A Certain Age: Twelve Monologues From the Classic Radio Series Read online

  LYNNE TRUSS

  A Certain Age

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Introduction

  A Note on the Text

  The Brother

  The Wife

  The Son

  The Mother

  The Father

  The Daughter

  The Married Man

  The Sister

  The Husband

  The Other Woman

  The Pedant

  The Cat Lover

  Cast

  About the Author

  From the reviews of A Certain Age

  By the same author

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Introduction

  These monologues were written for BBC Radio Four, and appeared in two series. The first, which comprised all the female voices, was broadcast in 2002. The second series (the men) followed in 2005. Many were written specifically for the actors who played them, so to that extent are collaborations. All were produced by Dawn Ellis, of BBC Radio’s Light Entertainment department, who put as much of her heart and soul into them as I did. Since the whole point of a monologue is that it should speak for itself, I hope these pieces don’t require much by way of introduction. I’d just like to mention a few things to put them in context.

  Since the advent of the video diary, we’ve become so accustomed to stories told in this particular straight-to-audience form that you could be forgiven for assuming (as I did when I started writing mine) that it had been knocking around since ancient times. How those Athenian theatre festival-goers were delighted, for example, when, over a series of well-crafted scenes, the goddess Athena endured and reported (to no one in particular) the roller-coaster emotions involved in setting up her successful high-street poster company. But, in fact, no such play seems to have come down to us. When Alan Bennett wrote his first Talking Heads in the late 1980s, it seems he was pioneering a quite new dramatic form.

  Up to that point, a “monologue” could mean any number of things: to a student actor, it was any uninterrupted speech learned for audition purposes; to a literary critic, it was a type of Victorian poem. Of course, there were stage monologues, both in the legitimate theatre and in the music hall, but they were unlike Bennett’s in two respects: first, they were generally addressed to a particular, unseen person; and second, they were fixed in time. As recently as 1983, a critic wrote that the monologue “lacks the resources to develop the temporal dimension, the notion of life as a continuing process of growth and change”. But then Bennett came along and divided his monologues into scenes, and suddenly the temporal dimension was added, just like that. There was a simple fade to black, then a fade up again. At a stroke, this completely changed the kind of story that could be told.

  My own monologue career started in the mid-1990s, when I was asked to write scripts for the Natural History Unit in Bristol. A radio series called Dear Sir … Yours, Ruffled was to put the case for six unloved common British species, by having them voice their own story, as if in rather furious letters to The Times. My job was to tackle two of these stout defences: an urban fox, for Tony Robinson, and a grey squirrel, for June Whitfield. Instantly, I was in heaven. “Do you think that old teabag is going begging?” the fox interrupted himself, before he gulped it down. I had him shudder at the thought of Basil Brush: “Those dead eyes, you know, like buttons.” And in between the jokes, of course, there was lots of natural history information, such as the disgusting news that people used to rub squirrel brain on the gums of teething babies.

  A series called Tidal Talk from a Rock Pool followed (I had nothing to do with these titles), and I had another field day with that. We had Bill Wallis playing a periwinkle, Geoffrey Palmer as a hermit crab, Alison Steadman as an anemone (“My enemy’s anemone is my friend”), Greg Proops as a goby fish, Judi Dench as a limpet and Tony Robinson as a lugworm. I made the periwinkle a kind of music hall comedian trying to cheer up all the others. “So the big shark says, ‘Here’s that sick squid I owe you’, ha ha. All right, suit yourselves; I’m wasted here.”

  The animal I cared most about in that series was the limpet: stuck, lonely and bitter, on its rock while the salt waves surged and the far horizon beckoned. “Moscow! Moscow! Moscow!” she cried. She browsed algae from the rock, gossiped about the lewdness of the American slipper limpet, and quoted from Tennyson and Oscar Wilde. Judi Dench chose a Celia Johnson voice, which was superb; she also gamely stuffed her cheeks with Maltesers to represent the algae-browsing activity. The limpet went for a short walk, which meant she had to lift her shell and shuffle an inch or two, making comical straining and exertion noises. “I don’t know if you’ve ever had the misfortune to befriend a limpet,” she confided in a whisper, “but they are notoriously hard to shake off.” She remembered in despair that her mother once upbraided her, in her youth, for her unfortunate habit of “dwelling on things”.

