(78 year old guy is lying alone in the darkness of his cell. eyes downcast he stares upwards but just sees the same 4 walls he fell asleep looking at.)
(begins to chuckle to himself)
You wouldn't expect to see a sweet ol' gezzer like me in a cave like this, would ya? In fact the only place you would expect to see me is in a coffin by now. go ahead,laugh! But tell you the truth you wouldnt 'adam and eve' some of the stuff i did back in my day.
(closes his eyes and begins to reminice)
12 years ill have been inside tomorrow. Seems like an eternity though. Heck i can barely remember what happened yesterday, but strangely enough i remeber how i ended in this dump almost as clear as the the jelly they palmed me of with earlier. The disrespect they treat us old codgers with these days. I paid tax all my life for this. Makes me sick!
(pauses)
oh yeah what was i saying?... thats it: it was 23:11 on the 17 of june 1996 when my dear beloved dead wife had decided to arise from her grave,invade my mind and order me to run to 'the filth' and inform them it was me who had killed her the year before. I mean as a farmer you'd expect me to be a dab hand with the butchers knife but to hack off her head and pay specific attention to her juglar vien is puerile.(laughs) although the amount of blood discharged was torrential, i thought i was going to drown.of corse they put it down to me being "a confused old man" and then left me in here.Alone.Disowned.Forgotten!
(sighs)
Oh well. Only another few years left till i die then i can wave bye to my carers ,the other old biddies that live here and that horid smell in my room. Then finally ill be able to see my loving wife again.and you know what they say beauty lies within only with her it has nowhere else to hide.
(sorry the endings disapointing.) oh and its late!
Hi Sparky
ReplyDeleteThis had a real humourous edge to it. I could hear your character's voice throughout because you gave him his own language with which to address us - 'sweet old geezer in a cave like this', etc.
I like the confusion at the begining about whether he is in a prison cell or other place. You could really play on this confusion at the beginning, because it links well with the confusion society seems to have about him and the confusion they have told him he is suffering from.
I think you could do more with him complaining about the food, noticing things about his surroundings that annoy or tempt him, to lull us into a false sense of security about him.
You could also do more with the fact that he has got away with murdering his wife. The staff treat him like a silly old codger, so what does he think of them? He knows what he did and how dangerous he is. Could he be tempted to kill again if somebody upsets him? Therefore when he notices what is being left around, he could go one step further and talk about what he could begin to do with such items and to whom.
What was his motivation for murdering his wife? This could still be unresolved in him - he wasn't caught and dealt with for murder, after all. He says he is a dab hand with a knife, so he may be tempted to use one again.
You can really make him into a character we are going to sit up and listen to, or even be a little afraid of!
I liked the sharp humour in the last para, esp about beauty having nowhere to hide within his wife. You can bring this sharp humour to the whole piece through the voice of your character. This is what will make him come alive on the page and come alive for the audience.
Hope this helps.
Best wishes
ann g
Hey Sparky,
ReplyDeleteI do like this character you’ve created. He’s a very sinister but shrewd old man. I thought it was funny when he said “I paid tax all my life for this” – to keep himself in a prison cell. That was clever.
I also like this very odd, complicated relationship with his wife. It’s kind of ambiguous whether he killed her or not, and it’s not clear if he’s sad that she’s dead. At the end he says only a few more years till he dies and he can be with his loving wife again, which presumably means he misses her, but then he goes on to allude to fact that she’s really ugly. This was funny, and gave the character another layer.
At this point, I'm not sure whether the old man really killed his wife or not, but I don’t think it’s necessary to spell that out for us. But I'm also not sure whether his wife came to him as a ghost, or her spirit possessed his body for a few hours, or if the old man went crazy and admitted to a murder he didn’t commit, or if he was so wracked by guilt by the murder that he turned himself in and blamed it on his dead wife. I would have liked another detail or two about this.
I would have also liked to heard a bit more about the man’s relationship with his wife while she was still living. Were they always fighting? Or were their fights passive aggressive? Or maybe they got along really well but secretly hated each other on the inside? There are a lot of possibilities, and I think it would help your monologue to know a little more about their relationship.
You’ve written an apology for the “disappointing” ending, and I just want to say that I didn’t think it was disappointing. I like the line you ended with. But as I’ve just said – if you build up their relationship a little bit more, the ending will seem even more effective.
Fantastic stuff, Sparky - I really enjoyed this, and it carried your trademark originality and wit. I just wish you could take more care with those spellings, as, rightly or wrongly, I think they DO matter... :)
ReplyDelete