There Has Possibly Been An Incident

Chris Thorpe

• Publisher: Oberon Books
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781783195398
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: British Drama
• Index: Literature

When life offers you a choice between heroism and compromise - what happens? Sometimes planes don't land the way they're supposed to. The people of a country have had enough of their leaders, but those leaders have to be replaced with something. A person steps out of a crowd and, for a moment, becomes more than human. A man walks into the lobby of a building and brings death with him to prove his point.

Note

The text divides into five intercut sections. The sections marked G, Y and N are performed by the same three performers throughout, each reading the texts designated by one of the letters. The letters are not meant to suggest casting or character, they just reflect the initials of the performers who first performed the text – although ‘G’ is a woman, ‘Y’ and ‘N’

could be performed by either a man or a woman.

The recurring text marked ‘Dialogue’ can be spoken by any of the performers, two at a time, each taking one half of the dialogue. It could be that different combinations of performers take up the dialogue every time it recurs, but it should be clear that the dialogue is taking place in a different ‘place’ to

G, Y and N's texts.

I've suggested the text marked ‘Final Speech’ could be spoken

in unison by all performers – but it's just a suggestion.

L:I'm listening and I'm not listening.

I'm listening to someone I know well, someone I have known for years, telling me, with restraint, something terrible.

I'm listening to the thing he's telling me. I'm taking it in, but I'm also concerned. By concerned I mean interested, clinically, analytically interested, rather than as an emotional response to the content, sparse as it is, of the thing that he's telling me, I am concerned with the quality of restraint. The quality of his restraint. Because I feel it, also, in myself. The restraint that's so much a habit it's become how we operate.

I know this thing, this Incident the man is telling me about, to be terrible, in the detail of it, even though the man in front of me is not telling me the detail of it. He is telling it as a detail. As a short series of short sentences within the body of a larger thing. I know this thing to be terrible and I also know this thing, because I said it was a good idea for it to happen. But still I need to be told. I need to be told in an untraceable way. We are both comfortable with this. And we are both comfortable with this because we are aware of responsibilities higher, than a responsibility to ourselves. And one of his responsibilities is to tell me, in person, news like this.

C:He's wearing a white shirt. He's wearing a white shirt. He's wearing a white shirt and black trousers. I can never see his shoes.

If I start thinking about where all the wires go I'll start trying to see the connections. And because this is. Because this is possibly a dream. Because I think this is possibly a dream it's best not to pull at the wires too hard.

L:A long time ago now, many years ago now, I saw this same man, this man who is standing here, with news of this Incident. This man now standing in front of me, in my office in a tailored suit, who has somehow managed not to sweat on the way over here, or maybe stood in the hallway outside letting the air-conditioning dry him.

A long time ago now, I saw this man save the life of another man, and a woman, who, all things considered, probably deserved to die. I saw him commit one act of mercy, and years later, here we are. Look what we've bought with it.

J:Imagine loss.

Imagine something you could have been.

L:I do not want to be the only person who can fulfil the function I can fulfil, but the more I do the job, the more I become the only person who can do it. Of course somebody else could do this job, could and should do this job, but I have a duty to that successor. Not just to paper over the mistakes of the past but to concrete over them and leave monuments there. The man in my office swings himself with such easy familiarity into the soundlessly upholstered leather chair opposite, and begins to tell me a terrible thing as if it's just a stage in an ongoing process. Which it is.

J:A guy sits on a plane.

L:Years ago we stood on a balcony, on a balcony over a square that was no longer square because the buildings at its edges, the edges of the square, and the edges of the buildings themselves were so eroded, so pulverised by shellfire that there were no straight lines. The straight lines and right angles of the square had been pounded beyond rubble into a kind of dusty softness that sighed down over the former edges of the square like sand. We hadn't levelled this building because, I think, there was some agreement, that there would be a moment for people like us, so long denied the chance to do so by the people entrenched in the building, to stand on that balcony just once as the proxies of everyone below, and hold up our arms just once and reflect the people back at themselves. We were standing on the balcony. But the people below were the leaders. I stood on the balcony and raised my arms with the others and the air was electric with promise and noise. The noise an as yet unformed roar, before the slogans were written that would carry us all into the future. This unexpected future where this man is standing in my office smelling so unfamiliar, so generic, he could be selling me a hedge fund or a high class car in any one of a million artificially cooled spaces across the world.

J:A guy sits on a plane. Me. I sit on. I am sitting on a plane. The type of plane, the make, the model isn't important. It's not relevant to the chain of events that has got me there. The design of the plane becomes relevant later, I guess. Things like door placement and the precise level of cladding around the fuel tanks, along with the position of the fuel tanks, the landing speed. The tolerances of the struts designed to support the landing gear away from the fuselage. Even the carpets. Even the precise chemical composition of the artificial fibres that make up the carpets on the plane, the level to which those...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-title Page
• Title Page
• Author
• Copyright
• Contents
• Note