The Car
Sarah wrote 'The Car' in 1997 as part of her BA degree in 'Theatre Studies'. It was an attempt to show the effects of emotional aggression and mental violence in a relationship, and how damaging that form of battery can be, and in particular tried to show how language can be used as a form of attack. It was taken up by a lecturer, Sylvia Vickers at Roehampton Institute and staged in association with Sam Walters at the Orange Tree in Richmond in 1998. Sylvia Vickers had hoped to set up a national writing competition, and wanted to use 'The Car' as a pilot for that project. She followed 'The Car' up the following year with a play by Susan Baker at the BAC called 'Sweet Celerity'. This is an extract from the press release of The Car:
Apollo loved Artemis but he thought that love meant control. Artemis loved a dead lover, whose death had isolated her from any future relationship. They both need exorcism from ghosts of hatred and love. Does anyone truly know what is happening in someone else's mind? The Car (a eulogy) is the cyclical tale of the last days of an impotent and dying relationship. The writer has tackled issues of communication and the lasting effects of loss and love within human relationships in a particularly melodic style. Mythology and poetry mingle with the fury and violence involved in an ill matched relationship. This work allows the potency and explicit eroticism of the female voice to be set free.
Sarah also later wrote a film script version as well this links to an extract from that script
Below is an extract from the middle of the play:
Scene Four
There is silence. Apollo straightens up. Smoothes down his hair. He sits and stares out at the audience. Artemis stays in her curled up position. Long pause. Then slowly, so as not to antagonise, she gets up. She ducks swiftly under the roof, and moves swiftly to upstage left. The image is ghostlike, she glides. The dim spot that has surrounded the 'car', dims even more, two beams of lights, aimed at around thigh level, like car headlights, flash on her. She does not react at all to anything he says. Her strength confuses her, because despite it, she is still with him. Apollo speaks, he is still speaking in a smug and knowing tone, an intensely irritating one. During his lines, Artemis should still be in her calm state, her voice is still, whole in her reminiscing, but she shakes her head and her arms distractedly, yet stylised. She is trying to throw off Apollo's words.Artemis:
To live is to dream, and the difference between sleep and dreams is that with dreaming, you can dream with some-one. He's forever saying, we live as we sleep, alone. But dreaming becomes more beautiful when you share them with people. And then sometimes, sharing leads to those dreams. My dreams are so long, they're my reading material on long trips. My salve to the Mean Reds. My spirit's nurse, my spirit's Nanna. When I dream waking visions, I dream of the things that have gone before, and the things that are to come. I am the Ghost of Christmas Past and Future embodied in this, (She gestures down to her body, and then she snaps her head up suddenly and looks at the audience.) But not the Present.Apollo
I know better, I said, I can see inside your head and listen to the voices there. You dream too much, and do too little.Artemis:
I dream of big communal houses, with tens of friends living therein. I dream of big communal houses with scores of children running around. They make so much noise, that their voices become one voice. The one voice I hear in the morning when I open my eyes. The one voice coming from a communal throat. I dream of uneven long lawns running down into orchards of barren trees. Their only function is as a playground for the children. Bruised and winded children. Leaf sludge covered children. Adventurous arrogant ten year olds. W ailing and left-behind toddlers. Babies that smell of milk and vomit. There is no feeling that matches the emotion you discover, when a child wakes you up with the slimiest of kisses, and "Wuv you, mummy." I miss children. I miss communal houses.
Apollo:
I know better, I said, of a heart dripping red passion into my hand. Beauty and Joy and Innocence, is that your creed too? But I believe in this world's sorrows, they have an edge, whereas your rural idyll makes my stomach churn.
