Original Death Rabbit

Rose Heiney

• Publisher: Nick Hern Books
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781848428294
• eBook ISBN: 9781788501378
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: British Drama
• Index: Literature

'I was a thing, you see. I was a pretty bloody big bloody thing. I was briefly – very briefly – a meme. A craze. One of the first.'

We all have our comfort blankets and coping mechanisms. And if yours happens to be wearing a full-sized rabbit onesie (with ears), what's the problem? You're not bothering anyone. At least, not until you're photographed at the back of a child's funeral. Dressed as a rabbit. And the photo goes viral.

Rose Heiney's Original Death Rabbit is a painfully funny play, shining a light on one woman's struggle with the dark side of the internet. Originally broadcast on BBC Radio 4, the play received its stage premiere at Jermyn Street Theatre, London, in January 2019.

A tiny, very messy studio flat. The mess is pretty dense; we’re almost in hoarder territory, but not quite.

On the walls are posters pertaining to the four major Richard Curtis films – Four Weddings and a Funeral, Notting Hill, Love Actually and About Time.

And a small shelf of books – old, cloth-and-leather-bound books.

There is a little table and chair set up in the centre of the flat. The bit of wall behind the table is white, and free of posters (this is important as we’re going to project things on to it later).

There’s a laptop open on the table.

A young woman who believes herself to be an UGLY CUNT – so that’s what we’ll call her throughout – is sitting on a swivel chair in front of the laptop, staring at the screen.

She is wearing an old, bright-pink, animal-print fluffy onesie with a hood, which has large fluffy pink-and-white bunny ears on it.

The UGLY CUNT is using the Photo Booth application on her laptop. Stares very, very seriously at the screen. Adjusts her ears so they are straight. Presses a key, and we hear the one-two-three Photo Booth countdown, then a too-loud sound and a too-bright flash as her selfie (stiff, solemn, fluffy-eared selfie) is projected brieflly on to the wall behind her.

Webcam working, let’s begin.

The UGLY CUNT addresses the webcam. She speaks with a slight mockney accent.

It comes and goes. Stronger at the start of the monologue – fades totally away to RP at the end.

She is swigging from a bottle of vodka throughout.

Okay.

You probably know who I am, if you’re watching this. Unless it’s gone viral, and you’re new to this, and you’ve had to read up. In which case – Hiiiiii!! I’m – you can google my real name, if you’re really that desperate to know it. All you need to know is I’m thirty-one years and three-hundred-and-sixty-four days old, I have twenty-eight thousand seven hundred and eighty-seven followers on Twitter. People have opinions about me. I am a tiny but inarguably significant fragment of the internet.

I was a thing, you see. I was a pretty bloody big bloody thing. I was briefly – very briefly – a meme. A craze. One of the first.

What happened was – okay, hold on – just a minute –

She scrolls through her iPhone picture library.

Aha.

She brings up a picture of the herself, a few years younger – it’s projected onto the wall behind her. In the photo she’s wearing the same rabbit onesie she’s wearing now, over full academic dress. She’s with two friends, and they’re standing outside the Oxford University Examination Schools, celebrating the end of their Finals. Champagne, party poppers, etc. She looks wild, happy, excited.

June 2006. Twenty-one years old, just finished finals. Got a First, thank you very much – (Burps, loudly, then curtsies.) English Literature.

You probably hate me now because I went to Oxford, don’t you? You’ve turned. You were inching towards interest, sympathy, blah blah blah but now you’re all like ‘Elite! Bullingdon! Bullingdon! Incest! Beagles! Die! Die! Pitchfork! Die!’ Well FYI that’s your problem, not mine. What do you want me to say? ‘My old man’s a dustman.’ Sorry.

Actually, fuck it – I’m going to tell you more about Oxford. And you can all tweet at me what an overprivileged cunt I am, and you’ll enjoy that and feel great about yourselves, and I won’t know about it, or care any more. So I’ll tell the truth. I went to Oxford because I loved poetry. Love loved love loved LOVED the fustiest and most unfashionable poems ev-ah.

