The Libertine (NHB Modern Plays) Read online

  ROCHESTER. I didn’t write it because I was too busy living it.

  ETHEREGE. You were right about Lizzie though. The finest actress on our stage.

  ROCHESTER. I love her, you know.

  ETHEREGE. Love? ‘Love gilds us over and makes us show fine things to each other for a time, but soon the gold wears off and then again the native brass appears.’

  BARRY comes offstage. She looks around.

  (Bowing.) Lizzie.

  BARRY (to LUSCOMBE). What is he doing here?

  LUSCOMBE. Don’t blame me. I am not a lord. I am someone for whom good fortune means a free pie.

  LUSCOMBE eats and buries herself in the prompt copy.

  ETHEREGE. John. I’ll see you after. I’ll be in Long’s.

  ROCHESTER. Very well. Or Lockett’s?

  ETHEREGE. Long’s.

  ETHEREGE slips away towards the stage door. An edgy moment. ROCHESTER sits on a costume hamper, drinking claret from a bottle.

  BARRY (to ROCHESTER). Have you seen this play?

  ROCHESTER. I saw it yesterday.

  BARRY. And what did you think?

  ROCHESTER. You don’t care what I think.

  She turns to go.

  You’re brilliant in it. I thought… I thought you only had the tragic gift. But you were light and larky and true. And you made me laugh. I had a couple of notes. I wrote them down somewhere.

  He searches his pockets for a moment, then stops.

  What’s the point? Even if I give them to you, you won’t take any notice, will you?

  BARRY. No. I won’t.

  ROCHESTER. But I taught you once.

  BARRY. You taught me to rehearse, to repeat a part over and over again so that I was so familiar with it I was free to act.

  ROCHESTER. I won a bet off George over you, a hundred guineas. What the devil became of that money?

  BARRY. It went the way of all the other money.

  ROCHESTER. Yes.

  ROCHESTER drinks, finishing the bottle.

  It went into bottles and I threw them into the sea with messages inside, and somewhere in years to come, people will pick the messages out and read them aloud and wonder.

  HARRIS comes offstage dressed as Dorimant. LUSCOMBE helps him with his costume change.

  So, Mr Harris, you portray the merry Lord Dorimant, do you? May I ask you how it feels to be me?

  LUSCOMBE. Mr Harris has a quick change and you will let him be.

  ROCHESTER. I am nature and you are art, let us see how we compare.

  HARRIS. I have one minute.

  ROCHESTER grasps HARRIS by the wrist and presents the pair of them to BARRY.

  ROCHESTER. I don’t half feel a jolly gaping gulf between the ideal and the real. Here we have him, your Restoration Gent. He has not pissed his breeches today and there are no creatures in his periwig. He can walk in a more or less straight line for over two hundred yards without falling on his face and retching. He has a few hundred pound under his mattress and a rising fountain of blood in his cods. Now look you upon this picture and on this. He has not washed, he cannot walk and he most certainly will not be able to raise either the price of a dinner or his own pintle. But he can drink. Which of these would you prefer to see on the stage?

  HARRIS. I must be got into my nightgown.

  ROCHESTER releases HARRIS. LUSCOMBE helps him into his costume.

  ROCHESTER. This is what I envy in you stage people. The notion that something HAS TO BE and within the next few seconds. You make time seem so important. I must change my clothes NOW, I must make my entrance now. But life isn’t a succession of urgent NOWS it’s a listless trickle of ‘Why should I’s?’ That’s why nothing that happens on a stage is true. Do you understand that, Mr Harris?

  LUSCOMBE. You’re on.

  HARRIS goes onstage. LUSCOMBE gives ROCHESTER a hard look, but decides not to take him on.

  You have five minutes only, Mrs Barry.

  BARRY. Yes, Molly. (To ROCHESTER.) You used to love the theatre.

  ROCHESTER. I still love theatres, I just despise what happens inside them. It is absurd, the way the whole farrago engages people so.

  BARRY. It’s a world, like any other – the law courts or the counting house. If you engage in life, you engage necessarily in some absurdity.

  ROCHESTER. I want you to leave the theatre.

  Pause.

