Citysong

Dylan Coburn Gray, Carys D. Coburn

• Publisher: Nick Hern Books
• Year: 2019
• eBook ISBN: 9781788502108
• Topic: Letteratura
• Subtopic: Teatro britannico

Late-night taxis, teen discos, home nurses, Jewish launderettes, vigilantes, babies, immigrants, seagulls. Citysong is a play, a poem and a chorus of voices showing three generations of a Dublin family on one day.

Intimate and sweeping, joyous and ridiculous, it's modern-day Dublin's Under Milk Wood via Metamorphoses (not the book about the cockroach). It's different things at different times, which makes sense seeing as it's about change.

Carys D. Coburn's Citysong was winner of the 2017 Verity Bargate Award, and premiered at the Abbey Theatre, Dublin, in May 2019, before transferring to Soho Theatre, London.

The author was named Most Promising New Playwright at the 2020 Off-West End Theatre Awards for Citysong.

ZERO

VOICE. It is night and here is the city, sleeping.

Riversplit and seakissed and roadrunneled and concrete brick stone steel and glass formed and typeset.

Look: the spire’s a spindle or axis and while it’s not vinyl the city is a record of all that has happened to us, is happening, or will. It spins as the world does and a godlike needle could read its spaces, how it bumps and juts and dimples and cavities, as pages or notes in the book or the symphony of us.

It is a legible palm, a singable psalm, ringable changes, irreducible word of the language that speaks us like Genesis or crucible whose heat both begins and then ends us.

So let’s begin with an ending.

Night has lightened until it isn’t, and day breaks into wholeness.

Like an egg cracked into a cakebowl and cakedom, or a wave into licks of foam on rock, or the heart of a roaming dad who yellowsignedly and oh-so-resignedly taxis through the less but still blackness.

He and the moon are waxers, lyrical and big respectively, and they wane and wain as well. The nightly, monthly and silvery moon to the horizon and an eyelashlike slivereen of its milklike, fullfat, self.

The stubbly, the weary, the double and bleary-visioned man not a shrinker but a carrier: he rubs his eyes hard as chastisement for failing him and wains in the sense – or guise – of a chariot.

Each night he’s on nights he slaloms from outstretched palms into suburbs and estates where his radio awakens –

RADIO (incoherent noises).

VOICE. and cracklingly beckons him back into town for some short-haul transit. Like tonight, when he stopped for the hailing hands of George’s Street –

FARE 1. to North Strand?

VOICE. The Five Lamps –

FARE 2. to The Ivy House?

VOICE. Gardiner –

FARE 3. to Liffey street?

VOICE. and Eden Quay –

FARE 4. to my house, please?

TAXIDAD. Which is where?

VOICE. He says, gruff, though he quite likes these oneshots, mirrorlooking at these not-much-more-than-ten-minute-or-a-fiver fares and inferring their life affairs from their from, their to, their demeanour. Is it a date or a breakup, a catchup with the once-close-now-once-a-year faces?

He can afford to waste time on them, tonight at least, he’s hit a hundred already. It’s no banquet or feast but in faminetimes it’s hungersauced to deliciousness.

And he’s been cruising for a while now, he’s exhausted and he’s fished out this patch of the pond, so it’s time to head home.

He doesn’t mind the driving, but he’s never been exactly eye to eye with the other drivers. Lovely blokes, but the rankbanter betimes can be very anti-everything. With all of the complaints like –

DRIVER 1. He fuckin’ dropped his chicken fillet roll

DRIVER 2. He dropped his fuckin’ kebab

DRIVER 3. She was a grown fuckin’ woman and she pissed in the fuckin’ cab.

DRIVER 4 (noises of disapproval).

VOICE. And then there’s the –

DRIVER 1. Fuckin’, part-time drivers

DRIVER 2. Fuckin’, not a sniff of them until five or the clubs close and then they’re out like an army

DRIVER 3. Fuckin’, sittin’ on the rank like a rash but half as charming

DRIVER 4 (noises of approval).

VOICE. But all of that’s nothing on the acid loathing saved for –

DRIVER 1. Fuckin’, double-jobbers

DRIVER 2. Fuckin’, bored teachers

DRIVER 3. Fuckin’, bored firemen wanting cash for their lovely holliers.

DRIVER 4. BASTARDS.

VOICE. Not his buzz, he understands, but he’s managing, and like he always says –

TAXIDAD. Can’t complain, it could be worse.

VOICE. And his wife, who’s a nurse, and who wants – but refuses – to curse at him shoots back –

TAXIMAM. That’s a load of – dogbusiness.

VOICE. He’s on his way to her now.