When I was twelve, I howled with laughter at Edward Lear, ‘The Owl and the Pussycat’ – my dad used to read it me and I thought it was the best and cleverest and loveliest and funniest and most beautiful thing I’d ever encountered. I was – what would I call it now? I’d say, ‘I was the patriarchy’s little bitch. Head on Daddy’s knee, listening to an old white man reading old white man poems. Brainwashed scum.’

But for me it was heaven.

Pause.

Then I got older, and I realised that there’s a poem for every situation, every feeling that you’ve ever encountered. EVER. There’s pain in life, and there’s the antidote for pain, which is poetry.

Words were our family religion – Dad taught sixth-form English, and wrote a teeny tiny column in the local paper. My mum was his number-one fan. We were a classic little band of writers who never-quite-wrote. Mad mad love for books and films, disowned sense of shackled discontent manifesting as compliant sweetness – and uttter, utter reverence for anyone or anything published. Rubber-stamped by the clever people.

So in the sixth form at school, I started a website. www.poemsIlove.com. I was going to put a poem up every week, and write why I loved it. That was it. What was I trying to do?

I think I maybe thought that I was going to end up rich like Bill Gates? I’m not sure quite how. The internet was new-ish – you said internet, I thought Bill Gates. Made perfect sense to me at the time. I was going to be an anonymous internet poetry billionaire.

I only ever posted one poem. ‘An Arundel Tomb’, by Philip Larkin.

I’ll spare you it. Google it. It’s the one where he goes to a church, and sees an entombed couple, and it ends with him writing about that –

‘almost instinct, almost-true.

What will survive of us is love.’

Pause.

Good, huh?

Pause.

Nuh-uh. Not good.

She takes a swig of vodka.

First term, I made friends with this girl, Penny. She was president of the college feminist society and the socialist society and the anarchist society who weirdly held completely amazing and extremely organised picnics – and after we first met she googled me, and found Poems I Love, and sent me this motherfucker of an email about how badly Philip Larkin treated women, and how he was now proven to be a racist, and how by allying myself with him publically – the ‘publically’ is important here guys, it had never occurred to me that I might have a responsiblity to my ‘public life’ – I was aligning myself with ‘forces of great harm’. It went on and on and on – the basic message was ‘You might think you’re Hufflepuff, but you are Slytherin, my friend.’

And I was horrified. I took my website down and immediately wrote a lengthy public Facebook apology to – get this – ‘all women, everywhere, throughout history, for my actions.’ Then I locked myself in my room, and cried for twenty-four hours, which Penny said was ‘about right, morally’ and I could ‘let it go now, if I was willing to behave differently and educate myself.’ This could be a ‘really positive move for me.’

So I pledged to do just that.

I adopted a certain ‘personal style’ after that, I guess – I can see, looking back, twenty-twenty hindsight and all that, I’d say –

I turned on myself.

(Mimicking herself.) ‘I was suuuuuuuuch a TWAT when I came here! I liked Philip Larkin!!!! I look back and just shudder at what I was.’

And every time I said something like that about myself, I’d feel a little… it was like the first time I’d said something, I’d jabbed a blunt knife in my belly and left it there. And every time I repeated if I’d twist the knife again and again and again until I couldn’t remember not being in that kind of pain. You have to drink quite a lot to cope with that level of self-abandonment. Or achieve quite a lot, eat, control. (Pause.) Google.

Pause.

There was this one phrase I always had the urge to google. ‘I said to my soul.’ ‘I said to my soul.’ ‘I said to my soul.’ And I never knew where it came from or what it meant. But it was like there was this little… mole in me, happy little mole, who said ‘I said to my soul…’

But I always stopped myself. Like some part of me was all ‘DO NOT GOOGLE THAT.’ Weird.

Anyway. Who cares, right? I was allied with the ‘good people’ now. I was ‘progress’. Penny had said ‘well done’ to me. And thus politically purified by Penny the sanctimonious eighteen-year-old, I was free to think well of myself.

Pause. Vodka.

I sometimes think that at the heart o...

Table of contents

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