The Black Sequin Dress

Jenny Kemp

• Publisher: Currency Press
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN: 9781921429538
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Drama
• Index: Literature

A woman leaves her children for an evening to go to a nightclub. In a moment of indecision she glances back, slips and falls. Money, desire and dreams converge as she enters a surreal world of haunting colours and lyrical distortions.

SEQUENCE A: THE GESTALT

UNDINE’S STORY PART ONE

We see bricks (a projected image 1 min 45 sec). WOMAN 1, wearing a simple day dress, is standing centre in front of the brick wall. She remains still. The text is spoken from off by WOMAN 3.

WOMAN 3: [voice over] Undine lives in the suburbs in a commission home. A brick one. All the houses in Undine’s street are the same with just slight variations, so you want to go into other people’s houses to spot the difference. Undine closes her eyes to the bricks and finds herself in a flat land. She gazes at the horizon but oddly it does not appear distant, she looks down and sees her two feet, they look as if they are standing on the horizon. Has she grown tall, or have they receded? She cannot look into the depth of the landscape, she stands on it. She stands on a flat plane, she may as well be standing inside a perspex cube. She puts out her hand to test the space in front of her. Nothing, just air of a medium temperature or even of no temperature at all. She waves her arm, it moves jerkily, it is a message from her brain, she knows telling her arm to move and wave, as if someone is standing at a distance outside her cube and needs to be acknowledged. Her arm goes down, her knees bend and she keels over, she faints off the edge of the earth, she falls out of the dead landscape. Her body crumples to the ground, her head falls back against the hard earth, earth as hard as stone, ping like a metal ball it bounces for a moment and falls still.

[There is a pause. WOMAN 1 remains standing and then collapses to the floor. The bricks fall (the cyc should fall slightly behind her.) There is stillness. WOMAN 3, in a black satin wide strap slip, is lying asleep on the earth. WOMAN 4, in the same day dress as WOMAN 1, stands at the right exit door embracing a skeleton. We see its back and her front. We now also see the horizontal box above the left exit.]

NIGHTMARE 1

After a short period WOMAN 3 wakes with a gasp. She sits up trying to orientate.

WOMAN 3: What’s that! What was that scream?

[She looks behind her.]

I thought I heard a scream.

[She is shaking.]

I need a drink of water. I think I fell, or someone fell.

[Pause.]

I need some water.

[She takes a glass from the floor beside her and drinks.]

IT’S AS IF MY BODY HAS BEEN TAKEN APART

WOMAN 4 speaks the text as the bricks slide from the stage. WOMAN 1 slowly gets up and leaves the stage by the left exit. The train (with facade up) slides slowly from the right tunnel across stage and into the opposite tunnel. In the first carriage we see the MAN and the WAITER, both with hats and jackets, sitting opposite each other at a small table having a drink. It is daytime and it is the buffet car. WOMAN 2, also in the day dress, begins to walk from the front end of the train past the MEN towards the second carriage. As she passes them she slips and nearly falls. She steadies herself on their table. The WAITER helps her. They exchange glances. She then looks at the MAN, who is facing the front of the train, and continues to her carriage. She sits at her table, drinks some water, then turns and looks out the window as the train leaves the stage.

WOMAN 4: It’s as if my body had been taken apart and put together again. One part separated from another, all floating, speeding off, as if bombed, shooting out into the darkness, the universe, and put together again. Again as if all this may have happened many times before. Something better this time, put together, by the force of the return flight, after the bombing which had just occurred. A shock which something in me knows all about. But now I don’t. What could it be? – a memory – which returned with an incredible force, fell, or was propelled from one area into another, somewhere where it had been tightly held. Perhaps there was a kind of explosion in this area which set it free, or maybe just things changed …

[The train disappears.]

… then the shock was the new arrangement. Something completely different after all these years.

[WOMAN 3 leaves by downstage left tunnel.]

THE WOMAN IN THE BLACK SEQUIN DRESS ARRIVES AT THE NIGHTCLUB

ENTRANCE 1 – THE SETTING

We hear music and the WAITER appears and stands by the wall in between the front and back left tunnels. WOMAN 1, now in a black sequin dress, enters from the upstage left tunnel, pauses at doorway, walks into the nightclub and down centre stage to the front as she speaks the following text. The MAN enters from the upstage left tunnel and stands a little way along the track with his back to the audience as if waiting for the train.

WOMAN 1: I can see a beautiful nightclub. Black shiny surfaces, all polished and clean, sparkling glasses full of champagne, gin and tonic, cocktails, liqueurs etc. Women melting into their partners bodies, the men wrapped around them like blankets. The band, in a row laid back, handsome. Snacks, cards, cigarettes, money, lipstick, watches, jewellery, high stools, dancing, wild dancing, bare bodies under not much. They abandon themselves here. Get out of their day shoes and set off at a gallop, drinks whizzing down the gullet, talk gurgling up, hands wandering all over the place, anywhere will do, who cares. They have learned how not to care, how here to let go the reins.

[WOMAN 3 appears in the entrance of the downstage right tunnel with glass of water and watches.]

The...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Playwright’s Biography
• Dedication
• First Production
• Characters, Main Actions and Setting
• The Black Sequin Dress
• Copyright Details