Work Text:
What does the audience want to hear?
There’s a moment before the play starts, when all the audience is shuffling through the rows of the theatre, trying not to bump into any knees, trying not to lose their grips on their programmes, squinting to make sure the numbers on the seats match the ones on their tickets, when the play could be anything.
Even when it’s a play that has been performed a thousand and one times before, a Shakespeare, a Molière, a Broadway about cats, there’s always a moment when everyone knows the play could turn out like nothing they’ve seen before. And they want it to – they’re here to see the actors express their own embodiments of the characters, to see the designers paint the sets with their own styles, to see the play with eyes that have learned so much more since the last time the lights hit their retinas.
And if it isn’t Shakespeare? If it’s a play that no one has ever seen before?
“Love is horrifying.”
Set the stage. Set the actors. And let the characters take over.
“I mean, think about it.” Ianthe beheld the withered husks of decomposed flesh that remained on the gnawed skeletals of the fingerbones. “If the soul is permeable, and love is conditional on the acceptance thereof, then every time someone walks away, they take part of you away, and you will never know what they do with it.”
“Who said love was conditional upon acceptance of the fact?” Palamedes looked up at her from the six feet of soil that he had dug out. The shovel was bent at an odd angle, as if twisted by the impact of the earth, as if used as a murder weapon. “We are loved regardless, aren’t we?”
“That…” The prince, as in Hamlet, let the fingerbones tumble down into the grave. Alas, poor Yanthrick. “That doesn’t make it any less horrifying.”
The librarian, as the dexterity required for all librarians, caught the bones in mid-air. “I rather like to think that it makes it more exciting.”
In the full moon’s darkness, in the tangle of her hair in the midnight wind, the prince’s grin was terrifying. “Camilla will never know now, will she?”
The audience gasps, both at the thud produced by the impact of Ianthe’s jab and at the genius of the subtle deconstruction of the theme of vengeance in The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark (or something like that (assuming, of course, that the author of the piece (and indeed, Ianthe) has actually read Hamlet, and hasn’t just memorised ‘to be or not be’ for the aesthetic (but then, can love be an aesthetic? (probably not (maybe the audience is just gasping because the play is… bad)))).
And the show goes on.
“Love is mortal.”
“I disagree.” The librarian had found his glasses again. Or someone’s glasses, at least, lying on top of a dusty tweed jacket that was left over from a previous production. He blew the dust off. Slipped them back on. “Life is mortal, but love carries on, at least in part. The love we express lingers in those who survive us.”
“Have you seen John’s ambulatory funerals?” Ianthe had. To her great misfortunate (they were, among everything, a terrible influence on her). “They loved once, and they survived, but what’s left? Ritual self-flagellation? There’s no life left in them. If you can’t live, you can’t love. Life is mortal, ergo love is mortal. Q.E.D.”
The glasses made everything blurry. Palamedes knew it was going to give Camilla a headache sooner rather than later. He hoped she could forgive him. “You would condemn Corona to that?”
A couple of people in the audience had come under the expectation of a swordfight. They wanted to see blood (theatre hasn’t changed that much, has it?). They were getting excited now – it would come soon.
And the show goes on.
“Love is burdensome.”
The Princess raised a badly-styled eyebrow. “A surprise, to be sure, coming from you.” She was running late for the costume change for the next scene where she would be playing a bear (she’d always wanted to get the chance to chase someone around while practising her growls). “But, go on.”
“When you open your soul to someone, you can’t control how much of them will come in, nor can you control how much of yourself will leave with them.” The librarian didn’t much fancy the part of being the chasee. He had, in fact, specifically skipped that day of the auditions. “You, of all people, should know this.”
The prince scoffed. “If you’re suggesting that I loved Babs…”
“Love,” of course, the audience wouldn’t know who was in the bear suit, nor would they know who had auditioned and who hadn’t – it was all very proprietary information, “is the acceptance to carry the weight of others souls with yours.”
“Romantic,” the third drawled in the fashion of one who desperately thought it was romantic, but just as desperately couldn’t be seen to admit it without breaking character, “Is this where you give me the speech about how love and freedom can’t coexist?”
