The Oberon Book of Modern Monologues for Men

Volume Two

Catherine Weate, Catherine Weate

• Publisher: Oberon Books
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781849436052
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Performing Arts

Monologues are an essential part of every actor's toolkit. Actors are required to perform monologues regularly throughout their career: preparing for drama school entry, showcasing skills for agents or auditioning for a role. Following on from the bestselling first volume (2008), this book showcases selected monologues from some of the finest modern plays by some of today's leading contemporary playwrights. These monologues contain a diverse range of quirky and memorable characters that cross cultural and historical boundaries. The pieces are helpfully organised into age-specific groups: 'Teens', 'Twenties', 'Thirties' and 'Forties plus'.

PART ONE:
TEENS

SHADOWMOUTH

by Meredith Oakes

Shadowmouth was first performed at the Crucible Theatre in Sheffield on 8 June 2006.

A fifteen-year-old BOY is thrown out of home by his mother and taken in by a lonely middle-aged man. He watches the BOY from a distance, filled with desire. But the BOY is in a dark depression and cannot be saved. He tries to lose himself in the seediness of city nightlife and assorted relationships but nothing helps and he heads for destruction.

BOY

One night, I reached the centre of town

It was like discovering a whole unknown tribe

People awake at night

Like me

Going about their business in the middle of the night as if it were the most ordinary thing in the world

While everyone I knew was asleep in bed

All the rules were turned upside-down

Drink, drugs, visions and sex were everyone’s serious business

While the business buildings, the government offices, the gallery, the museum, slept like dark forgotten giants

There were lit up places floating like boats on the city darkness, and in them were pirates and ruffians, girls with smudged eyes and bare flesh, drinkers staring down into wells of alcohol, fat hairy men in black leather, women in bowler hats, people with cigarette holders and rings on their fingers

It was like seeing through the skin of the city down into where it had always been like this, century upon century

It was like seeing the hidden life now visible and glowing, everyone decked out as the self of their dreams

I didn’t know who I might see lining up to the bar

Christopher Marlowe

The Queen of Sheba

I’d never seen a floor with so much dirt on it, the dirt of centuries

Fag-ends in drifts

Grit piling up against the skirting boards

And people slopping drinks as they passed, calling to each other across the noise

The air was at saturation point with alcohol, smoke and sweat

The place felt ready to burst into flame

It was here

Whatever would make me real

I was in the room with the animal

I could see its rolling eye, its velvet mouth, its foam-flecked shoulder, its huge flank

I could feel the heavy stumbling of its hooves in the straw

I loved it

THE LOSS OF ALL THINGS

by Chris Goode

from SIXTY-SIX BOOKS: 21^st-Century Writers Speak to the King James Bible

Sixty-Six Books: 21st-Century Writers Speak to the King James Bible was first performed at the Bush Theatre in London on 10 October 2011. On 14 and 28 October, the sixty-six texts were performed back-to-back in an all-night vigil at the Bush. On 28 October they were performed complete at Westminster Abbey.

Sixty-Six Books is a celebration of the 400th anniversary of the King James Version of the Bible. Sixty-six writers were commissioned to interpret a book from the KJV for the twenty-first century. They include playwrights, poets, novelists and songwriters differing in gender, age, ethnicity, sexual orientation and faith. The Loss of All Things is Chris Goode’s response to the ‘Philippians’. TIM is a thirteen-year-old boy in Year 9. His best friend is Paul, who is thinking about killing himself. Instead, TIM wants to keep Paul alive in a room at the back of the cellar to practise his experiments on, just like he did with the family dog.

TIM

…when I was younger, couple of years ago, and my mum was starting to get ill, my mum and my dad got me a dog. I’d wanted a dog for ages and they said I could have a dog as long as it was me that took care of it and everything. It was called Shreds. It was a lab retriever. Friendly. Good personality. There were two of them, Shreds and Patches. And they got split up because the owner couldn’t cope any more. She had a, um…nervous breakdown.

And it was fine, for a while, having Shreds around, and then I started thinking about how it would be interesting to have a dog that was like a ghost or something. Like it would still follow you around but it wouldn’t quite be alive exactly. So I got this notebook, you know, and I started doing drawings of ghost dogs and weird sort of not-quite dogs and dogs that were made out of rubbish and stuff.

And I drew this one that was like a skeleton dog. But it still worked. You could see its heart or whatever. And I started to think, you know, how much of a dog could you actually get rid of and it would still work.

I was looking it up on the internet and stuff. Like, what’s like actually inside a dog?

And there were pictures from like scientific experiments and stuff where there’s only, there’s not quite a whole dog. It’s like, some of it’s been cut away. Like when you’ve started eating a chicken and it’s in the fridge the next day.

So I did sketches of these like science dogs. And you could see their skulls or whatever. Their ribs with a heart. Shaped like a proper heart.

Anyway.

It was quite lucky that my mum started getting really ill, in a way, because no one was thinking about Shreds. So I could just… No one was like, where’s Shreds?

And then I read this thing about where you take the bark out. Like you can actually debark them, surgically. Or not necessarily exactly surgically exactly. But so then it’s just… Because it’s easier after that.

But I wouldn’t do that to you. Necessarily.

DESERT BOY

by Mojisola Adebayo

from Mojisola Adebayo: Plays One

Desert Boy was commissioned and produced by NITRO and the Albany Theatre and premiered at the Albany in London, on 28 April 2010.

Junior Watson, aka SOLDIER BOY, is sixteen years old and part of black South London gang culture. As he bleeds from a knife wound on Deptford beach, a strange traveller from the past appears: Desert Man from Mali. He takes SOLDIER BOY on a journey through black colonial history to discover his past and, ultimately, himself. Time travel is juxtaposed with the events in SOLDIER BOY’s life that led to Deptford beach: in this scene, we find him alone, dispossessed and frightened on a train. Later we discover that his wound was self-inflicted: ‘I’m scared, people are scared of me’ and ‘they’re not gonna get me. Not my crew, a dog or next gang, not the police or a bunch of racists. I’ll do it myself.’

SOLDIER BOY

The last stop South. I’m going anywhere from Lewisham, anywhere from this life. People push past and steal my backwards seat. A college kid sits there drawing lines on a pad random. The other one’s taken by a banker biting her lip, tap tapping on her blackberry. Why they wanna name a phone after a fruit? Why can’t they call things what they are? Tap tap, scritch scraaatch. The rest is tourists. It’s like the whole carriage is tormenting me. They all watch me but pretend not to see me, nervously, like when someone owes you money. I clock them aaaaall out of the corner of my hoody. I slump on a sideways seat and stare into space.

…

And the doors of the...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Half-title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• INTRODUCTION
• CONTENTS
• PART ONE: TEENS
• PART TWO: TWENTIES
• PART THREE: THIRTIES
• PART FOUR: FORTIES PLUS