The Divided Laing

Or The Two Ronnies

Patrick Marmion

• Publisher: Aurora Metro Books
• ISBN:
  9781906582838
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: European Drama
• Index: Literature

London 1970: Experimental psychiatrist R.D. Laing is facing eviction from his pioneering asylum in the East End's Kingsley Hall. Local residents are up in arms – and to make matters worse, Ronnie's revolutionary colleague David Cooper is flipping out on the roof…With his personal life going down the pan and his mental state heading the same way, Ronnie takes an acid trip to the future. His mission is to save his therapeutic collective The Philadelphia Association and secure his professional legacy. Will it be a one-way ticket to madness – or can breakdown sometimes mean breakthrough?

THE DIVIDED LAING

or

The Two Ronnies

by

Patrick Marmion

A speculation on the mind of experimental psychiatrist RD Laing on the imagined occasion of his last night at Kingsley Hall in 1970

First performance at the Arcola Theatre, London, 18th November 2015.

Dramatis Personae

Ronnie Laing

A Glaswegian experimental psychiatrist (43)

Aaron Esterson/Publican

Ronnie’s associate, also from Glasgow (47)

David Cooper

A South African anti-psychiatrist (39)

Mary Barnes/Amelia Laing

A devout patient/Ronnie’s mother (47)

Ulrike Engel/Reporter/Policewoman

Ronnie’s imaginary partner – an angel (late 20s)

Joseph Berke/Policeman/Son

A young American therapist (mid 20s)

Other parts including the Chorus can be played by the members of the company.

Note on the play

The Divided Laing is a work of fiction. No claim is made that any of the events portrayed in the play ever took place. Like the story, all the characters are imaginary even where loosely based on historical counterparts. Some names have been changed to distance them further from these historical counterparts and none should be taken as a biographical representation of any person living or dead.

RONNIE THE FIRST

SCENE ONE: ENTER THE SHRINK

Kingsley Hall 1970: a large room backed by three arched French windows opening onto a balcony with 1950s deck-access council flats beyond. The room has clutter pushed aside including a pool table, a TV and an upright piano supporting a bowl of fruit.

CHORUS

Imagine here our scene. The year of Grace one thousand nine hundred and seventy.

CHORUS

Ronald David Laing our hero is now a Londoner of two score years and three where once he was a single child growing up in a humble Presbyterian home in 1930s Glasgow, Scotland.

CHORUS

There in the wet and freezing North did the child Ronnie hungrily devour books and learning at the public library across the road – a stone’s throw from the hard as girders Gorbals where many and often times a hoodlum’s blade might sever balls from man.

CHORUS

Then a young man with blooming hormones, he breaks with family tradition and goes unto the university thereto to follow Hippocrates and become a Doctor of Medicine. Discovering a love of hill walking and mountaineering, together with pianism and song.

CHORUS

He develops too a passion for Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Camus and existential philosophers, reshaping the thoughts of man, before electing to specialise in psychiatry – that necromancy of the mind.

CHORUS

Now is he shocked and distressed by violent, brutalising practices he finds in that cruel and unnatural world. Lobotomies, electric shock treatment, imprisonment and injection into arse with turpentine.

CHORUS

And so he heads to London there to publish his famous book –

ALL

The Divided Self

CHORUS

– setting out his radical theories on the supposed mind disease that men know only as ‘schizophrenia’. Here he gathers to himself a crew of like-minded brothers who name themselves The Philadelphia Association or PA for short. Together they achieve fame and notoriety for their dissident methods and subversive practices. Thence, in his pomp, swollen with pride and international fame, Icarus-like he flies on to ever-greater peaks.

CHORUS

In East London’s Bromley-by-Bow here our setting, the venerable site of Kingsley Hall, a community centre built to serve the poor where once Mahatma Gandhi stayed upon the roof with his beloved goat.

CHORUS

Here is Ronnie found.

CHORUS

For five years now has this been his temple of the soul.

CHORUS

A psychedelic refuge for the mentally distressed and poor in spirit where shrink and madman are all of one compact.

CHORUS

And where I, Mary Barnes, tossed upon the tide of madness regressed to being a baby, fed on a bottle and painting my room with poo.

ALL

Here begins our tale…

All exit.

A cream coloured telephone starts ringing aggressively to one side of the stage.

Enter Mary – a wild, middle-aged woman bearing a jug of clear liquid and a plate of white sandwiches. Mary looks at the phone wondering how to answer it with her hands full. She dumps the plate and jug on the piano and goes to the phone.

The phone stops ringing before she gets there.

Unconcerned, Mary returns to the piano, singing the hymn ‘I Cannot Tell’ to the tune of Danny Boy. She lifts the piano lid, removes a small bottle from inside and fills it from the jug, before putting the bottle back and blessing herself.

Enter Joseph, bear-like, bearded, big glasses and huge fizzy hair with a skull cap clipped over his bald central reservation.

JOE (New York accent)

Mary. I need your help upstairs. What’re you doing?

MARY

Filling Ronnie’s bottles!

JOE

He’s here?

MARY

Yes! Haven’t you heard?

JOE

No. I’ve been stuck on the roof with David.

MARY

How’s he getting on?

JOE

Still sleeping. So where’s Ronnie?

MARY

He’s doing an interview with a journalist. Showing her round. Lovely girl. She’s going to tell the world about us. I made Marmite sandwiches for them. Ronnie’s favourite. D’you want one?

JOE

Are you sure it’s Marmite, Mary?

MARY

Yes. Try one.

JOE

No thanks. Tastes like living shit. You British.

MARY (eating one herself)

Hey, Joe, maybe this time he’ll stay. We’ll be one big happy family again.

JOE

For Chrissake don’t say that.

MARY

What?

JOE

Happy family.

MARY

What d’you mean?

JOE

You know what he thinks about families. They fuck you up. And he’s right. Like those terrifying cornflake commercials. Families ‘enjoying’ breakfast together. In the sun. With their dog. Beaming like idiots. Rattling their chains. Families are schizogenic nightmares.

MARY

He loves his family!

JOE

Yeah, right. So much he’s got two.

MARY

What’s the matter Joe? You’re not yourself.

JOE

I know. I’m sorry. I had this freaky dream about Ronnie last night. Now he goes and shows up. In so called ‘reality’. Like my dream was prophetic or something.

MARY

He loves you.

JOE

Does he? Sometime...

Table of contents

• The Divided Laing
• Copyright
• Title
• Dedication
• The Divided Laing