The speech wasn’t part of the script. “If you want.”
“I really don’t,” lied the prince – Palamedes, once he got started, was magnetic in all the right ways (and that was part of love, wasn’t it – the delight of seeing someone’s eyes light up?). “I’d much rather you keep talking about how love is uncontrollable.” She shot him a wink (or, at least, what she thought was a wink). “I like it when you talk dirty to me.”
Well, the film board hadn’t given the play a rating yet, so…
“Love is consumptive.”
The theatre, it should be pointed out now, had a wide range of refreshments available in the lobby, for a very reasonable price (according to the owners). If the audience wishes to partake, it’s just out the doors and back down the stairs. Discounts are available for students and seniors. Outside food and drink is not permitted within the premises.
“This is about the Seventh, isn’t it?” The prince laughed, knowing that she was safe since her love for her sister had consumed nothing of hers. “God, you’re so Victorian. You and your nurses and your delicate, frail waifs. Do you fantasise about fucking her bones into fragments?”
“Do you know,” the librarian knew that insults were the only language Ianthe had been raised to speak, so he tried not to let her get to him. He tried. “You can be quite mean.”
“Practice makes perfect,” she shrugged humbly, “As my parents and my tutors like to tell me.”
“All I mean by it,” he wasn’t going to ask whether she thought her parents had loved her – he, as a rule, believed in not being mean, “is that you are what you eat.”
Again: a wide range of refreshments is available down in the lobby. Please buy some. After more than a decade of austerity, the theatre’s kinda fucked. Everything is – the libraries are gone, the parks are gone, the jobs are gone, the climate’s gone, the future…
Well, what is there left to do but buy?
“Love is impatient.”
“Incredibly impatient.” Ianthe stretched herself out across the castle rampart. Languidly. Seductively. “So why don’t we just cut to the chase and fuck nasty?”
“It remains to be seen,” Palamedes stretched himself out across the piles of books, glasses hanging from the tip of his tongue. Piercingly. Seductively. “Who can fuck nastiest.”
The audience will be impatient too, if they keep going with dialogue like this. But then again, impatience is part of being an audience, isn’t it? Desperate impatience for the day of the play to roll around, desperate impatience for the first scene to start, impatience for the climax…
And, then, impatience for that gut-wrenching emptiness that always happens when the play is finally done and you’re forced to move on from the characters that you’ve grown to…
Love.
“Love is a revenant.”
“Love is aspirational.”
“A story.”
“Allegorical.”
“An instinct.”
“Evolutionary.”
“A dream.”
“Mythical.”
“An adventure.”
“Absurdist.”
“Transcendentalist.”
“Mereological.”
“Metahemeralistic.”
…
“Metahemeralistic?”
…
“Well,” Ianthe eventually drawled, much in the way of someone who had tried, but had failed to come up with a hilarious pun, “Love certainly is creative. And destructive. Pick your own shore.”
And what was the difference between the shores?
“What is love?”
After a long moment, after carefully setting the busts back on their pedestals, after contemplating the absence of the paint that had brought them to life, after tracing the tips of his fingers over those modern wounds where the marble parts had been hammered off, the Warden simply shrugged. “Baby, don’t hurt me?”
The Prince opposite him snorted. “You don’t know.”
Did he? It’s often said that the problem with writing characters who are smarter than you is that you have to show them smart. If you write a great poet, but can’t write great poetry, what’s left of the character? But maybe that’s not the point. “Do you?”
Ianthe, in any case, was not a writer. An actor, a thespian, a dramatist, a dancer losing herself in that danger zone where she becomes the dance and nothing else. Don’t hurt me, eh? “Fair enough.”
Maybe that was what love was: unknowable. Maybe there wasn’t a definition, at least not an easy one, not one that could be defined in a single word, or a single sentence, or… Or, maybe the playwright just couldn’t find a good, suitably poetic way to define it. Was that the point?
The real love is the friends we’ve made along the way.
Is that what the audience wants to hear?
Maybe that was love: an expression of the way we choose to live with the differences between us, as imperfect as it is. An expression of the way we choose to live in this world, as imperfect as it is. An expression of the way we choose to build the future, as imperfect as it will be.
What is love?