  BARRY. It is my livelihood.

  ROCHESTER. But it needs not be. There is one here who could provide for you better.

  BARRY. I see no one.

  ROCHESTER stands and speaks to her, formally but very naturally, without embroidering the text.

  ROCHESTER. ‘Leave this gaudy gilded stage,

  From custom more than use frequented,

  Where fools of either sex and age

  Crowd to see themselves presented.

  To love’s theatre, the bed,

  Youth and beauty fly together,

  And act so well it may be said

  The laurel there was due to either.

  ’Twixt strifes of love and war,

  The difference lies in this:

  When neither overcomes,

  Love’s triumph greater is.’

  BARRY. That isn’t the truth about love. It is invariably a war and there is always a victor and a vanquished.

  ROCHESTER. I don’t want you for a mistress, Lizzie. I want you for a wife.

  BARRY. You have a wife.

  ROCHESTER. There are ways of proceeding. For an intimate of the King, such a thing may be accomplished.

  BARRY. Oh, the King, your good friend.

  ROCHESTER. You chide me that I have never engaged in life. Well, I mean to begin, and I would have my divorce dispatched that I may dedicate myself to you.

  BARRY. And money?

  ROCHESTER. I still have money.

  BARRY. You have your wife’s money.

  ROCHESTER. A fellow such as I can always lay hands on money.

  BARRY. A fellow like you can always spend it.

  ROCHESTER. YOU KNOW WHAT I MEAN!!

  BARRY. You have no understanding, do you? You have comprehended – just – that I am tired of being your mistress and your solution is to conscript me into becoming your wife. It is not being a mistress I am tired of, John. I am tired of you. I do not wish to be your wife. I wish to continue being the creature I am. I am no Nell Gwyn, I will not give up the stage as soon as a king or a lord has seen me on it and, wishing me to be his and his alone, will then pay a fortune to keep me off it. I am not the sparrow you picked up in the roadside, my love. London walks into this theatre to see me – not George’s play nor Mr Betterton. They want me and they want me over and over again. And when people desire you in such a manner, then you can envisage a lifetime of money amassed through your own endeavours. That is riches. ‘Leave this gaudy, gilded stage.’ You’re right, this stage is gilded. It is gilded with my future earnings. And I will not trade those for a dependency on you. I will not swap my certain glory for your undependable love.

  ROCHESTER. Even if I were to give you children?

  BARRY. It makes no difference. I have your child in my belly at this moment.

  ROCHESTER. You are carrying our child?

  BARRY. I will have it this summer while the theatres are closed and by the start of the season I will be flat enough to play Desdemona in a nightgown.

  LUSCOMBE. Mrs Barry. Two minutes please.

  ROCHESTER. This is the child of our passion, a child of hope. The instant I met you I was delivered from still life, from the ice of my own soul. You dragged me in from the edges of the world to eat. But now you send me away hungry from the table and I cannot go back to the region whence I came. I CANNOT FORGIVE YOU FOR TEACHING ME TO LOVE LIFE

  BARRY. John, I thank you for what start you gave me on the stage. But if I have taught you what you say, then our account is settled. Your lesson to me was my livelihood, and mine to you was life itself. We have no need to meet again.

  R
OCHESTER. Lizzie –

  BARRY. If you are in London and have half a crown in your pocket, you may see me there. (The stage.) For the rest I hope I shall be always in your heart and sometime in your thoughts but never in your debt.

  BARRY adjusts her costume, looks in the mirror held out for her, nods to LUSCOMBE and, without turning back, goes onstage. LUSCOMBE and ROCHESTER watch. There is much laughter at her entrance.

  ROCHESTER. She has such life in her. That’s what they come for.

  LUSCOMBE. I have never seen the like, not in all my years at this. I watch her every night. It is always the same and yet always different. And when she goes off, I do not live until I see her on again.

  And indeed LUSCOMBE turns all her attention on the stage, mouthing the words to BARRY’s performance.

  ROCHESTER. That’s right, Molly. We do not live. We do not live.

  ROCHESTER watches for a moment, then goes.

  Lights fade to blackout.

  Scene Twelve – Husband and Wife

  Immediately lights come up on ALCOCK.