Artemis:
Drinking ice cold bottle beer in the shade of the poplar in the glare of summer. Teaching the communal child to juggle. Teaching a certain black boxer-bull mastiff to master the skateboard, and laugh as he runs a-barking with the board whirring under his paws. Sleepy summer nights of skin feeling sticky and dirty, and spliffing my way to bed, surrounded by much loved faces, all loving me back. (Her voice changes, grows bitter) University hasn't given me that. I feel too old sometimes. Like I've grown up too far to reach. That never-never land is only never now. My Pan has flown away, far way away, and I am Wendy now, in Mother mode, with none of the baby soft cradle cap kisses.
Apollo:
I know better, I said, of a spirit half dead. Clipped wings, you can't fly anymore, my little lost tom-boyArtemis:
(Here, she grows aggressive, to a degree, trying to lose his voice in her memories) I dream of long walks down sinuous paths, bathed in the lunar luminosity. Of mist wraiths swimming around my feet. Of star gazing and moon bathing. Lying in thigh length grass worshipping the Moon Mother, with smiles. Of hand in hand astronomy, hanging you all on the permanent star in the Northern Sky.
Apollo:
I know better, I said, I know you better than you know yourself. And I own you.
Artemis:
(She is now calm, she has succeeded in evading him) I dream of panting hikes up mountainous hills, and pausing on the summit, to nicotine breathlessly gaze at the panoramic view, and listen to the absence of sound. To listen to the muffled noise as the vortex of silence inhales the wind and even the words from my throat as I say "Yes".
EXT. BEETLE DRIVING ALONG COUNTRY ROAD. DAY
TITLE SEQUENCE
Music: Janis Joplin's "As good as you've been to the World"
INT. PUB 1. NIGHT
Lengthy CU onto Apollo's face. He is slumped against the bar, cradling
a pint. He is an utterly broken man. He is beautiful in a feminine way, but
exudes a stench of cruelty. He has some partially healed burns on his face.
APOLLO
Please.
EXT. BEETLE DRIVING ALONG COUNTRY ROAD. DAY
ARTEMIS
(voice-over)
This agitation will have wings
A-pacing-tracing-prowling-growling
A fro and to feline feeling
This storm will break through the trembling membrane
of stumbling control.
This thin fine skin of fluttering beating wings
is not as self supposed,
the supine delicate fearfly
but
teeth and claws and hot sweet breath,
and the thought of blood pumping o'er tongue and throat
awakes the memory,
just a feather kiss from the guardian spirit would
trip the trap,
begin the release,
But we sent him to sit above the bed of
a sick child
and I would not call him away.
He sits in the coolness of the ether, and holds us
two in his mouth of light.
And still the circling question repeats,
"Do I hold the art for liberation?",
And still
This agitation will have wings.
INT. PUB 1. NIGHT
Apollo attempts to pull himself up onto a stool. He's too pissed .
APOLLO
There is the absence of emotion. It is the worst feeling.
INT. RESTAURANT .DAY
Artemis speaks to camera. A waiter pours her a large glass of red. She has a skinhead, and large dark eyes. She lights a fag. She looks up at the camera, and smiles.
ARTEMIS
When I woke up from my first night with The Angel for the first time, I had never felt so sated in my life. My skin was burnt from the heat. In comparison, my first encounter with Apollo was absolutely shocking! I wasn't attracted to him. So I stayed with him for three years. Madness.
There are two kinds of insanity that I develop when I get involved with men. The first madness is the sweetest, and most destructive. That's when I'm held by the vice of the vision, like a rabbit in the glare of headlights, I only exist for the sight of the objet d'art. Every action, every phrase, every ounce of my being flutters in the moment of that man, and then? Then he's gone. And I emerge from that torpor, that tharn state, and shake my head, and refind my sanity. I am then olive soul calm, and self-despising. I wish they'd find me an antidote, I'm obviously allergic to the buggers.
The second kind of madness I've only gone through once. The kind where I live with a man for three years and a day whom I feared and who loathed me in return.
INT. PUB 1. DAY
It's much earlier in the day. Apollo has only just started drinking.
