Since U Been Gone

Tabby Lamb

• Publisher: Oberon Books
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781786828606
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Ciencias sociales
• Subtopic: Estudios LGBT

'He was a boy, she was a girl. Can I make it any more binary?' When friends die and pronouns change, what's left of the memories that don't fit anymore? Brought to life with storytelling, an original pop music score, and way too many America's Next Top Model references, Since U Been Gone is a moving and powerful autobiographical account about childhood co-stars, teenage rebellion, growing up queer in the mid-noughties, and finding yourself while losing a friend.

SCENE ONE

A person speaks; they are not a cis white man.

Here’s the thing, we started off friends. It was cool but it was all pretend.

It’s 4.10 a.m. on New Year’s Day. 4.20 might be more appropriate considering my history, but it would also be total bullshit.

I’m writing this now because you’re not here. This will be the first year I’ve lived through without you in it. I’m in bed in a pair of pink and black briefs. The glitter I Vaseline’d to my eyes drops onto the keyboard each time I blink, but I’m too tired-slash-lazy to actually take it off. Words on a screen make me feel safer. The black and white totality, and the existence of a delete button. I want to write something that looks like a Winnie the Pooh film. You know when it starts and the screen looks like a story book? He clambers up the letters, pulling himself up on an A, swinging from a J, settling comfortably inside the letter O to ask where the honey is before climbing up over the words altogether and walking away.

I want to write it all down, climb up over it and get to the other side. Physically and emotionally.

I’m writing this down because my voice isn’t working. My fingers can type, but when I open my mouth to talk, I can’t. But I’m not writing anymore. If I was writing this down it would be a book and books don’t live on stage like you do. So – let’s bring this to life:

To begin with, I turn back time. I reverse it to that odd period, the noughties, when the world once blind to its neighbours learnt their lives online, and the youth read of social history and civil rights and memes. We’re on a carousel.

We’re actually in a rehearsal room called Carousel in a tiny theatre on the outskirts of Warwickshire, but this way is far more theatrical. So we’re thirteen and on a carousel and this is the first time we meet. You’re the girl sat in the corner of the room scribbling away in a book and I’m the boy holding court in the centre of the room as usual, like the queen I was destined to become… I’m so not a queen, am I? Not yet.

This is a remembering play about you…and me. And being a remembering play, there are moving lights, it is sometimes overly sentimental, and it is not realistic.

In memory everything happens to music. That explains the musician on stage with me. It also goes some way towards explaining the photo in my hand. I have only one photo in my hand and this photo represents the one of us that will no longer be in the running towards becoming America’s Next Top Model…

You said that this was love at first sight, remember? I had to explain that love at first sight has to happen at first sight, that’s why it’s called love at first sight.

Initially you remind me of Hermia from A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Or is it Helena? The short one. The one from the tea towels and mugs in the RSC gift shop. ‘Though she be but little, she is fierce.’ You’re a force to be reckoned with, brutally cutting yet incredibly loyal – though I don’t know this yet.

First sight was catching each other’s eye from across the rehearsal room. If that was love, then why did I think you hated me? You thought I was just a posh gay boy, which I guess was like two thirds right? Why didn’t we talk more? Why didn’t we have sleepovers or sit at the same table at lunch?

We were rehearsing for a play. Both of us had tiny parts – you were one of about thirty narrators, and I was a pirate who died in my very first scene. So whilst everyone else set sail for Treasure Island, we sat in opposite corners of the rehearsal room being as Emo as we possibly could.

I remember my costume included some cowboy boots three sizes too big for me that my mum had picked up from a car boot sale, and yours had the skeleton of a hoop skirt that meant you couldn’t quite fit through the rehearsal room door.

Despite not hanging out, we were both writers back then. We both s...