  ALCOCK. The discerning traveller, having a mind to visit Adderbury, takes the road through Watford, spends the night in Aylesbury and, after an early start, is sitting down to lunch at his destination, four miles south of Banbury. There is, however, another way, not the way of the discerning traveller, but what I shall call the Arsehole Way. Journeying in the Arsehole manner, you stop at an inn after three minutes on the road and find yourself still within its precincts at one o’clock in the morning. You then sink into a stupor until dawn, at which point you fall to shouting at your minions and ride like the clappers, until, a mile short of Aston Clinton, a wheel works loose and you have to walk to an inn in search of a blacksmith. He not appearing immediately, you take handsomely to the company and fall into a drunken stupor again. You do not wake till early evening but then cover the final thirty miles at a mouth-frothing velocity and tumble, more dead than alive, into an empty house whose owner and servants have long ago taken to their beds. We did not take the way of the discerning traveller.

  The space has become the dark dining room of rochester’s own house. It’s the middle of the night. ALCOCK comes on with a lit candelabra which he puts down on the floor. He takes ROCHESTER’s coat.

  ROCHESTER. Bring me some wine.

  ALCOCK. It’s late, sir, I’ll have to wake the cellarman.

  ROCHESTER. Break down the door, fool.

  ALCOCK. It is oak, my lord.

  ROCHESTER. There is an axe mounted on the lintel of the doorway opposite, my father put it there for emergencies.

  ALCOCK. I believe the emergencies he envisaged were of a more Cromwellian nature.

  ROCHESTER. How I hate the country! You cannot even get a drink in your own house.

  ROCHESTER throws his empty brandy bottle on the floor. MALET comes in.

  Elizabeth! Get the servants up at once, we have ridden all night, we need drink.

  MALET immediately throws a heavy bunch of keys onto the table. Some moments, then ALCOCK picks them up and goes off to the cellars.

  Thank you.

  Pause.

  We set out in good time but we were delayed.

  Pause.

  The roads, it goes without saying are a disgrace.

  Pause.

  The poplars we planted on my last visit. Are they thriving?

  Pause.

  Mr Rose, the King’s gardener, presented him with a pineapple the other day. I do not altogether approve. Pineapples, growing in England, it argues too much the final triumph of art over nature.

  ROCHESTER breaks down and cries. MALET stands looking at him.

  MALET. John. I am ever your last resort. When your mistress has kicked you into the street, no innkeeper in London will give you credit, and the last whore in Covent Garden refuses to attend to you, then and only then do you come to me. Have I been so remiss in my wedding vows that you run so assiduously from the woman whose company you should most fervently pursue?

  ROCHESTER. My most neglected wife, till you are a much-respected widow I find you will scarce be a contented woman, and I endeavour so fairly to do you that service that none but the most impatient would be dissatisfied.

  MALET. Your meaning is that you are trying your hardest to make me a widow.

  ROCHESTER. No man ever endeavoured harder.

  MALET. I don’t want you to die, I want you to live and live differently.

  ROCHESTER. I have been able to bear many things, but the worst pain of all has been to hear you complaining but never to confess what part of you is hurt.

  MALET. It is all too clear what has been my hurt. It has been your persistent business to be absent from my hearth, my board and my bed.

  ROCHESTER. If I have been absent, well, I have had business –

  MALET. Wherever in the world you are, I have never known when you will find it in your heart to leave that place and come home to me. Consider with yourself whether this be a reasonable way of proceeding. I can fulfil my marriage vows to you, but only if I know where you will be and what schemes are in your head.

  ALCOCK is back, bearing two open bottles of wine.

  ALCOCK. My lord.

  ROCHESTER immediately snatches a bottle and drinks.

  MALET. I will take the other.

  ALCOCK. My lady.

  ALCOCK is surprised but hands over the bottle to MALET,who drinks from it.

  MALET. Thank you, Alcock.

  ALCOCK goes.

  ROCHESTER. Lizzie, I do not wish to drive you to intemperance.

  MALET. Why not? If it is good for you, why, is it not good for me?

  ROCHESTER. It is not good for me.

  MALET. It is not good for you?

