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(Enter a noticeable cadaverous-looking man with large blue eyes. He is clothed in retro-bohemian-style: a close-fitting striped top and a pair of tapered black trousers will do. And, naturally, a beret. He holds aloft in the air an open umbrella. Although one would consider this appendage to be a satisfactory (if only just) means of cover under the usual conditions in which such a cover is desirable (i.e. continuous or intermittent rain), its spokes are all bent out in not quite the right directions, like indecisive vectors. It is the kind of umbrella Salvador Dali himself would have designed. Somebody has danced in it. Salvador Dali himself has danced in it. Enter a Madman, as angry as a hacksaw. He combatively flails his fists like bicycle pedals. He yells loudly and nonsensically, in the mode of a Futurist bruitist poem. The Noticeable Man collapses the umbrella and lances it wildly across the stage. Collapsed umbrella passes through body of Madman like a magical javelin and exits via the right-wing. This clearly provokes the Madman further, and he now churns his fists so rapidly that they become invisible, as electrons are invisible. Meanwhile, the Man Without the Umbrella has unconcealed some kind of small gun and points it at the audience. The spectators in the front-row, who have so far been very hushed and still, now become animated. They are all the women the Man has ever loved, and who have loved him, some for years, others for one day. Each face seems to continue on from the last, with slight alterations. The nose reappears but the mouth is gone. The hair has greyed but the mouth is returned. Finally the Man recognises his Mother. He shoots all of them. He reclips and discharges fire along the second row, the men he has loved and who have loved him, moving from left to right. Enter a police squadron, dressed in Cop-show uniforms. Man shoots the police. He shoots everyone, remorselessly, everyone he has ever known, including the Madman. Then he shoots himself, in the most tragic manner conceivable. In the heart perhaps, after Guy Debord. Three weeks later the theatre is demolished. The ground is leveled and covered with strips of pregrown grass.) |
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