The Importance of Being Alfred

Louise Welch, Louise Welsh

• Publisher: Nick Hern Books
• Year: 2015
• eBook ISBN: 9781780015859
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: British Drama
• Index: Literature

Twenty-three years after his affair with Wilde, Lord Alfred Douglas enters a conspiracy with a prominent homophobe...

Louise Welsh's short play The Importance of Being Alfred was first performed at Òran Mór, Glasgow, as part of the A Play, a Pie and a Pint season in October 2005.

THE IMPORTANCE OF BEING ALFRED

Louise Welsh

The Importance of Being Alfred was first performed at Òran Mór, Glasgow, as part of the A Play, a Pie and a Pint season on 17 October 2005, with the following cast:

ALFRED	Benny Young
BOSIE	James Mackenzie
PEMBERTON BILLING	Richard Conlon
Director	Liz Carruthers
Designer	Annette Gillies

Characters

LORD ALFRED DOUGLAS (A), a tall, thin, raddled, but austerely elegant man of fifty

BOSIE (B), a handsome undergraduate of twenty-one

PEMBERTON BILLING (PB), a bluff, athletic man of thirty-eight

Characters should be played as straight as possible

Author’s Note

In 1918, Hugh Pemberton Billing, Independent MP for East Hertfordshire, was sued for criminal libel by the dancer Maud Allan. The trial followed accusations in Billing’s proto-fascist newspaper The Vigilante that Allan was a lesbian German agent who was ‘corrupting’ prominent members of society, with a view to bribing them into undermining the war effort. One of Pemberton Billing’s keenest supporters was Lord Alfred Douglas, best known as the lover of Oscar Wilde, but in later life an ardent homophobe and anti-Semite. The action of the play takes place in the run-up to the libel trial.

The year is 1918. LORD ALFRED DOUGLAS’s sitting room. Afghan rugs, tasselled standard lamp, antimacassars, stuffy Victorian atmosphere. Lights up on BOSIE, a slender good-looking blond youth sitting in an armchair, reading a beautifully bound slim volume. We get the impression that the book is not occupying his full attention. The youth is dressed as if for summer and has a green carnation in his buttonhole. Next to his chair is an elegant occasional table; on it are another couple of fine bound books and a glass containing a large measure of malt. A second identical chair and occasional table faces his. Behind the small seating area is a desk scattered with papers and pens, and holding a reading lamp, a decanter of whisky and some glasses. A combined coat and umbrella stand is stage left. The youth sighs, leans back in the chair, stretching out his legs and places the book on his chest. A, a man in his fifties, enters stage left carrying some printed papers. He’s dressed for winter and carrying an umbrella, he has just come in from a shower of rain. Everything about A is ultra-conservative and yet there is a dapper quality to his sobriety, everything is just so. He places his papers on the desk, shakes the umbrella, puts it in the stand, unfastens his coat and hangs it up. A is raising his hat from his head when he notices the visitor. He freezes, looking at the youth who half rises from his chair, pleased to be interrupted from his reading.

A. I thought I refused to see you.

B (lowers himself back into his chair). Perhaps if you closed your eyes…?

A goes to the desk and gets himself a drink, the mirror of his companion’s.

A. Perhaps if I promise you a beating?

B. I’d consider that a poor incentive.

A. I’m not trying to reward you.

B. Don’t you think that laying your hands on me, getting yourself all… worked up would make me even more present? That’s supposing you can lay your hands on me.

A lifts a walking stick from the coat stand.

(Coolly.) Feel free to try.

A looks between the walking stick and B as if considering attack, then throws it back into the stand.

A. Why are you here?

B. I’ve got to be somewhere, why not here?

A. Because you’re not wanted.

B. I wouldn’t be here if that were true.

A (with emphasis). You are not welcome.

B. You can’t take your eyes off me.

A. I want you to leave.

B. If you meant that I’d go. (Relaxed.) Sit down, drink your drink, it’s excellent whisky.

A. What do you want?

B ignores him, goes to the desk and lifts one of the papers A was carrying when he entered. Reads out its title.

B. The Vigilante.

A. The newspaper of patriots.

B. The last refuge of scoundrels?

A. The organ of choice for right-thinking men.

B. Really? (Begins to read.) ‘There exists in the cabinet noir of a certain German Prince a book compiled by the Secret Service from reports of German agents who have infested this country for the past twenty years, agents so vile and spreading such debauchery and such lasciviousness as only German minds can conceive and only German bodies execute.’ Do you believe that?

A. Every word. Except for the part about debauchery only being executed by German bodies. Sadly that is mistaken.

B (raises his eyebrows. Continues reading). ‘In the beginning of the book is a précis of general instructions regarding the propagation of evils which all decent men thought had perished in Sodom and Lesbia. There are the names of forty-seven thousand men and women, Privy Councillors, wives of Cabinet Ministers, even Cabinet Ministers themselves, diplomats, poets, bankers, editors, newspaper proprietors and members of His Majesty’s Household prevented from putting their full strength into the war by corruption, blackmail and fear of exposure.’ (Looks sceptical.)

A. It’s a fact.

B. You believe that there are forty-seven thousand amongst our great and good who have been corrupted by German agents and are being blackmailed into undermining the war effort? (Laughs.) I didn’t realise we had forty-seven thousand great and good available to be perverted.

A. Then you are naive.

B. No, I thought that all the great and good had submitted to corruption long before the war ever started.

A. You think you’re amusing.

B shrugs.

This is no laughing matter.

Becomes schoolteacherish. This is something that has been explained to him and he’s taking pleasure at explaining it in turn.

Britain is the most upstanding nation in the world. And yet after three years of war our troops are still languishing in the trenches. Why?

B. You tell me.

A takes a seat and leans forward earnestly.

A. Have you ever walked round Marble Arch or Hyde Park Corner at twilight?

B (rests himself on the arm of the chair opposite). Once or twice, when I’ve been in the mood.

A. Then you’ll have seen agents of the Kaiser loitering in the shadows. (Mimics camp voice.) ‘’Scuse me, sir, ’ave you got a light?’ And should you offer them a light, what next?

B. They smoke their cigarette?

A. They engage you in conversation. They propose a drink, then once they’ve built fellow feeling with talk and alcohol, they suggest retirement to a quiet room where you can converse in peace. Or perhaps, if they judge you to be of a garrulous temperament, they’ll know of a party where a man at a loose end might find convivial company. These are highly trained operatives willing to stoop to anything. I’ve explored the shadows of London and seen them, primping, pouting, flaunting themselves shamelessly. I know of parties where thirty or forty men have danced together – (Whispers.) some of them dressed as women.

B (drops down into the chair). You get about. Walk around after dark a lot, do you?

A. It sickens me.

B. The way too much candy sickens.

A (gets to his feet). The way the stench of shit forces you to gag. Why are there still Germans who are allowed to walk free in England while over in France their countrymen are fighting our troops?

B (relaxed). Why not? They prefer our way of life, why should they want to destroy it?

A. Psssssh. The enemy wants to worm its way through what is brightest and best in our country. They hide among us, pretending to have taken on our ways while all the time they are a cancer eating away at all that is good. Why are German banks still allowed to operate on our soil? Why does so much of the nation’s wealth lie in Jewish hands? Why are we losing the war?

B shrugs, goes to the drinks cabinet and tops up his whisky.

Because those who could make a difference are being blackmailed by the German Secret Service. We’re failing on the ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Contents
• Introduction
• Original Production
• About the Author
• Copyright and Performing Rights Information