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Invincible
About this book
The recession is biting hard and so Emily and Oliver have decided to downsize and shift their middle-class London lifestyle to a small town in the north of England. They want to live and to work and to raise their two young children in a friendly community, among what Emily terms 'real people', away from the cold anonymityof the city. So these left-leaning, well-educated people have invited over two of their new neighbours in an attempt to break the ice. Tonight Alan and Dawn are to be offered olives, anchovies and are to be introduced to Karl Marx and abstract art. As classes and outlooks collide, the scene is set for a meeting which will have consequences as hilarious as they are tragic.
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Act Two
SCENE 1
A few weeks later. EMILY, open-mouthed, and OLIVER. He has just made a shocking announcement.
EMILY: You have got to be joking?
OLIVER: I just think itās important.
EMILY: But weāve talked about this for years and weā¦
OLIVER: I know we have but what you fail toā¦
EMILY: I cannot believe youād do something like that.
OLIVER: Well, Iām sorry.
EMILY: After everything weāveā¦
OLIVER: I just think that nowās the time.
EMILY: Itās not worthy of you.
OLIVER: Oh, come onā¦
EMILY: I feel gutted, to be honest.
OLIVER: Itās just something I feel Iā¦
EMILY: I feel completelyā¦betrayed.
OLIVER: Arenāt you being a bitā¦
EMILY: You have seriously re-joined the Labour Party?!
He does not respond.
The same Labour Party we have spent the last fifteenā¦
OLIVER: Iām just tired of feeling soā¦
EMILY: ā¦the last fifteen years despairing about!
OLIVER: ā¦disaffected.
EMILY: āGovernment is merely the shadow cast by big business over society.ā
OLIVER: Comrade Chomsky, I presume?
EMILY: Merely participating in this fraudulent system isā¦
OLIVER: But I am not an anarchistā¦
EMILY: Itās not a question of anarchy!
OLIVER: Weāve got to get the right wing out, surely?
EMILY: But they are all right wing!
OLIVER: Okay, butā¦
EMILY: They stopped representing working people twenty, thirty years agoā¦
OLIVER: At least when New Labour came in there was some kind ofā¦
EMILY: Oliver, we replaced the Tories with a lying, murderingā¦
OLIVER: I knew you wouldnāt approve soā¦
EMILY: Whatever moral authority the Labour Party ever had went up in smoke the day they buried John Smith.
OLIVER: Isnāt that something of a mixed metaphor?
EMILY: John Smith was a man ofā¦
OLIVER: Yes, but he was in opposition soā¦
EMILY: He was a man of integrityā¦
OLIVER: But he was hardly a socialistā¦
EMILY: He was no Tony Benn but at leastā¦
OLIVER: He was just a lawyer with conservative valuesā¦
EMILY: Well, he wasnāt Blair. He wasnāt some power-crazed, warmongeringā¦
OLIVER: And Tony Benn has been proved wrong about almost everything!
EMILY: How can you say that!?
OLIVER: For Godās sake, Emily, he happily confessed to admiring Chairman Mao!
EMILY: What he said actually said wasā¦
OLIVER: And Marx advocated violence soā¦
EMILY: Youāre just anotherā¦fearful liberal, Oliver. And the liberal class has been seduced by wealth and by securityā¦
OLIVER: Itās easy to have integrity when you have no power.
EMILY: New Labour destroyed everything real, decent people believed in. They took away the voice of the ordinary citizen foreverā¦
OLIVER: Like your friend Mr Benn you do have this tendency to sentimentalise the working classesā¦
EMILY: And now the corporations will rule for God knows how long andā¦
OLIVER: Oh, the corporations, the corporationsā¦
EMILY: All these faceless careerists whoāll do or say anything simply to getā¦
OLIVER: We have to make the most of who weāve got and hopeā¦
EMILY: We need to bring about radical change to the wayā¦
OLIVER: Well, if I can be frankā¦
EMILY: Thereās no real democracy and you know it. Thereās no actual choice!
OLIVER: If I can be frank with youā¦
EMILY: Oh, feel free to be frank.
OLIVER: You and your group of nice middle-class ladies with their nice middle-class clothing and their nice middle-class haircuts, all of you standing about in the high street handing out all your leafletsā¦
EMILY: So, youāre deriding my campaigning?
OLIVER: Iām not deriding anything. Iām justā¦
EMILY: And the urgency to act on climate change is being completely ignoredā¦
OLIVER: We know, we knowā¦
EMILY: Where are the writers, the broadcasters, the TV personalities, where are the brave ones screaming: āNo, sorry! Capitalism is not this invincible, unassailable engine of human progress!ā? Iāll tell youā¦
OLIVER: We need to assimilate the Green movement and the Anti-war movement intoā¦
EMILY: Mainstream politics?
OLIVER: Of course.
EMILY: But if anyone ever stood up in mainstream politics and called for Blair to stand trial as a war criminal theyād just be ridiculedā¦
OLIVER: I agree but thatāsā¦
EMILY: (Tearful.) That man must one day be held accountable!
OLIVER: We have to work with the world as it is.
EMILY: And now heās travelling around, lecturing about peace, making his millionsā¦
OLIVER: And stop trying to be perfect all the time.
EMILY: When he should be spending the rest of his life in some tiny prison cell weeping and rocking andā¦
OLIVER: I donāt want to antagonise you butā¦
EMILY: Makes me sick to the stomachā¦
OLIVER: Emilyā¦
EMILY: I so hate him, Oliver! I j...
Table of contents
- Cover
- Half-title Page
- Title Page
- Copyright
- Dedication
- Contents
- Characters
- Act One
- Act Two
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Yes, you can access Invincible by Torben Betts in PDF and/or ePUB format, as well as other popular books in Media & Performing Arts & Television. We have over one million books available in our catalogue for you to explore.