  Maybe I’ve been making heavy weather of this monologue-writing, but the image of the limpet blindly shuffling its shell along, while panting and groaning, does quite resemble what it was like to inhabit each of the twelve characters in this book. You may have seen the movie Being John Malkovich, in which a mysterious portal behind a filing cupboard allows people to occupy the brain of John Malkovich for ten minutes at a time, seeing the world through his eyes, and then (if they concentrate very, very hard), getting him to say things, or move his arm. Writing monologues is similar to that. I’ve varied the form as much as I can in these twelve: there are plotty ones and organic ones; twisty and straightforward; light and dark; redemptive and non-redemptive. One of them – “The Husband” – is simply exposition. But all of them required the same strenuous mental puppeteering. These are not all nice people, by the way; but that’s part of the point of doing it.

  From the technical point of view, what I was most surprised to learn about the monologue is that there are all sorts of stories that can’t be told this way. In proposing the men’s series, for example, I came up with this idea for “The Son”, which turned out to be unworkable:

  The Son

  Jason is a Kiwi vet, unmarried, straight, and popular with the pet-ladies of his West Country parish because of his understanding tone. They are all in love with him: he seems to be refreshingly in touch with his “feminine side”. It doesn’t even bother them when their pets fail to flourish under his care. But when he learns that his mother has died in New Zealand, he goes to pieces, and is dropped by everyone. It turns out that his feminine-side appeal has limits.

  Tone: arch

  Theme: access to “feminine” emotions

  Ideal casting: Martin Clunes

  Now, there are problems with this that anyone can spot –Martin Clunes with a New Zealand accent being just one of them. But the main problem is that the protagonist of this story can’t actually tell it, because it’s mainly about how he is unconsciously perceived by other people. If he knows these women all adore him for his feminine side, the theme stops being “access to emotions” and becomes manipulativeness or even vanity. Anyway, I quickly dropped this idea, and instead wrote a “Son” that was about a light-hearted photographer’s very happy and matter-of-fact relationship with his dead father, which was possibly my favourite of the whole twelve. By way of counter-example, there is this:

  The Married Man

  Jim is an American mystery writer living in London. His stories are middlebrow puzzle mysteries, and he enjoys being the omniscient author in command of all the facts. In his personal life, he is conducting a casual long-term affair which he thinks hi
s wife doesn’t know about. She does. She also always guesses “whodunnit” by about the 50th page, which ought to tell him something about how smart she is. In the end, of course, it’s his own inability to pick up clues that is his downfall.

  Tone:light

  Theme: control

  Ideal casting: Kevin Spacey

  This proposal bears a pretty close resemblance to the piece as it turned out, except for the madly unrealistic Kevin Spacey thing. The reason it worked was that its theme was, actually, not control but self-deception. The characters in this book all speak for themselves, but the interest for the person reading or listening to them is always, primarily, in ascertaining and judging how well they know or understand their own story. Alan Bennett describes his Talking Heads characters as people who “don’t quite know what they are saying, and are telling a story to the meaning of which they are not entirely privy”. After I’d completed the second series of A Certain Age, I went to see the excellent revival of Christopher Hampton’s The Philanthropist, in which a character says there are only two types of people in the world: those who live by what they know to be a lie; and those who live by what they believe, falsely, to be the truth. This stark assessment of humanity applies perfectly to the protagonists of dramatic monologues. “We don’t live our lives for other people,” Judy is happy to parrot in “The Daughter”. And she believes it, even though living for someone else is precisely what she’s doing.

  I ought to explain why it’s called A Certain Age. The idea for the original series arose out of my rather weak observation that in one’s early forties, a person comes to realise that some particular life choices are no longer open. In fact, many life choices seem already to have been made, sometimes without the involvement of any conscious decision. Thus, a woman might find she could define herself at age forty-two as the mother of a grown-up daughter, or the daughter of an elderly parent, or a wife of twenty-five years. Always keen to impose technical limits on myself, I decided that this system – Mother, Daughter, Wife, etc. – would discipline me, in that each person would talk about just one central relationship. At that time, incidentally, I thought the phrase “a certain age” would have a nice double meaning, in that your forties also bring you more confidence in knowing who you are. However, except in the case of the contented Cat Lover, and the happily restored Pedant, the narrators are subject to the usual curse of the monologue, in that (see above) they don’t know quite what they’re saying, and don’t know the full story anyway.

