Arachnid
(A bare stage but for the five actors, M1, M2, W1, W2 and W3, who sit in a semi-circle in the darkness upstage)
M1: I first met Alan Strang six months ago. My hospital, the Institute for the Criminally Theatrical, was full and I didn’t want to take any more patients, but Hesther insisted.
W1: (Coming forward) You’ve got to see him, Martin. It’s the most horrifying case I’ve ever dealt with.
M1: But my hospital is full, I don’t want to take any more patients. Weren’t you listening?
W1: My board would put him away for life if they could.
M1: What’s he done? Bit of heavy petting at the local pool? Pilfered a couple of pens from the local Woolworth’s?
W1: He chopped the legs off six spiders with a metal spike.
(Pause)
M1: All at once or over a period?
W1: All on the same night.
M1: Where?
W1: In a riding stable. The horses were terrified.
M1: You’d better show him in. (To audience) I knew I was in for an evening of superb theatrical excitement the moment I saw him.
M2: Have a break, have a Kit Kat.
M1: Thanks, I don’t mind if I do.
M2: Well, I don’t have any on me at the moment so there.
M1: Won’t you sit down?
M2: I had a cat once but a dog ate it. Then I had a dog but it got run over by a train.
M1: Tube train or British Rail?
M2: I’ll only answer if you will.
M1: All right.
M2: Do you have a secretary?
M2: Most nights, yes. What other pets have you had?
M2: Had a hamster once.
M1: What happened to it?
M2: It’s my turn. Do you like spiders?
M1: Only on toast. What happened to your hamster?
M2: I’m not telling you! I’m not telling you anything! (Makes to leave)
M1: By the way, which parent is it won’t allow you to keep pets? Mother or father?
M2: I don’t keep them.
M1: Ahah!
M2: I just told you. They keep getting run over by trains and eaten by dogs.
(He lies down upstage)
M1: Brilliant! As soon as I made that crack about having spiders on toast he clammed up completely. Typical adolescent para-neurological persecution complex with transsexual overtones as first observed by Carl Jung and Sigmund Romberg. I decided to visit his mother.
(W2 steps forward and immediately trips over M2’s prone body)
Hello, Mrs Freud?
W2: No, I’m Mrs Strang.
M1: Mrs Strang, how much does your son know about sex?
W2: You doctors, you’re all the same. Not in the house five minutes before you’re poking your noses into other people’s private parts. Why can’t you leave the boy alone?
M1: Mrs Strang, Alan is in pain.
W2: Well, he shouldn’t lie where people can trip over him, should he?
M1: Tell me, did your son ever own a pet spider?
W2: I thought you wanted to talk about sex?
M1: Later.
W2: Well, we never let him have a pet spider, no. Mr Strang don’t believe in pampering children. But he did have…
M1: Yes?
W2: A picture of one. On the wall above his bed.
M1: Ahah!
W2: Rather a queer one, it was. This picture of a spider looking over a five-barred gate. You don’t often see them taken from that angle.
M1: How do you mean?
W2: Well, from underneath, like. It came out all legs…
(W2 returns to her seat.)
M1: It was all beginning to fall into place. Starved of affection by a nymphomaniac mother, an obsession with a string of increasingly short-lived pets, and big picture of a spider in his bedroom. It would be enough to drive anyone mad.
(M2 runs on)
M2: It’s not mad! Spiders are sexy!
M1: Sexy?
M2: All those legs. And those big brown eyes looking at you. That’s how Jill looked when we went out that night.
M1: Jill?
M2: This girl I met in the shop where I was nicking me weekly Spider-Man comic.
M1: Ahah! Show me, Alan, Act out what you did that night with Jill.
M2: I’m not taking my clothes off!
M1: (Dryly) I don’t particularly want you to…
M2: Well, I took Jill to see this skinflick at the local fleapit, and then she started asking me about Graham.
M1: Graham? A homosexual classmate who’d once pushed you into a cobweb?
M2: Don’t be daft. He was my pet spider Mum never knew about.
M1: Ahah!
W3: (Coming forward) I know, let’s go in the stables and take all our clothes off and frighten the horses.
M2: We can’t do that.
W3: Why not?
M2: Well, there’s spiders in there.
W3: I’m not scared of spiders.
M2: They’ll crawl all over us.
W3: Don’t worry. We can fend them off with this metal spike. Come on.
M1: What happened?
(M2 and W3 act out the following as M2 speaks)
M2: We lay down and I looked at her and she looked at me and I took the chewing gun out of my mouth and she took the safety pin out of hers and I mopped up the blood and then…
M1: What?
M2: And then…
M1: What, Alan? You must tell me.
M2: I saw this thing coming towards us! All big and fat and hairy and – and –
M1: What was it?
M2: Graham. He must have followed me. I said ‘Back, Graham get back, boy’, but he wouldn’t listen. Just kept coming towards me on his long hairy legs.
M1: So you chopped his legs off?
M2: No, first I showed him to Jill. (He shoves an imaginary spider in W3’s face)
M1: What did she do?
W3: Jesus Christ! (Runs off)
M2: Then I chopped his legs off.
M1: Why?
M2: Well, I was all set up, wasn’t I? And he has to go and bloody scare her off.
M1: What about the other five?
M2: I didn’t mean to do them, honest. Only I was traumatically unbalanced by pre-coital tension, know what I mean?
(M1 throws a blanket round M2’s shoulders)
M1: It’s all right, Alan. You’re cured now. You won’t chop the legs off any more spiders. Next time you take a girl in a stable they’ll crawl all over you and you’ll have completely forgotten that they once represented a dream of frustrated pet ownership. And you’ll be able to keep a goldfish without it drowning after a week. And your mother will ask me round for private consultations and I’ll occasionally give her one for nothing. I doubt, however, with much passion. And –
M2: Will I still be able to enjoy myself?
M1: Yes. You’re a normal healthy boy now, Alan. You’re free to go.
M2: Great. (Moves to go)
M1: Where are you going?
M2: Back to the fleapit. Should see the size of the bugs in there. Got legs like giraffes, some of them. (Exits)
M1: Failed again. Now of course he’s got me at it. We sit in the stalls of the Scala, Soho, our tools in our hands, striking at legs. And we never come out.
(He sits staring hopelessly ahead)
CON: Ha bloody ha. (Critic picking up on title of play he’d already written and had a hit with at Edinburgh – while, of course, cleverly referencing a key point in the original.)
It is, of course, incredibly unfair. He just wanted to take the piss. He couldn’t think of anything original that week so he chose to write this cheap pastiche instead. He felt threatened by it. Not clever enough to fully understand or appreciate it so he just makes mock, in his usual pathetic way.
PRO: He enjoyed the original enormously. Found it deeply exciting and thought-provoking. But it wasn’t the play’s seriousness he was guying, it was simply taking an extreme idea and twisting it just enough to make it feel absurd. Changing the blinding of six horses into the mutilation of six spiders. Spiders are more of a bete noire for most people. And the fluid way he incorporates the baroque theatricality of the original into his spoof is his way of showing his appreciation.