Spooky Action at a Distance

Eve Leigh

• Publisher: Nick Hern Books
• Year: 2019
• Topic: Literature
• eBook ISBN:
  9781788501088
• Subtopic: British Drama
• Index: Literature

A hard-hitting, poignant play about anti-immigration sentiment in Britain today.

A fascist demonstration and anti-fascist counter-demo are held in Dover. Bricks are thrown. Tweets are sent. Windows are broken. So are faces.

Before and after, near and far, people struggle to understand what happened, and the part they played.

Eve Leigh's play Spooky Action at a Distance was first performed at Royal Welsh College of Music and Drama, created in association with the Royal Court Theatre, before performances at the Gate Theatre, London.

The Nick Hern Books Multiplay Drama series features large-cast plays specifically written to be performed by and appeal to young people.

30 January 2016. Morning.

Okay, so we’ll start on the sea floor.

Off the coast of the UK, the south-east coast.

A big dredging machine does its heavy thing, a chunk of the sea floor gets crushed and milled to within a few micrograms of the appropriate size.

Then it’s superheated in a big kiln and when it cools down it’s superheated again.

Then it gets put on the back of a lorry and driven north and west, and slapped up as part of a garden wall.

Which is maintained by the council for nearly a whole lifetime.

Until it’s not maintained any more.

It wiggles loose but people keep sliding it back. The neighbours, it makes them nervous, there’s something a little too inviting about a loose brick in a wall, it’s like a loose tooth, you just want to rip it free.

One day it winds up in a gutter and if it had stayed there maybe everything would have been different.

But it got kicked back onto the pavement again.

Wendy sees it just as she’s getting on the minibus to Dover, everybody else has bricks or poles or,

everybody else has something,

and she’s the only girl, she’s gonna need to protect herself in case it gets nasty.

And you know these fuckers love to get nasty.

So Wendy picks it up almost without thinking, except that the others all laugh when they see her do it. She realises she’s gonna tell THEM about it, her proper friends, her friends from the alt-right forums in Germany and Denmark and the States, they all know she’s going and they’re completely in solidarity with her, they’ll be really proud that she’s resisting, she’s taking the fight to the streets and she’s not scared.

(She definitely won’t be telling her mum or brother or any of the idiots at college, well she never tells them anything, they wouldn’t understand the importance of resisting, and anyway her mum’s just happy she’s eating again and finally back at college.)

She’s got this chunk of England in the random shrapnel of her bag, the carcass of an old tampon applicator, a battered notice of a doctor’s appointment, some sorry-you’re-leaving cards from whenever that was. A bandana in red, black and white, National Front colours, the historic colours of the Reich, to tie across her face for the demo.

It feels good, the weight.

This is the first time Wendy’s been out of the house in daylight in a long time. Not counting college, because an A-level farm for posh fuckups absolutely doesn’t count for anything. When she goes out it’s a secret, it’s for long night-time runs over the downs, she likes to feel the cold air in her lungs, she likes the way it hurts, she likes to see the landscape the way it would have been a thousand years ago, not choked with people like it is now, and she really likes to burn off whatever nonsense her mum has made her force down for dinner.

She runs in the dark, beyond the pain, she is a valkyrie, a warrior.

She’s glad she gave the minibus driver an address two streets down, her mum would definitely have looked funny at the other passengers, Wendy doesn’t actually know them, they’re all men ten or twenty years older than her.

They could bench-press her.

They could pick her up with one hand.

None of them talk to her but they look. The whole minibus is looking. She stares down furiously at her bag.

Wendy doesn’t want to talk to them, she hates her voice, she’d rather type. She doesn’t want them to look at her, she hates feeling their eyes on her, the minibus is pulling away, maybe this was a mistake –

Maybe this was all, a, terrible… [mistake.]

She grips the brick in the depths of her bag.

Feels like it’s keeping her. Firm on the earth.

Flicking over to a radically different station.

But I didn’t start the journey because of the brick. I want to make that very clear.

By the time the brick was in the air I’d been on the move for hours.

The old king has undertaken a journey, it’s very dangerous, but he must see his child again, there’s no time to lose. He will walk up and down the aisle to prevent blood clots, wear special socks, he will keep his weak and fragile body going until he arrives at his child’s side.

He knows nothing about the brick.

He knows nothing about the demo.

All that he knows is that something is telling him to move, something is telling me to move, something is telling me that the stakes have changed and I need to get to my child’s side, there’s no time to lose.

30 January 2016. Afternoon.

Sound of a stone smashing a window.

MALIK runs in from the next room. Picks up the stone. It’s smooth and rounded all over, like it came from the beach. There’s a note strapped around it by a rubber band. He pops it into his pocket quickly as he hears BOJANA coming. Turning toward her –

BOJANA. Don’t move!

MALIK. Uh –

Okay –

BOJANA. You don’t know where the glass has got to, don’t move, I’ll get the hoover.

She disappears and MALIK immediately takes the rock out of his pocket to look at the note. He jams his hands back in his pockets as she comes back with the hoover.

MALIK. You can’t –

He waves his hands at the hoover.

BOJANA. What?

MALIK. You can’t um – you can’t hoover that, it’ll cut up the bag, it’ll – you can’t.

BOJANA. Course you can.

MALIK. It’ll fuck up, the hoover’ll be – shedding broken glass into the carpets for months, it’ll the landlord’ll

flip out

you don’t want to hoover broken glass with that thing trust me.

BOJANA. Really? Because –

MALIK. Look, just please can you get a dustpan and brush.

Just to please me.

Please?

BOJANA rolls her eyes but there’s a smile flickering near her mouth. She’s leaving to get the dustpan and brush.

MALIK. Anyway, you’re late for work now, get out of here!

She pops to get the dustpan and brush and MALIK reads the note. He looks a bit sick. He is just a bit slow at stuffing it into his pocket this time and is startled to see BOJANA, looking at him. She hands him a dustpan and brush and keeps a broom for herself.

BOJANA. You know I’ve been thinking we should put something in the windows. Cut out erm

erm

(Does a scissors gesture.) the, snowflakes, the ones made of paper, or something.

MALIK. It’s after Christmas, why would we –

BOJANA. So the seagulls don’t keep slamming into our windows.

Right?

MALIK (he is not sure if she knows that it’s not seagulls breaking the windows). Oh. Oh yeah.

BOJANA (she knows it isn’t seagulls that are breaking the windows). Because if it keeps happening, maybe, the windows are unsafe.

MALIK (he feels like maybe she knows it’s not seagulls breaking the windows). Maybe.

BOJANA. It’s not very nice to the seagulls, I don’t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title page
• Contents
• Introducing Multiplay Drama
• Original Production
• Characters
• Place, Time, Note on Text
• Spooky Action at a Distance
• About the Author
• Copyright and Performing Rights Information