—

CHERRY: He spent most of his early life in orphanages and being farmed out to foster parents who, realising what a nut case they had on their hands, put him back, quick smart.

NICK: Opening night nerves, Lewis?

LEWIS: Nick?

NICK: Didn’t see you at the moratorium today.

LEWIS: Didn’t have time. We only stopped rehearsing an hour ago.

NICK: You should have seen it!

HENRY enters wearing a tuxedo and his father’s medals. He listens to NICK at a distance.

A hundred thousand people, maybe two hundred. Took hours to get to Parliament House, yelling out, ‘One, two, three, four, we don’t want your fuckin’ war’. Radicalised the nation.

LEWIS: Why are you here?

NICK: Came to wish you the best for Così.

LEWIS: Why don’t you stay and watch it?

NICK: Going out with Lucy to celebrate the moratorium.

LEWIS: She was coming to see this.

NICK: You don’t understand, Lewis—today Australia was changed forever. She doesn’t want to see an opera about a few upper-class twits.

LEWIS: She said she was coming—

NICK: Lewis, we’re mates, aren’t we…?

LEWIS understands immediately.

LEWIS: You’re sleeping with her!

NICK: No, she’s sleeping with you, we’re having sex.

LEWIS: In the same house.

NICK: Lucy’s not possessive about you, I’m not possessive about her. What’s the fuss?

LEWIS: Christ!