  I wish there were a better, more attractive term than “monologue”. What a turn-off word it is. It has any number of associations, and not one of them is pleasant. “And now Miss Truss has agreed to delight us with one of her monologues!” is the cue for any sane person to tip-toe to the hall, grab a coat at random, and then dash out into the stormy night. But at least banging on about monologues here makes one thing clear. The following are not first-person-narrated short stories. Despite the extraordinary talent the characters sometimes have for remembered dialogue, despite all their unlikely mastery of exposition, these are still slices of drama as opposed to slices of fiction. The way to differentiate the two forms is, by the way, quite simple.

  “It was the tragedy of my father’s death that it brought my family together.”

  That is the first line of a first-person-narrated short story.

  “It was the tragedy of my father’s death that it brought my family together, or I’m not riding this bike.”

  That is the first line of a monologue.

  Finally, a word about the performances. If by any chance you pick up A Certain Age on BBC Audio, you will discover what an outstanding job was done in studio by each of our twelve great actors (listed here). Casting A Certain Age was a nail-biting exercise, as it always is for radio, since actors’ agents won’t allow their stars to commit to radio work more than about three weeks ahead, in case something more lucrative comes up. But if the waiting is stressful, the reward is all the greater when your perfect actor actually steps into the studio with his Guardian under his arm and a copy of the script with bits already underlined. I am the soppiest of the soppy when it comes to actors, so I’d better not describe all the ecstatic dancing-on-the-spot I’ve been known to do when the actor has gone. But since I wrote these pieces for performance, I can hardly claim not to care about how absolutely brilliantly they were done.

  A Note on the text

  When editing these pieces to make them identical with the edited broadcast versions, I found that I couldn’t bear to lose (again) some of the precious incidental stuff I had bravely sacrificed in the cause of the rigid 28-minute time-slot. The text does, therefore, sometimes depart from the audio versions – but never for very long.

  The Brother

  TIM is quite posh; he is in the art business, a bit camp, and a natural loner. It will be for the listener to decide whether he is gay. Having inherited his father’s gallery on the death of his parents, he has built up the dealership and takes great pride in his achievement. His older brother Julian lives in Australia. They have not met for ten years.

  Scene One: at home; classical music playing quietly. Tim is jetlagged but very pleased with himself

  No matter how many times you experience this, it’s still horribly disorientating. Here I am, 9.30 in the evening, at home in Belsize Park, eighteenth-century mahogany desk piled high with post opened in my absence by the lovely Gideon, and this morning – well, this morning I was crossing Fifth Avenue in a yellow cab, on the way to Newark (because, of course, I never use JFK). [Yawn] It’s too brutal! After two and a half weeks in the Peabody apartment on East 75th, arriving home to London so abruptly is SUCH a jar to one’s sensibilities. Of course, Manhattan is infested nowadays with nasty little British people on shopping sprees, all gleefully waving their currency converters, and one finds it increasingly difficult to avoid them, alas, even in the smarter galleries on Madison. The woman in the adjacent seat on the flight home – and this was in UPPER, as they so unpleasantly denominate it these days – told me she had bought [he remembers the details precisely, but they don’t mean much to him] ten mini iPods in assorted colours and a suitcase full of Region 1 DVDs. I said, [very condescending] “How lovely. And did that take you long?” And she told me she had been in Manhattan only TWO DAYS; she’d just “popped over” while her husband was on the Algarve playing golf. I said, “Oh I bought very little for myself, I’m afraid. But then I do travel to New York several times a year.” And she said, [scoff; not an imitation] “So do I, dear! This day flight’s much better than the night one, innit? That night one does my head in.”