APOLLO
When love strikes, you're caught in the maelstrom, in the eye of the storm, with your stomach transformed from a simple digestive tract, into a supine delicate fear-fly. This fear-fly transcends the zenith of hope and the pit of despair. That is the most bittersweet emotion. You swoop and soar, your mind re-runs every encounter, deliberating, forcing doubt to be shaken, not stirred, with longing. This is the beginning of the petite mort. The little death, the loss of the self in the maze of murmuring passion. The antithesis is the absence of that person. One definition of Hell, is a place with the absence of God. My own Hell is the absence of my Goddess.
INT. RESTAURANT. DAY
ARTEMIS
I have recovered so quickly from the break up, from Apollo, from that bloody house. The end of that time felt like..
It felt like I was standing alone at a bar, on a Saturday night, standing with my pint and all around me raced neon haze speeded up, congealed up swirls of frenetic pace, the undulating babble of hasty words and faster deeds, of swirling red, green traces of faces in a bubblingboilingburningmass... that's what the last eighty days have felt like, except now I am a solitary smile. Eighty days of anarchy's head. Apollo is far away and now I'm alone in a state of soothing balm, or so it seems to me in my serendipity, for I am far away from him and no longer afraid.
She downs the last of her wine, and motions for the bill.
INT. PUB 1. DAY
He walks from the bar over to a table where a man is quietly reading a paper, and sneakily watching him. Apollo motions with his head to ask if its OK to join him. The man shrugs. Apollo quietly starts talking to himself. Then starts to direct his monologue to the other drinker, who tries to avoid eye contact and looks embarrassed, trying instead to concentrate on his paper.
APOLLO
I long for her breath on the pillow in the morning. With the crystallised shards of sunlight splintering her face into shadow and light. To look at the lashes lying upon her cheek. Black mascara against snow. Her skin was amazing. I've never touched anything so soft, so warm. She was my tactile plaything. I always got the feeling that she wanted to be stroked forever, stoked forever. But that feeling ran hand in hand with the knowledge that she had yet to meet the man that she wanted to stroke her forever. I now wonder what he will be like. This man who could stroke her forever. Will he be beautiful, so beautiful that he would pale her beauty?
EXT. QUIET COBBLED STREET OUTSIDE RESTAURANT. DAY
Artemis is wearing a long black leather coat, with high black boots. She isn't beautiful, but you'd definitely give her a second look, whatever your sexual preference.
ARTEMIS
He didn't ever really understand me. But then I don't suppose he ever wanted to understand me. He wanted only to possess, to own. This thing, this woman that he had held precious from a distance, was one that should never have been his, and was only available because she was a lost possession. A glove. A handbag. So he claimed that which was no one's to own, and then made his mission clear. To change her for the better.
INT. PUB 1. DAY
The other drinker gets up and quietly walks off with his drink. Apollo shouts after him.
APOLLO
Would he stoke her heart, but more importantly would he stoke her mind?
EXT. RIVERSIDE CAR PARK. DAY
She pauses before a beaten, burnt and broken wreck of a Beetle. Smiles, winks at the camera, and walks to a black Triumph Spitfire. She looks directly at the camera.
ARTEMIS
He got inside my plastic paranoia of all the things that the world wants me to be, and he ripped the flesh off my back, to parade me unknitted, unmade and bleeding.
She gets in the car and drives off.
INT. PUB 1. DAY
Apollo is now approaching a family who are all eating ploughman's lunches. He doesn't sit at their table, but leans against the wall staring at them. The parents ignore him, but the two young children watch him unabashed. He directs his words to them.
APOLLO
Would he enable her to glow? I put myself through this pain, of seeing her fall for this man. I see her blush and giggle, in the way that she never coquetted with me. I see her longing to play the Unsure Game. I see her revelling in the not knowing, revelling in the unsurity of a possible beginning of a new thing. I see her face smiling in the potential, I see her long for the days when she sees this man. And wouldn't she love it to hear me talk like this? Yes.