How These Desperate Men Talk (NHB Modern Plays)

Enda Walsh

• Publisher: Nick Hern Books
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781780014142
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Drama
• Index: Literature

A short play written during the author's time working with European theatremakers, from the writer of Disco Pigs, Misterman and Ballyturk.

Lights fade up slowly.

A bare stage but for two middle-aged men of similar appearance sitting opposite each other. Their names are JOHN and DAVE, and they are men from suburbia. Between them is a small square table.

JOHN holds a pistol to DAVE’s face. We can’t hear what they’re saying below the static but it is clear that they’re having a heated discussion. DAVE is seen to back down, the argument seemingly lost to the man with the gun.

DAVE and JOHN’s general demeanour is on edge.

This all lasts forty-five seconds. The static thankfully stops.

DAVE. It seemed right that it would be the anniversary. Seemed almost too perfect that today would have to be the day. Would have to be the same day a year on from the time you first saw her. How ordered it all was.

JOHN. How simple and true and right.

DAVE. How simple and true and right. Like the very first time you saw her in the park drinking her drink… like you gave life to her somehow.

JOHN. Like she just existed from that moment on.

DAVE. Right. You imagined her and there she was, taking her drink on the park bench that evening like she always did. Looking at the little quack-quacks neither interested nor disinterested. Just blank-looking. She looked blank to you and just then you realised that this is what attracted you to her. Her blankness.

JOHN. That’s right.

DAVE. And as you followed her home that night from the park and followed her the next morning and afternoon you started giving her different personalities the same way you did to the hundreds of blank people you had followed about town. And in certain angles, certain lights, she became different people from your past. Your distant past. And by the end of the first week and after following her in and out of the shops and the parks and on and off buses… and as you looked at her sitting on the park bench and taking her drink and looking blankly at those little quack-quacks… you decided there and then who she was to you, John. You decided you were looking at your…?

DAVE stops and waits. JOHN responds:

JOHN. My mother.

DAVE. Your mother!? Haven’t we done that before?

JOHN. Well, I don’t know!

DAVE. I’m sure we have used your mother…

JOHN. Really?

DAVE. A little time ago.

JOHN. Are you certain?

DAVE. Certain? No, I’m not certain.

JOHN. Then just use it! USE IT! CARRY ON!

DAVE. Your much younger mother before you were born. Before she married your father? The young woman you had followed that first week and was followi...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Contents
• Original Production
• Characters
• How These Desperate Men Talk
• About the Author
• Copyright and Performing Rights Information