Play With a Tiger and Other Plays

ANNA: Yes, here you are. [in pain] Dave, you have no right, you have no right … you’re a very careless person, Dave … [She gets off the bed and goes to the window.] What’s the use of talking of rights and wrongs? Or of right or wrong? OK, it’s a jungle. Anything goes. I should have let myself get pregnant. One catches a man by getting pregnant. People like you and me make life too complicated. Back to reality. [looking down] My God, that poor fool is still down there.

DAVE: Anna, don’t freeze up on me.

ANNA: You want to know what I’ve been doing? Well I’ve been standing here at night looking into the street and trying not to think about what you’ve been doing. I’ve been standing here. At about eleven at night the law and the order dissolve. The girls stand at their window there, kissing or quarrelling as the case might be, in between customers. The wolves prowl along the street. Gangs of kids rush by, living in some frightened lonely violent world that they think we don’t understand – ha! So they think we don’t understand what’s driving them crazy? Old people living alone go creeping home, alone. The women who live alone, after an hour of talking to strangers in a pub, go home, alone. And sometimes a married couple or lovers – and they can’t wait to get inside, behind the walls, they can’t wait to lock the doors against this terrible city. And they’re right.

DAVE: They’re not right.

ANNA: Put your arms around one other human being, and let the rest of the world go hang – the world is terrifying, so shut it out. That’s what people are doing everywhere, and perhaps they are right.

DAVE: Anna, say it!

ANNA: All right. You’re an egotist, and egotists can never bear the thought of a new generation. That’s all. And I’m an egotist and what I call my self-respect is more important to me than anything else. And that’s all. There’s nothing new in it. There’s nothing new anywhere. I shall die of boredom. Sometimes at night I look out into the street and I imagine that somewhere is a quiet room, and in the room is a man or a woman, thinking. And quite soon there will be a small new book – a book of one page perhaps, and on the page one small new thought. And we’ll all read it and shout: Yes, yes, that’s it.

DAVE: Such as?

ANNA [mocking]: We must love one another or die, something new like that.

DAVE: Something new like that.

ANNA: But of course it wouldn’t be that at all. It would probably turn out to be a new manifesto headed: Six new rules for egotists, or How to eat your cake and have it.

DAVE: Anna, stop beating us up.

ANNA: Ah hell.

[DAVE puts out a hand to her, drops it on her look.]

DAVE: OK, Anna, have it your way … You’re not even interested in what I’ve been doing since I saw you? You haven’t even asked.

ANNA: The subject, I thought, had been touched on.

DAVE: No, honey, I was being serious. Work, I mean work. I’ve been working. [mocking himself] I’ve been writing a sociological-type article about Britain.

ANNA: So that is what you’ve been doing for the last week. We were wondering.

DAVE [acknowledging the ‘we’]: OK Anna, OK, OK.

ANNA: What am I going to be without you? I get so lonely without you.

DAVE: But baby, I’m here. [at her look] OK Anna. OK.

ANNA: All right, Dave. But all the same … I sometimes think if my skin were taken off I’d be just one enormous bruise. Yes, that’s all I am, just a bruise.

DAVE: Uh-huh.

ANNA: However, comforting myself with my usual sociological-type thought, I don’t see how there can be such pain everywhere without something new growing out of it.

DAVE: Uh-huh.

ANNA [fierce]: Yes!

DAVE: All the same, you’re tough. At a conservative estimate, a hundred times tougher than I am. Why?

ANNA [mocking]: Obviously, I’m a woman, everyone knows we are tough.

DAVE: Uh-huh … I was thinking, when I was away from you, every time I take a beating it gets harder to stand up after-wards. You take punishment and up you get smiling.

ANNA: Oh quite so. Lucky, isn’t it?

DAVE: Tell me, when your husband was killed, did it knock you down?

ANNA: Oh of course not, why should it?

DAVE: OK Anna.

ANNA: Everyone knows that when a marriage ends because the husband is killed fighting heroically for his country the marriage is by definition romantic and beautiful. [at his look] All right, I don’t choose to remember. [at his look] OK, it was a long time ago.

DAVE: Well then, is it because you’ve got that kid?

ANNA [irritated]: Is what because I’ve got that kid. That kid, that kid … You talk about him as if he were a plant in a pot on the windowsill, or a parcel I’ve left lying about somewhere, instead of what my life has been about.

DAVE: Why take men seriously when you’ve got a child?

ANNA [ironic]: Ho-ho, I see.

DAVE: All right then, tell me truthfully, tell me straight, baby, none of the propaganda now, what does it really mean to you to have that kid?

ANNA: But why should you be interested, you’re not going to have children …

DAVE: Come on, Anna, you can’t have it both ways.

ANNA: No.

DAVE: Why not?

ANNA [angry]: Because I can never say anything I think, I feel – it always ends up with what you think, you feel. My God, Dave, sometimes I feel you like a great black shadow over me I’ve got to get away from … oh all right, all right … [She stands, slowly smiles.]

DAVE: Don’t give me that Mona Lisa stuff, I want to know.

ANNA: Well. He sets me free. Yes, that’s it, he sets me free.

DAVE: Why, for God’s sake, you spend your time in savage domesticity whenever he’s within twenty miles of you.

ANNA: Don’t you see? He’s there. I go into his room when he’s asleep to take a good long look at him, because he’s too old now to look at when he’s awake, that’s already an interference. So I look at him. He’s there.

DAVE: He’s there.

ANNA: There he is. He’s something new. A kind of ray of light that shoots off into any direction. Or blazes up like a comet or goes off like a rocket.