Cosi

Così

Louis Nowra

Currency Press • Sydney

Table of Contents

Title Page
Copyright Page
Playwright’s Biography
First Production
Characters
Setting
Playwright’s Note: Trial by Madmen

Act One

Scene One
Scene Two
Scene Three
Scene Four

Act Two

Scene One
Scene Two
Scene Three
Scene Four
Scene Five

www.currencypress.com.au

CURRENCY PLAYS
First published in 1992 by
Currency Press Pty Ltd
PO Box 2287
Strawberry Hills NSW 2012
www.currencypress.com.au
[email protected]

Reprinted 1995 (twice), 1996, 1997 (twice), 1999, 2000, 2001, 2002, 2003, 2004, 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010 (twice), 2011

Copyright © Louis Nowra, 1994

First electronic edition published in 2012 by Currency Press Pty Ltd.

Copying for Educational Purposes

The Australian Copyright Act 1968 (Act) allows a maximum of one chapter or 10% of this book, whichever is the greater, to be reproduced and/or communicated by any educational institution for its educational purposes provided that educational institution (or the body that administers it) has given a remuneration notice to Copyright Agency Limited (CAL) under the Act. For details of the CAL licence for educational institutions contact CAL, Level 15, 233 Castlereagh Street, Sydney NSW, 2000. Tel: (02) 9394 7600; email: [email protected]

Copying for Other Purposes

Except as permitted under the Act, for example a fair dealing for the purposes of study, research, criticism or review, all rights are reserved. This publication (or any part of it) may not be reproduced or transmitted, copied, stored, distributed or otherwise made available by any person or entity (including Google, Amazon or similar organisations), in any form (electronic, digital, optical, mechanical) or by any means (photocopying, recording, scanning or otherwise) without prior written permission from the publisher.

Performing Rights

Any performance or public reading of Così is forbidden unless a licence has been received from the author or the author’s agent. The purchase of this book in no way gives the purchaser the right to perform the play in public, whether by means of a staged production or a reading. All applications for public performance should be made to the author, c/o HLA Management, PO Box 1536, Strawberry Hills NSW 2012, email [email protected] ; ph: +612 9549 3000

Printed book ISBN: 9780868194035

ePub ISBN: 9781921428647

Cover design by Trevor Hood

Front cover shows Barry Otto and Ben Mendelsohn. Back cover shows the final scene. Both photos from the Belvoir St Production. Photos by Stuart Spence

Playwright’s Biography

LOUIS NOWRA was born in Melbourne. His plays include Page 8 (with David Page), The Woman With Dog’s Eyes, The Marvellous Boy, The Emperor of Sydney, Inner Voices, Visions, Inside the Island, The Precious Woman, Sunrise, The Golden Age, Capricornia, Byzantine Flowers, The Watchtower, Summer of the Aliens, Così, Radiance, The Temple, Crow, Miss Bosnia, The Incorruptible, The Jungle and The Language of the Gods. He has translated The Prince of Homburg, Cyrano de Bergerac and Lulu for the stage. He has also written the libretti for Whitsunday and Love Burns. For television he has written Displaced Persons, Hunger and The Lizard King and for film Map of the Human Heart, Così, Heaven’s Burning, Radiance, K-19: The Widowmaker and Black and White. His radio plays include Albert Names Edward, The Song Room, The Widows, Sydney and The Divine Hammer. Other writings include nonfiction works: The Cheated, Warne’s World and Walkabout (in Currency’s Australian Screen Classics series); five novels: The Misery of Beauty, Palu, Red Nights, Abaza and Ice, which was shortlisted for the 2009 Miles Franklin Award; and two memoirs: The Twelfth of Never and Shooting the Moon. Nowra has won multiple awards and prizes, and lives in Sydney.

