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CHATROOM
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Chatroom was originally performed as part of the 2005 NT Connections season. It received its first professional production in the Cottesloe auditorium of the National Theatre, London, on 10 March 2006. The cast was as follows:
WILLIAM | Matt Smith |
JACK | Javone Prince |
EVA | Matti Houghton |
EMILY | Andrea Riseborough |
JIM | Andrew Garfield |
LAURA | Naomi Bentley |
Director | Anna Mackmin |
Designer | Jonathan Fensom |
Lighting Designer | Jason Taylor |
Sound Designer | Christopher Shutt |
Video Designer | Dick Straker |
Music | Paddy Cunneen |
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Characters
WILLIAM
JACK
EVA
EMILY
JIM
LAURA
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There are six identical orange plastic seats in a row at the very front of the stage. There’s a two-metre gap between each seat.
‘Oompa Loompa’ sung by the Oompa Loompas, from the film Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, is heard.
During this song three actors appear from one side of the stage and two others appear from the other side. They walk casually towards each other in a line, stop, turn and face the audience.
From left to right they are WILLIAM, JACK, EVA, EMILY and LAURA. They are all about fifteen/sixteen years of age. They stand there for a while and look at the audience.
They then look at each other. They seem to be sizing each other up. In unison they walk towards their seats and sit down.
This should all last one and half minutes.
As they sit the Oompa Loompas’ song comes to an end.
Lights.
WILLIAM. You’re depressing me now.
JACK. Really?
WILLIAM. You see, you’ve lost me. At the beginning I was with you. But not now. I’m a little disappointed.
JACK. Sorry.
WILLIAM. You really think that? You’ve thought it over, came to an opinion, you believe that?
JACK. It is popular.
WILLIAM. Well, so is body-piercing but that isn’t a good thing, is it?
JACK. I suppose.
WILLIAM. So let’s look at the facts. A single man lives in a castle in the middle of… where is it set again?
JACK. Film or book?
WILLIAM. There’s a difference?
JACK. Both films changed some details. It doesn’t really matter.
WILLIAM. Well, in the book it’s set where ever it’s set… and this man lives in his big house in the middle of the town. He lives with dwarfs. Nothing wrong with that. But they’re orange. Orange dwarfs with green hair.
JACK. And there’s only twenty of them making the world’s supply of chocolate… none of this is meant to be realistic.
WILLIAM. But why make them dwarfs? Why the green hair? Why make them orange in the first place?! Can you see where I’m going with this?
JACK. Kind of.
WILLIAM. What’s wrong with the ordinary?
JACK. It’s for children. Ordinary’s boring, maybe?
WILLIAM. Which is my original point about these children’s writers! As if a little boy who shares a giant bed with his grandparents… four of them! As if he’d ever in the real world win this extraordinary chocolate empire!
JACK (groans). Yeah.
WILLIAM. You know in the real world it would have been that fat German boy who falls into the chocolate lake at the beginning of the tour. In the real world he’s the winner.
JACK. I think I might have to…
WILLIAM. This is how it really ends. He falls in. His father gets these big-time lawyers to sue the shit out of Willy Wonka. They look into his shady past, his very dodgy personal life with those orange midgets. He’s dragged through the tabloids with paedophilia ringing in his ears. They make shit out of him! Willy Wonka is no more. He’s done. He’s doing twenty-five years in a high-security prison being passed around his fellow prisoners like the proverbial box of Quality Street. In the outside, the Germans win, ’cause let’s face it, the Germans always win. The fat German kiddie…
JACK. His name is Augustus.
WILLIAM. Right, Augustus… well, he inherits everything as part of his settlement. He gets it all. And because he’s a fat glutton he can’t stop eating all this chocolate. The more the Oompa Loompas make, the more Augustus eats. He’s eighteen years old and forty stone. One day he wakes up, stretches for the television remote and dies of a massive coronary sclerosis. That is the real world. Do you understand this? Where exactly are you getting confused?
JACK. It’s only a children’s story.
WILLIAM. It’s a lie! What’s the point? What are they telling us?
JACK. What are who telling us?
WILLIAM. The writers! Our parents! Harry fucking Potter!?! In the real world he’s still under the stairs. He’s a thirty-year-old retard who’s developed his own under-the-stairs language!
JACK. The point is…
WILLIAM. Yes?!
JACK. The point is… is that children don’t want to read the true stories. What child wants to read the news?! It’s just escape. It’s important that we dream of other things.
WILLIAM. Fuck off! Life’s too short. If the world is going to evolve in any way… children should be told what’s really happening. Cold, clear facts… that’s what’s taken us down from the trees, that’s what powers economy…
JACK. A lot of these children’s stories are metaphors. The writers are expressing important issues in creative ways!
WILLIAM. ‘Expressing important’…?! You see, you’re depressing me again!
JACK (to himself). Fuck’s sake.
WILLIAM. Do you think any eight-year-old finishing reading Charlie and the Chocolate Factory thinks anything other than, ‘I’d love a Never-ending Gobstopper, Grandpa!’?! Listen to me, John…
JACK. It’s Jack.
WILLIAM. They’re trying to keep children young! Adults. Publishers. Fucking writers. They don’t want children thinking for themselves. They see children as a threat. They want to keep everything ‘fantasy’. This J.K. Rowling woman! She is the enemy. She should be taken out. Erased. Removed. Exterminated.
A pause.
JACK. So that’s what you’re doing in a Harry Potter Chatroom? Trying to drum up some interest in an assassination attempt on J.K. Rowling?
A slight pause.
WILLIAM. Well, are you interested?
A slight p...
