The Shy Manifesto

Michael Ross

• Publisher: Methuen Drama
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781350114401
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Theatre Playwriting

Last night I tried not to be shy, just as an experiment for one night - and with catastrophic results. 17 year old Callum is proud to be shy and he thinks you should be too, because what this noisy, crazy world needs right now is a bit more self-restraint. The Shy Manifesto is a bittersweet coming-of-age comedy drama about a shy boy who is fed up of constantly being told to come out of his shell.
Tonight he is to address an audience of radical shy comrades and incite the meek to finally rise up and inherit the earth. But memories of the previous night's drunken escapades at a classmate's end-of-term party keep intruding, and threaten to upend the fragile identity he has created for himself.
Callum delivers his manifesto, exploring adolescence, isolation, self-loathing and sexuality. His irreverent lightness of touch, and multi- rolling as the other characters in his story endear him to the audience, encouraging us that we, too, can be proud to be shy.
The Shy Manifesto is a solo piece that takes the experience of being shy as its central subject- something which has rarely been explored in drama, and yet which touches on many audience members lives.

Callum I can tell you what you won’t be getting from me this evening; any kind of confession or disclosure. You shall learn nothing intimate about my person. By the end of this lecture you shall feel no closer to me in any way. Far from it. You will leave here (I hope) as a radical shy activist, galvanised by my words and inspired by my deeds yet still feeling, nevertheless, that I am as much of an inscrutable enigma as I was when you first came in. And please, let me say the same about you too.

No ‘journeys’ shall be made by any of us tonight, save a journey to the toilet (if you’re really desperate), or perhaps to the bar afterwards. As Fernando Pessoa, that great Shy Icon (or ‘Shycon’), once wrote, the need to confide is the most abject of needs. He also added that it was far better to lie.

‘Come on, don’t be shy.’ That’s what they all say, isn’t it? But I say to you: why not be shy? Why should our shyness be drummed out of us? Why can’t the rest of humanity follow our self-effacing example? After all, aren’t we meek supposed to ‘inherit the earth’? Or did the Bible lie about that too?

Last night I tried not to be shy, just as an experiment for one night – and with catastrophic results.

Yes I say to you – be shy! Be timid. Reject the push and shove of modern life. Spurn ambition. Talk less. And for God’s sake, keep your voices down!

Are the floors of the stock exchange crowded with the shy, crashing the global economy and impoverishing small countries? Are the parliaments of this world peopled with the meek, starting wars and legislating injustice? Likewise, are the mafias and terrorist cells and the rest also so peopled?

I would submit not.

And even when in cases where various notorious vagabonds and psychopathic tyrants are revealed to have had ‘shy childhoods’ did they not educate themselves out of it by the very course of their rise (or descent, rather) to power or infamy? Was not the havoc they wreaked only possible by the very renunciation of their shyness – in fact the very symptom of this denial?

Perhaps in some people, our shyness is a vital recognition of our own failings, the knowledge that we would not make the world a better place, the self-awareness that not every thought that pops into our head is worth uttering.

As you’ll all know from your own experiences of being shy, there are always people on hand to try and cajole the shyness out of you; to, in that ominous phrase, ‘bring you out of your shell’. As that other great ‘Shycon’ Alan Bennett once so eloquently put it, they come at you ‘with a heartiness that seems to be almost without heart’.

My mother’s friend Libby is one such person. She and the matriarch first met doing post-natal yoga when I was a mere bawling infant. Since then, Libby has been a regular nuisance in my life, forever stationed with my female parent on the patio chairs, supping on herbal teas or quaffing kale smoothies and generally sticking her oar in where it’s not needed. Up until my pre-pubescence I was often ‘babysat’ by Libby. I did my best to avoid her, as she sat in the living room, watching bilge on Sky. Instead I hid in my room and worked on my computer. But after a couple of these babysitting sessions there came a knocking on my door and in she wafted, all smiles and a Princess Di tilt of the head, and she perched on my bed with her hands folded in her lap and asked, ‘Callum, why are you so shy?’

I mean – how can one answer that?

‘I have no idea, Libby. But more to the point; why are you so obnoxiously loud? Oh, I’m sorry – is that outrageously rude of me? Am I not allowed to pass judgement on your personality the way you’re clearly entitled to pass judgement on mine?’

Of course that’s completely not what I said –

Obviously!

Because I’m shy.

Instead I simply shrugged.

Libby took my shrug as a cue that I wanted her to further unravel the mystery of my shyness, like some kind of social skills detective. And like Helen Mirren on ITV3, she had her prime suspect placed in custody with the tape running and she was determined to extract a confession.

Other people might think I was merely lacking in self-esteem, but sharp-eyed Libby’s X-ray vision burned through my façade to see the truth of what I really was: rude, arrogant and superior!

According to Libby, we shy people are merely inverted egomaniacs, believing ourselves to forever be the centre of everyone’s attention. In Libby’s view, ‘superiority is the secret heart of shyness’ and the reason I didn’t converse with people was because I believed myself to be soaring above them all like the Bournemouth Eye (a hot-air balloon tethered to the centre of town which lifts hen parties pointlessly up into the sky before bringing them thudding back down to earth again).

‘Do you imagine your shyness lends you an air of mystery?’ she enquired, voice dripping with derision.

I shook my head but this internationally recognised gesture to signify ‘no’ seemed strangely unintelligible to her because she triumphantly replied ‘Well it doesn’t!’ as if somehow contradicting me.

‘It just makes people think you’ve got nothing to say,

Callum, and the sad fact is they won’t make the effort to get to know you. People just won’t care about you.’

‘But yet you care about me, Libby,’ I reminded her.

At this she remembered to click back into empathy mode – like a politician who realises a little too late there’s a TV camera rolling.

‘Yes I do care, Callum,’ she said, soothingly. ‘But most people won’t. And they’ll be the go-getters who achieve things and seize all the opportunities. Don’t you want to be a winner?’

Of course everything she said was utter rot! I do not believe myself to be superior to anyone (although it’d be supremely hard for even a maggot not to feel both morally and intellectually superior to Libby), I’m just different, that’s all! I may well be way ahead of my schoolmates in terms of intellect but I lag far behind most of them in terms of looks and sporting ability and I’ll always be the very first to graciously admit this. But after I sat there stunned having endured this merciless onslaught, Libby merely patted me on the head and said ‘Something to ruminate on, eh, Callum?’ and with that the ruthless character assassin left the room having carried out her hit.

Libby stepped up her campaign against me a couple of years ago and at one point she was even trying to have me institutionalised. She had just read that book The Curious Dog in the Night Garden (or whatever the hell it’s called) and had got it into her thick skull that I must have Asperger’s or autism of some kind. Libby was telling my mother that she should get me tested whilst I was lying upstairs on my bed reading Larkin. The thing about being as shy and quiet as I am is that very often people forget you’re even there, and Libby simply hadn’t factored in that, what with my window wide open and with them sat on the patio merrily nattering away directly below, I could hear every single word they uttered.

‘I’m serious, Bronny,’ said Libby to my mother, ‘he’s got all the signs.’

‘But he’s terrible at maths,’ protested my mother.

‘No, but you see that’s a po...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Contents
• Company
• Character
• The Shy Manifesto
• eCopyright