FIRST PRODUCTION

Così was first performed by Company B at the Belvoir Street Theatre, Sydney on 21 April, 1992 with the following cast:

HENRY Bob Baines
JUSTIN, NICK, ZAC David Field
LUCY, JULIE Kerry Fox
CHERRY Celia Ireland
RUTH Elspeth MacTavish
LEWIS Ben Mendelsohn
ROY Barry Otto
DOUG David Wenham

Director, Adam Cook
Designer, Stephen Curtis
Lighting, Mark Shelton

CHARACTERS

LEWIS, 21, has just left university.
LUCY, 20-23, is doing an MA thesis and lives with Lewis.
NICK, 21-24, also doing a thesis and directs student productions.
JUSTIN, a social worker in his late 30s or early 40s. He is neat and precise.
ROY, 40-50, a mental patient who has spent much of his life in institutions.
HENRY, 40-50, a former lawyer who is now a patient. Like Roy, he has spent much of his
adult life in institutions.
DOUG, 20-30, has a liking for fires, but has not been in institutions very long.
CHERRY, 25-35, has been in institutions for some time.
JULIE, 21-25, is in a mental institution for the first time because of drug dependency.
RUTH, 30-40, an obsessive personality, who is in and out of mental institutions.
ZAC, 25-30, the musician of the group who has been in and out of mental institutions.

SETTING

The time is 1971. The play is set in a Melbourne mental institution.

To Gerri Williams and Adam Cook.
And, of course, Hilary Linstead—who was right all along.

Mozart was probably one of the sanest people who ever lived except for his preoccupation with scatology and his obsession that his wife may have been unfaithful to him.

Joseph Feher
The Problem of Constanze Mozart’s Fidelity

PLAYWRIGHT’S NOTE: TRIAL BY MADMEN

Written at probably one of the most intensely difficult periods of my life, Così is one of my most lighthearted plays. Each morning when I climbed the ladder to my South Melbourne attic I had never felt keener on entering the world of one of my plays. Like Summer of the Aliens, Così is partly autobiographical. Both centre on a character called Lewis (there, but for a vowel could be me). Summer of the Aliens was Lewis at fourteen, Così is Lewis at twenty-one. I suppose I chose those years because they were turning points in my understanding of people. Contrary to the opinions of those phrenologists of the twentieth century—the psychiatrists—it is sometimes events and experiences after your youth that determine the way you view the world, and so it was with my experiences that are part of Così.

Both my grandmothers ended up in mental institutions. On my mother’s side, Grandmother undoubtedly was suffering from a form of senility. Having always prided herself on her mental abilities (she could recite, in order, all the kings and queens of England) she found herself falling into the darkness of mental illness. When I visited her in Mont Park asylum she seemed to me to be the same person, but more discursive and mentally unfocussed. There is a current theory that far from being like a computer, the brain resembles a jungle. If this is so, then Grandmother’s brain became an inpenetrable jungle, swallowing up any explorer who dared to enter. On my father’s side my grandma deliberately chose madness as a way of dealing with the fact that her seventy-year-old husband had run off with a thirty-year-old barmaid. When I visited her in Mont Park (years after my other grandmother was in there) she lived permanently in the year 1948. As far as she was concerned, I did not exist, because I hadn’t been born yet and to complicate matters she thought I was my father. When she asked if I were to marry my mother, not only could I give the date, but I could tell her how many children I would have and so on. Some people would say that in having to pretend I was my father about to marry my mother I was taking part in a Freudian nightmare, but I prefer to see it as my having fallen, like Alice, down a hole to end up in topsy turvy land.

So, unlike Lewis in Così I had experience of mental institutions. It is difficult to rediscover my motives for involving myself with mental patients. I suspect that the madness of my grandmothers gave me an intense interest in the subject. Madness both frightened and attracted me. This was 1971 and the era of R.D. Laing, a Scottish psychiatrist whose view of madness was oddly reassuring in a decade going crazy. One of his ideas was that labelling people mad was to stigmatise them, and that many mentally ill people should be allowed to go totally mad—once at rock bottom they would again find their true selves. This idea of true and false selves is such a philosophical, let alone a psychological flim-flam, that it is not surprising that someone like myself, at twenty-one, was attracted to it. I even approached the mental health authority and proposed that I write a history of asylums in Victoria. Not having the intellectual rigour to do this, I decided to work with mental patients.

