Keith Waterhouse: Collected Plays

Send in the Clowns , Stephen Sondheim, copyright Revelation Music Publishing Corp. & Rilting Music.

Rights administered by WB Music Corp.

All rights reserved. Used by permission.

First performed at the Apollo Theatre, London, on 3rd November 1992 with the following cast:

ROGER PIPER, Peter O’Toole

ANGELA CAXTON, Tara Fitzgerald

JUDITH PIPER, Lucy Fleming

BELLE PARSONS, Cara Konig

CHARLES PECK, Jack Watling

GUNBY T. GUNBY, Donald Pickering

MAITRE DE L’HOTEL, William Sleigh

Director , Ned Sherrin

Designer , Tim Goodchild

ROGER PIPER: An advertising executive, in his 50s

ANGELA CAXTON: His mistress, in her late 20s

JUDITH PIPER: His wife

CHARLES PECK: His partner

GUNBY T. GUNBY: Owner of a hotel guide

BELLE PARSONS: A friend of Angela’s

MAITRE DE L’HOTEL:

We discover ROGER pecking away on a portable typewriter at a small table. After some moments he addresses the absent ANGIE (to whom he will be talking constantly throughout the play.)

ROGER: She thinks I’m writing a novel. A splendid idea, she calls it — therapy. And so it is, but for a different trauma than the one she imagines I’m going through. At my age the experience is shattering, bruising and the ultimate disillusion — but it isn’t terminal. I can tell, simply by putting our affair on the scales and comparing it with all the lightweight, short-weight, make-weight relationships I’ve had before, that you’ll be with me now until my death. But you won’t be the cause of it. Relax. This is the last and longest letter I’ll ever write you, and you can take that pained little smile off your face — it’s not what you used to call one of my whingeograms. It’s a love letter, Angie. Therapy.

The patio of ROGER’s house in Ealing.

A christening party has spilled out on to the patio, where several guests are sipping champagne and chatting. A young woman dressed all in black, with a black veil, talks to another guest, her back to ROGER.

ROGER enters the scene, still addressing ANGIE.

ROGER: You were born, I once said — and you were not amused — with a silver cock in your mouth. My count on your ex-sleeping partners at Tim’s christening party stands at half a dozen confirmed and two suspected, and none of them arrived in anything less than a Porsche. Was it by choice or chance that you set your sights at the advertising racket?

The young woman now turns, spots ROGER across the patio, raises her veil — and her glass — and favours him with a ravishing smile. As he responds, his wife JUDITH turns away from another guest and joins him.

JUDITH: Roger, who is that extraordinary creature dressed all in black?

ROGER: Angela Caxton? I suppose she’s what you might call a freelance factotum.

JUDITH: Is that what they’re known as these days? Who brought her?

ROGER: I don’t think anybody did.

JUDITH: Did you invite her?

ROGER: Certainly not.

JUDITH: But she can’t just have walked up the drive thinking, ‘Hallo, there’s a party, I’ll just wiggle in on my stiletto heels and help myself to champagne.’

ROGER: From what I’ve heard, it’s exactly the kind of thing she would do.

JUDITH: And you’d find that amusing, would you? What does she think this is — Breakfast at Tiffany’s ?

ROGER: (As a narrative aside.) To tell you the truth I was with Judith on that one. I hate, quote, ‘characters’. But I was falling in love with you, wasn’t I? Across an uncrowded patio.

JUDITH: In black from tip to toe and top to…bottom, I shouldn’t wonder. Do you suppose she meant to gatecrash a funeral and came to the wrong house?

ROGER: (As a narrative aside.) I guessed that the black outfit was your only set of what you called your dressing-up clothes. My heart lurched in pity — the first constituent of my love. (To JUDITH.) When women dress to startle it’s usually because they lack confidence.

JUDITH: It’s more often because they lack taste. So come on, Roger — what does she want?

ROGER: (As a narrative aside, looking across at ANGIE.) Me, it’s to be hoped… (To JUDITH.) I can only imagine she’s meeting someone here.

JUDITH: It’s Timothy’s christening party, not a place of assignation. How does she come to know you anyway? Or you her?

ROGER: (To himself.) Luigi’s… (As a narrative aside.) It should have been Our Restaurant by now, but we never had one, did we? Or an Our Pub or Our Wine Bar or Our Hotel. We did have an Our Song, though, but you didn’t know the words. Did you, my dear?

JUDITH: Well?

ROGER: I hardly know her at all. We were introduced by Hugh Kitchener…

His partner CHARLES PECK, who has been hovering, joins in the conversation.

CHARLES:…and Associates. When they were celebrating taking the Chepstow’s Choccy-Mints account from under our noses.

ROGER: (As a narrative aside.) There were six of you, all moderately pissed by the time Charles and I came in for your late lunch. (To CHARLES.) I wasn’t quite sure where she fitted in. Market research, I believe.

CHARLES: Summer temp, I’d say.

JUDITH: Office bicycle? (She moves away to greet other guests.)

ROGER: You were sitting between Hugh and that bearded Old Etonian in graphics — correction, young Etonian, sod him — whom you rather wittily characterized as –

ANGIE now turns from her conversation to provide — unheard by the others the remembered line —

ANGIE: Pont Streetwise.

ROGER: He struck me as the kind of man who would pee in your sink… And while you were giving me the eye he was trying, so you told me later, to touch you up under the tablecloth.

ANGIE: He was.

ROGER: Trying? Since you had a cigarette in one hand and a glass in the other you must have been fighting him off with your thigh muscles.

Taking offence, ANGIE turns her back on him. ROGER sits at a table, where CHARLES comes to join him. The party guests, including ANGIE, drift into the background during the following.

The first thing I noticed about you was the flattering fact that you were noticing me. And Charles said:

A restaurant.

CHARLES: Roger, something tells me you’re in with a very good chance of making a raging fool of yourself.

ROGER: Very possibly. (As a narrative aside.) You’d gone off to powder your nose. When you came back, it was not to Hugh’s table and Oliver the Old Etonian groper but to ours.

ANGIE crosses boldly to their table. ROGER and CHARLES rise.

ANGIE: Please don’t get up.

CHARLES: I’ll get you a chair.

ANGIE: There isn’t one. (Gazing at ROGER, she kneels on the floor, her elbows on the table.) There. Now I’m your apostle, kneeling at your feet.

ROGER: Disciple.

ANGIE: I thought they were the same thing.