  [He riffles through post] So. What have we here? [Shuffles and yawns as he talks] American Express, something tedious from Balliol; begging letter, begging letter [tears up the begging letters]; Art Quarterly; oh, cheque; ooh, NICE cheque; [less happy] mmm, small cheque, I sold that Ravanelli drawing much too cheaply; National Gallery invitation; cheque, ooh, VERY nice cheque; letter from [surprised, when he checks the signature] Julian, that’s odd, I’d better read that; small cheque, gallery invitation, gallery invitation; one, two, THREE copies of the Spectator (hurrah), and – ugh, well, a lot more that I’ll concern myself with tomorrow, with the help of the lovely Gideon. [Yawn] I can’t wait to show Gideon the Maffei sketch I bought from Fowlers and Wells. He’s got quite an EYE, I think. [Yawn] Oh well, what does Julian want? [He picks up Julian’s letter, which is three pages, and scans bits of it] It’s unlike him not to e-mail. Post from Australia takes such an age. The funny thing is, with Julian’s annual e-mails, I can always picture him in some internet café on Bondi, with palm umbrellas and towering surf, and a big cocktail standing by – probably one with an obscene name. I can just hear him ordering it: [impersonates Julian, who is very commanding as well as louche] “I want a Criminally Long Sweaty Screw, please, barman.”

  [Yawn] I really must go to bed soon. Oh well. [Rustle] “Dear Timmy.” Well, [puts letter down] he does that to annoy me, of course, and als
o to be Big Brotherish. No one else even calls me Tim any more; I insist on T.J. – or even, with certain friends, “Teedge”. Typical of the parents to cook up such a perfect imperious name for Julian and then just lose interest when I come along. Imagine being called Tim. Ugh. Imagine it, in particular, during Wimbledon fortnight! “Come on, Tim!” they all shout. “Come on, Tim!” Every year, in the weeks preceding the championships, the newspapers ask, “Is this the year for . . . TIM?” And I say, “Look! No tournament besides tiddly-winks will ever be won by a person named Tim!” [Pause] They call him TimBO sometimes, you know. Now, that’s enough to make you WEEP.

  [He has finished the rant; yawn] So. “Dear Timmy,” writes Julian. [Very big yawn] “I called last week and spoke to some bloke called Gideon.” Bloke? Gideon is hardly a bloke, Julian, honestly. [Peruses other pages] I have to say, though, this is suspiciously well spelled and punctuated for Julian. The miracle of spellcheck, no doubt. [Resumes reading] “He told me you were in New York but would be home on 17th. I am writing because I have been thinking about a few things.” [Mutter] Not before time, I’d say. “I realise I have never been a proper older brother to you.” [Tim is a bit disturbed by where this is going] What’s he talking about? A proper older brother? Julian was always a proper older brother to me. When we were at school he used to trip me going into assembly, steal my hymn book every Sunday, and punch me in the kidneys after nets; that’s almost a definition of being a proper older brother. “I wonder if I ought to come back to London. I wonder if I should be [Tim tightens with alarm, which increases as he continues] helping you with father’s art business. After all, I am technically head of the family.”

  Good heavens. [Attempt at light-hearted laugh] He makes us sound like the Corleones. Head of the family! “I’m sorry to say that Janey and I have parted.” Oh no. Oh Julian, you idiot. Janey was so RICH. “She is using Arabella and Max as leverage, which has been quite unpleasant, not to say ruinously expensive. So I just thought, remember how father used to admire my EYE, Timmy?” No, I don’t, as it happens. He admired MY eye, Julian. It was your FINGERS that made the biggest impression on father. When they were found in someone else’s till. “Why don’t I help you out for a few months in London? I never complained when you took over the gallery without me, did I?” What? You were in PRISON, Julian. [Turns page] “I’ve shown father’s will to a few people and everyone thinks I’ve been quite negligent of my own interests. I mean, little Timmy’s gambles have paid off well so far, so well done! But I’m a divorced man now, with titanic alimony. And you do [ominous for Tim] OWE ME, don’t you?” Oh God. Oh no. [Turns page] “Arriving on 20th. Looking forward to working with you. Don’t worry! My embezzling days are behind me. Besides, if I had any designs on your readies, little brother, I wouldn’t need to travel halfway round the world, would I? I could clean you out without leaving my desk! Your loving older brother, Julian. PS If you managed to acquire any coloured iPods or Region 1 DVDs on your trip to New York, there are people in China who would be in the market.”