This was also the era when chemicals began to control many of the wilder excesses of madmen and saw the first influx of social workers, who like grass burrs, were attaching themselves onto our social fabric. One social worker asked a friend and myself if we wanted to do theatre with mental patients, ‘to bring them out of their selves’ (I suspect he meant ‘shells’). Having the confidence and certainty of youth I thought that theatre would be therapeutic.

One of the connections I feel with Lewis now is my first day in rehearsals. Instead of feeling cocky, I felt a great terror. Facing so many faces, some earnest, shy and irritated, I suddenly realised I was responsible for these people. I wanted them to ‘come out of their shells’, but at the time feared what would happen.

So who was I then, and how much was I like Lewis? I was a person who was very much removed from what was around him. Working with mental patients seemed to me to be something to believe in, something far removed from the political rhetoric of the anti-Vietnam war protests of the late 1960s. Every day I would turn up at the Mont Park hall, to rehearse Trial by Jury. This was the added burden. I hated Gilbert and Sullivan but one of the patients wanted to do it. Some patients agreed with me and demanded more ‘singable’ songs, so we incorporated Beatles and Bee Gees songs into the show. As we rehearsed I realised that although I was working with the most approachable patients, many were mad. No trendy philosophy can hide the terrifying nature of madness for both the sufferer and his relatives.

Once I had gotten over any impulses to be a do-gooder I began to enjoy rehearsals. There was only one performance. Some relatives of the patients came, but the audience was mostly other patients. Before the performance started a student radical came along. Here was a fellow who preached revolution and the equality of all, and this radical, let’s call him Nick, started to sing into the microphone, as patients filed in, the song about madness: ‘They’re coming to take me away, ha, ha!’ I had never felt such anger towards anyone in my life.

The show was probably terrible. A curious, eccentric mixture of original songs, rock and roll and Gilbert and Sullivan. Yet, afterwards in the changing rooms, I felt exhilarated, as did the patients. It is a feeling I sometimes experience when I go backstage after one of my plays; a mixture of giggling, hysteria, cockiness and relief. Like the patients, I wanted to do another play, but we never did.

Someone who saw the first production of Così complained that I was mocking the patients. Certainly I did not set out to do that. I also had no intention of adding to the modern cliche: people outside the asylum are more mad than those inside. But one thing I am proud of is how the shyer members of the Trial by Jury cast blossomed and gradually I lost any notion of Me and Them. Così is faintly based on that production and is a mixture of autobiography, fiction, and my more recent experiences.

Sydney,
December 1993

ACT ONE

SCENE ONE

A burnt-out theatre. It is day outside but pitch black inside the theatre. A heavy door opens, a chink of daylight enters, as do three people: LEWIS, his girlfriend LUCY, and his friend NICK.

LUCY: Where are the lights?

LEWIS: Don’t know.

NICK: Maybe over there.

The door slams shut.

Damn! [Fiddling with the lock] Christ, it’s locked from the inside.

LEWIS: I thought I saw a switch over there.

They fumble in the darkness for a light switch.

NICK: Smells like it hasn’t been used in years.

LUCY: Burnt wood and mould. Are you sure you know what you’re doing?

LEWIS: I need the money, Lucy.

NICK accidentally touches LUCY who cries out in alarm.

NICK: [enjoying this] It’s a ghost.

LUCY: Nick, just find the light!

NICK: All theatres have ghosts.

LUCY: I can’t believe you’re going to do a show here.

NICK: Mad actors are bad enough, but madmen…

LEWIS: You said you were going to help me.

NICK: As long as you do Galileo with me.

LUCY: I wish you boys would learn to drive, I’m late for my tutorial.