  ROCHESTER. I am troubled with the stone. When I pass water I am in agonies, in the morning I –

  MALET. Why then do you pursue the path?

  ROCHESTER. Of intemperance?

  MALET. Yes, why? When were you last a sober man?

  ROCHESTER. I?

  Some moments. ROCHESTER poses the question to himself seriously. MALET stands watching him, holding the open bottle.

  It was… No, no. It was three years ago. No, four? Five?

  MALET. And are you not, John, a rational man? Has not your intellect been praised on all sides?

  ROCHESTER. It has.

  MALET. So a wise man, knowing that something is doing him harm, is wracking him with agues and diseases, and that five years of constant work at this practice have rendered his body feeble and his spirit low, what would this wise man do?

  Pause.

  ROCHESTER. You seek to trap me like a cunning lawyer.

  MALET. What would he do?

  ROCHESTER. He would desist.

  MALET. And those he loved, would they not show their love by beseeching him to desist?

  ROCHESTER. It is not so simple –

  MALET. Would such not be fair sign and token of their love?

  Pause.

  ROCHESTER. It would.

  Silence. Then MALET slowly inverts the bottle and starts to pour the claret on the floor. ROCHESTER makes a lunge to prevent her but then, transfixed, watches. Halfway through the bottle, MALET stops.

  MALET. Have you known me waste anything before?

  ROCHESTER. No.

  MALET. And why do I waste this now?

  Pause.

  ROCHESTER. So that it does not waste me.

  MALET recommences pouring. ROCHESTER makes another lunge to stop her. He can only hold himself back by taking a drink from his own bottle, which he does. MALET pours until the bottle is empty. She looks at ROCHESTER. ROCHESTER begins to choke on the wine, spitting it out onto the floor. He stares at the wine on the floor at his feet. Some moments. Then he takes the remains of his bottle and begins to pour it on the floor. Close to the end of the bottle, he repents and tries to bring the bottle to his lips. MALET is quickly beside him to prevent this. She holds him. The bottle rolls onto the floor. She holds him while he sobs
.

  MALET. I have heard men say that the Devil, God save me, is in you. If that be so, I know how he made his entrance.

  ROCHESTER. I have never ceased to love you. But I have not loved life.

  MALET. Shush, shush, you have strived to be happy.

  ROCHESTER. I would now write all my follies in a book dedicated to you and publish it to all the world.

  MALET. Come, John, it is too late for talk of that kind. Come now to bed.

  ROCHESTER sinks onto MALET’s breast. She holds him. He is quite still – asleep or dead. A light comes up on ALCOCK.

  ALCOCK. After I left his employ, I no longer had the enjoyment of life for which he had hired me. And when the end came, the manner of his departing was not credited.

  ALCOCK’s light goes out. Light up on SACKVILLE.

  SACKVILLE. My lord had never believed in God because of Mr Wyndham at the Battle of Bergen. The night before the engagement, my lord and Mr Wyndham, being possessed of a premonition of death, made a solemn bond that if either was killed he should return to the survivor with tidings of the afterlife.

  Lights up on the DOWNS actor: his face is bloody.

  DOWNS. Where is the spark? Where is the spark?

  SACKVILLE. The next day a cannonball carried away Mr Wyndham’s belly. He not appearing from the grave, my lord thenceforward turned his face from God.

  DOWNS. Where is the spark?

  SACKVILLE. What a pity we have to die at the end of our lives when our intellects are too feeble to repel the religious fellows who creep upon us in our troubled hours. My lord held the soul to be merely a function of the body until he stopped drinking. When you have enfeebled yourself with liquor and the body withers, it seems it is more attractive to think the opposite – that the body will drop away and the soul will soar.

  DOWNS. Where is the spark?

  Light up on BARRY. She speaks to the audience.

  BARRY. ‘He charmed the tenderest virgins to delight

  And with his style did fiercest blockheads fright

  Some beauties here, I see,

  Though now demure, have felt his powerful charms

  And languished in the circle of his arms.

  But for ye fops, his satire reached ye all,

  And under his lash your whole vast herd did fall.

  Oh fatal loss! That mighty spirit’s gone!