Olga in Three Sisters, the opening speech: ‘Father died just a year ago, on this very day – the fifth of May, your name-day, Irina.’ Jeeves says somewhere in P.G. Wodehouse that people with monogrammed slippers are afraid of forgetting their names. Irina, the absent-minded sister, probably needed reminding it was her birthday. A useful side-effect is that the audience also knows exactly when and where we are.
Tracy Letts’s August: Osage County begins with a frank information offload: Beverly Weston, the patriarch, conveniently explains to the new native-American hire, Johnna, the basic set-up: ‘My wife takes pills and I drink.’ This bald set-up is ‘concealed’ by digressions about Berryman, T.S. Eliot and Hart Crane – Beverly is a failed poet – but they are flagrant cover-ups, toupées, merkins, hair-pieces. Of course, alcohol is indiscreet, so a further strategy is overload. We know that Violet, Beverly’s wife, takes ‘Valium. Vicodin. Darvon, Darvocet. Percodan, Percocet. Xanax for fun. OxyContin in a pinch. Some black Mollies once, just to make sure I was still paying attention. And of course Dilaudid. I shouldn’t forget Dilaudid.’
In Athol Fugard’s A Lesson from Aloes, Piet Bezuidenhout tells his wife Gladys how he became involved in the black protest movement. It’s a two-page speech. When I interviewed Fugard in August 1980, I asked about the mixture of naturalism and characters reliving memories. For example, in The Blood Knot, it is unlikely that Zach wouldn’t have already told his brother exactly what it was like to work on the gate. Fugard replied: ‘I had the same problem in A Lesson from Aloes: Piet launches into the story of how he first met Steven [a black activist] and the specifics of that [bus] boycott, how he, at a very arid point in his life, suddenly found himself caught up.
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