Headed in from Ringsend, where he’s just dropped his last fare, headed North as the Eastlight scoops, like icecream, itself into the stillness of the still dark West. Following his homenose, he homegoes thinking –

TAXIDAD. That one went South quickly enough, like.

VOICE. It was a city-centre pick-up. Two people, thirties, a blazerless dress-shirt and a black and backless dress means –

TAXIDAD. Professionals, so my expert guess is Clontarf, Glasnevin, or somewhere in the Deep South. We’ll see now.

RIDER 1. Cambridge Road, Ringsend?

TAXIDAD. No bother.

VOICE. He says, and –

TAXIDAD. Close enough.

VOICE. He thinks.

It’s well past four o’ clock, meaning –

TAXIDAD. Lock-in rather than clubs, for this lot anyway.

VOICE. Or then again maybe it was clubs, he’s given both pause and a shock by their backseat conduct.

Like Central Bank teenagers more so than bankers, with their intertwined torsos and too-graphic noises like –

RIDER 1 (violent kissing). Oh my god

RIDER 2 (violent kissing). Oh my god

RIDER 1 (violent kissing). Fiona

RIDER 2 (violent kissing). John

VOICE. An unwanted flash of flesh in the rearview and she gasps, chokingly, says –

RIDER 2 (violent kissing). JOHN

RIDER 1 (violent kissing). FIONA

TAXIDAD. Folks, is here okay?

VOICE. He says, and they break off their kissing and oh-yessing for just long enough to say yes and pile out. The man’s hand flies from wallet to the twenty ten and fiver-taking driver’s, then alights – not lightly at all, but stonkingly – more horny swan honkingly than spare as a sparrowly – on her arse as they gigglingly foreplay their way up the courtyard of the building. Is it his? Is it hers? Who knows?

TAXIDAD. Enjoy.

VOICE. He says, as he reverses out the driveway.

TAXIDAD. Foreplay? More like FIVEPLAY.

VOICE. He tells his own face on the dashboard ID. It’s old enough that he’s young enough that he can’t see himself as himself in it.

TAXIDAD. My neck was never that long but.

VOICE. It was but.

TAXIDAD. I’m squinting but.

TAXIKID You still do but.

VOICE. His daughter sometimes interjects, on those good nights when he’s allowed to collect her from pints with her mates. It’s one of their things, like his sing-song but sincere question

TAXIDAD. So are you locked?

TAXIKID. Nah.

VOICE. She says, normally, or not-so-normally –

TAXIKID. A bit yeah, but only a bit but.

VOICE. Or just the once –

TAXIKID. Hi, yeah, it was a

did you have a

good night it’s really warm isn’t it?

can I turn on the window?

lovely

can I turn on the radio?

I meant the radio

VOICE. That time, he remembers, she fell asleep on the way home and he was himself again, his long-necked and narrow-eyed photoself, who used to carry his child sleeping from the backseat to her bed undisturbed.

She is taller than he is now, and his back’s fucked so that time he just pulled up at the kerb outside the house. She didn’t wake so he roused her with a shake on the shoulder and a –

TAXIDAD. Get to bed, y’dipso

VOICE. rather than the cheek-kiss that he and she did and didn’t wish for. Or so he thinks. He’s reserved, he’s always left it to her to determine when they touch. But she’s at least as much like him as the wife, so maybe she’s thinking the same thing of him.

He goes North to where – right now – she’s asleep like then; where he’ll be sleeping when she’s waking and when he’s waking whence she’ll be missing.

As frustratingly as a falling domino kissing the next domino that trembles but doesn’t fall. But where dominos kiss commonly it’s seldom that she kisses him if she kisses him at all. But as he says himself –

TAXIDAD. Can’t complain, could be worse.

ONE

VOICE. Let’s leave him, there and then, as the sun swells pregnantly from segment of a mandarin to half of a Jaffa Cake, at that moment when John and Fiona have taken off to take off their clothing.

Let’s move four and nine miles and months in space and time without leaving now, as they make love in an apartment, to a hospital that throbs like a heart despite the hour.

Let’s look instead, in this beginning instant, to this place in the centre, this place of infant’s first world-entries with placentas like parachutes, where the dawn chorus shrills and blinds as the sun, over and past outside’s smokers and the blinds, like a coldhanded doctor pokes the first fingers of greeting.

Who are the birds who sing here? They’re not, save vernacularly, they’re women, they’re pregnant, they’re wrecked and they’re spectacularly pissed off with everything.

This is not motherhood meek and mild but wild animals and viscera. High-definition and in the glistening hues of post-lion, wide-open, xylophon...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title page
• Contents
• Introduction
• Acknowledgements
• Original Production
• Voices
• Performance Notes
• Citysong
• About the Author
• Copyright and Performing Rights Information