There is the sound of breaking glass.

NICK: [nervously] What’s that?

LUCY: Someone’s breaking in.

NICK: Who is it? Who’s there?

ROY: [nervously] Is that you, Justin?

LEWIS: No.

ROY: Who is it? Who’s there? Answer me!

LUCY: [relieved] Found it!

The lights go on. A dismal hall is revealed. A silence as they stare at one another.

ROY: How did you get in?

LEWIS: The door.

ROY: It was locked when I checked it this morning. That’s why I broke in. Didn’t want to be late.

LEWIS: The superintendent gave me the key. Are you the social worker?

ROY: No, I’m a patient.

LUCY: I have to go now. See you at home, Lewis.

NICK: Lucy! Wait! I’m coming with you.

LEWIS: But you were going to help me.

NICK: [taking him aside] I will, but I just remembered I have to meet my thesis supervisor. He’s on my back because I’m spending so much time organising the moratorium.

LUCY: Nick, I don’t have much time.

NICK: Coming! [To LEWIS] Don’t forget the Galileo rehearsals.

He goes after LUCY. LEWIS feels betrayed. He and ROY, shy of one another are silent until ROY decides to break it.

ROY: This is where I belong: in the theatre.

LEWIS nods, not knowing what to say. JUSTIN ANDERSON enters.

JUSTIN: Morning, Roy. [To LEWIS] And what ward are you from?

LEWIS: I’m not from a ward. I’m the director—

JUSTIN: Lewis Riley?

LEWIS: Yes.

ROY: I was expecting someone a bit older.

JUSTIN: Justin Anderson. Everyone calls me Justin. I’m the social worker who initiated this project.

LEWIS: [looking at the theatre] It’s burnt.

JUSTIN: Coat of paint and it’ll be fine.

DOUG: [entering] Hey, someone must have been in here before me.

He casts an expert eye on the damage.

Allowed the fire brigade plenty of time to get here. Must have been kids.

JUSTIN: I thought you were in C ward?

DOUG: First person to have ever escaped from the closed ward since that murderer. [He notices JUSTIN’s expression of horror.] Having you on.

HENRY enters. He is very quiet and never looks anyone in the eye. His left arm is paralysed and he carries it as if it were in an invisible sling.

JUSTIN: Hello, Henry. You want to be in the play too?

He says nothing and sits on a chair.

ROY: Henry’s part of my hand-picked team.

DOUG: We’re the only ones who answered your ad.

ROY: [paying no attention to DOUG] Wonder where the girls are?

HENRY shakes his head.

JUSTIN: [introducing ROY] This is Roy, one of the patients who came up with the idea of doing a show.

ROY: [shaking hands] We’re going to make a great team. What’s your name?

LEWIS: Lewis.

ROY: We’ll be like Jerry Lewis and Dean Martin.

JUSTIN guides LEWIS away from the enthusiastic ROY.

JUSTIN: [sotto voce] He loves the theatre apparently. A great enthusiast when he gets going. He has his down periods like a lot of people, but he’s your support, your natural energiser. And this is Doug.

DOUG: So you’re the director?

LEWIS: [uncomfortably] Yes.

DOUG: Done anything I might have seen?

LEWIS: Probably not.

DOUG: You’re bragging. What about a movie? Done a movie?

LEWIS: No.

DOUG: Poofter?

JUSTIN: Doug!

DOUG: I want to know just in case he puts the hard word on me like Dr Simpson.

JUSTIN: And Henry.

LEWIS goes to shake hands with him but HENRY turns away.

Bit shy, the old Henry. Part of this project is to bring out people like Henry.

ROY: Shall we start now, Jerry?

JUSTIN: Hold your horses, we’re waiting for the women. How many are there?

ROY: Great response, great response. We need only three and we got them.

JUSTIN: They take longer to get here because they have to come from the women’s ward which is over the hill.

ROY: Where’s the piano? Asylums are the most inefficient places on this earth.