Polar Bears

Mark Haddon

• Publisher: Methuen Drama
• Year: 2010
• Print ISBN: 9781408130841
• eBook ISBN: 9781408132784
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Drama
• Index: Literature

Polar Bears is a captivating tale by award-winning writer Mark Haddon. Balancing humour and pathos, it tells of one man's struggle to love, support and live with someone suffering from a psychological condition. With an elliptical structure and teasing timeline, the play handles the subject sensitively, with vivid, sympathetically-drawn characters and nicely-balanced dialectics. Polar Bears is thought-provoking and intelligent, with echoes of Nietszchean philosophy, and it refuses to offer any easy answers for those embroiled in mental instability. The plot is as follows: John has never met anyone like Kay. When the moon is in the right phase, she is magnetic and amazingly alive. But when the darkness closes in, she is lost to another world, a world in which John does not belong.

Mark Haddon is a hugely celebrated writer who is best known for his 2003 novel The Curious Incident of The Dog in the Night-Time, which won a string of prestigious awards, including the Whitbread Book of the Year. It quickly became an international bestseller, was printed in 32 countries and translated into 15 languages.

Polar Bears is his first work for the theatre and enjoyed a high profile premiere at the Donmar Warehouse 1 April - 22 May 2010, directed by Jamie Lloyd and starring Jodhi May and Richard Coyle.

Three

Living room. Margaret and John.

Margaret There’s a little river beyond the houses. The garden used to go all the way down to the bank. This endless slope of green. Sandy and his friends would build ramps at the bottom and cycle as fast as they could and try to reach the other side. One boy lost four teeth. I forget his name. There were two stands of poplars, one to either side. You could see the woods. Kay used to like me telling stories of the creatures that lived there. Foxes, badgers, bears. It’s all gone now. The view. The river. The poplars. I had to sell the land a few years ago . . .

Pause.

She told you about her father . . . ?

John Yes. Yes she did.

Margaret Out there in the hallway. Hanging from the banisters. Everyone told me I should move. But you can’t run away. You have to face it. Might as well face it in a place you know. His father ended his life in an asylum. It’s like those Greek tragedies where a curse gets handed down from generation to generation.

John The Oresteia . . .

Pause.

Aeschylus.

Pause.

Agamemnon sacrifices his daughter Iphigenia in return for a fair wind to Troy. His wife Clytemnestra kills him when he returns home. Then her son, Orestes, kills her to avenge his father’s death and is pursued by the Furies . . .

Margaret I used to be a teacher, Mr Carr.

John Yes. I’m sorry . . . But the curse was lifted in the end, wasn’t it? After the intercession of Athena.

Margaret You read these old plays and you think it’s just something people did two, three thousand years ago. Gods and monsters. Historical interest. And then you realise, nothing changes.

John Well, some things change. I mean, the maenads, for example.

Margaret The what?

John Bands of women inspired by Dionysus into a wild orgiastic frenzy of drinking and lewd sexual behaviour in which they tore wild animals apart and ate their flesh raw.

Margaret You’ve led a very quiet life, haven’t you?

Kay enters.

Kay Is she giving you the curse thing?

John Well . . .

Kay Some mothers do the weather and ‘How was your journey?’ Mine does how her daughter’s going to end up in Broadmoor because Daddy was bonkers and Grandpa ran naked down Kidlington High Street.

John Unless the Goddess of Wisdom intercedes at the last minute.

Margaret Kay is ill, John. You may think she’s high-spirited. But it’s a disease.

John Margaret . . .

Margaret What?

John Kay is standing right here.

Margaret So I should talk about these things behind her back?

John I didn’t mean that.

Margaret Kay knows what I think. She also knows I’m right.

Kay This woman could be your mother-in-law.

Margaret This month is a good month. But there are bad months. Sometimes Kay has to go into hospital.

John I know.

Kay We’ve been seeing one another for three months. Amazingly it has come up in conversation.

Margaret Talking means nothing. Not until you’ve seen it. Not until you’ve been there.

Kay She’s a great saleswoman, isn’t she?

John Margaret, listen . . . Mrs Lewis. You’re right. I have led a very quiet life. I’m not an exciting person. I don’t have moods in the way that Kay has moods.

Margaret Moods?

Kay Shut up and listen to him.

John I suspect you think I’m rather boring. I suspect most people think I’m boring. But it’s Kay’s opinion that matters. And when I’m with Kay I’m special. I have this quality she doesn’t have. I’m stable. Around most people it’s invisible, but with Kay . . . I’m the person holding the bottom of the kite string. I do something she can’t do. And I think we all want to be special.

Kay kisses him.

Kay I love you so much.

Doorbell.

Margaret That will be Sandy.

Kay Oh joy.

Margaret exits.

Kay I told you. She’s never going to like you.

John I didn’t know she used to be a teacher.

Kay Sandy’s not going to like you either. I’d brace yourself for being patronised and insulted.

John Why did you invite him?

Kay Mum did. Possibly so he’ll patronise and insult you and you’ll head for the hills.

John Well, I’m really looking forward to this.

Kay On the positive side, he’s not very intelligent.

John Except that it’s not actually a quiz.

Kay We don’t have to see either of them again, if you don’t want to. I mean, I probably do, but you don’t.

Sandy enters.

John The infamous Sandy.

Sandy John.

They shake hands.

Kay I’d better help Mum in the kitchen.

John Are you going?

Kay Good luck.

She exits.

Pause.

John Kay says Margaret invited you so you’d patronise and insult me and I’d head for the hills.

Pause.

You make supermarket checkouts.

Sandy Not personally.

John No, but . . .

Sandy Actually, we don’t do the big-scale hardware any more. We sold that side of the business six months ago. We’ve moved into hand-held point-of-sale systems. Restaurants, mainly. The wireless unit the waitress brings to your table. Sends your order to the kitchen. Keeps your tab. Every table visible on every unit. Lets you pay at the table without your card being taken out back to be copied by some dodgy Albanian. We’re working on programs to detect and disable zappers at the moment.

John Zappers?

Sandy Automated sales suppression devices. Computer programs that skim off a proportion of the sales and keep them off the books so you pay less sales tax. Germany’s about to mandate tamper-proof POS systems, so it’s only a matter of time before the law’s changed over here. Obviously no o...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Characters
• One
• Two
• Three
• Four
• Five
• Six
• Seven
• Eight
• Nine
• Ten
• Eleven
• Twelve
• Thirteen
• Fourteen
• Fifteen
• Sixteen
• Seventeen
• Eighteen
• Nineteen