True Minds

Joanna Murray-Smith

• Publisher: Currency Press
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781925210163
• Topic: Letteratura
• Subtopic: Teatro

An irresistible portrait of courage and inner conviction, True Minds is cogent and facetious. When two families on the brink of matrimonial union become stranded in a freak storm, will the couples' dawning incompatibility coax them to fight for integrity as the only reliably stable choice?

The overwhelming impression when you enter Daisy’s modest apartment is of the books. There are books piled high, throughout the sitting room/kitchen, spilling out of crevices and wedged into the oven. The impression is that the inhabitant is uninterested in decor, but by virtue of her personality has nailed a ramshackle charm. She marches to the beat of her own drum, a beat which includes a strange collection of different-sized and -shaped ceramic giraffes and a guitar. In the fireplace a fire is burning. A large window reveals the darkening early evening sky and an electrical storm. Beside the fireplace is a strange, solo outing of magazine-style decor: a basket of firewood logs, wrapped stylishly and pointlessly in brown paper and kitchen string. There are two doors, one a front door leading to an apartment hallway, the other internal door leads to a bedroom.

Daisy’s mother, TRACEY, expensively bohemian, is slumped on the sofa watching a recording of a morning talk show. She has a bottle of white wine beside her from which she has clearly been consuming plenty. We hear the following:

DAISY: [on air] The point is, Katie, the book reflects a truth women encounter every day of their lives—

KATIE: [on air] It’s a generalisation though, isn’t it, Daisy?

TRACEY: [at the TV] You bet it is!

DAISY: [on air] It’s also a generalisation to say women prefer shoe shopping to sex. Does that make it any less true?

They laugh.

As I have discovered through my research from the New Guinea foothills through to the Norwegian archipelago of Svalbard in the High Arctic, if a man’s mother doesn’t like his girlfriend, there is no way he will commit.

TRACEY: [at the TV] Oh, bullcrap!

KATIE: [on air] So the message of your runaway bestseller is: beware to the woman who seeks to separate a man from his mother?

DAISY: [on air] It’s merely observing a truth in evidence across all cultures. You can take a man away from his mother, but you can’t take the mother out of the man.

TRACEY presses the pause button. To the sound of a gigantic clap of thunder, a bedraggled DAISY bursts through the door, completely covered in cold weather layers: beanie, scarf, Ugg boots and struggling with a huge, broken umbrella. This is a woman who has no interest in clothes and her lack of interest somehow makes her all the more alluring. She is also carrying several liquor bottles in a brown paper bag. She immediately drops the shopping and starts tearing around the room in a panicked frenzy, attempting to tidy up, stuffing objects in any available spaces.

[Panicked] Did he ring?

TRACEY: No-one rang—

DAISY: He was supposed to be here an hour ago! Hurry, hurry, hurry, hurry!

TRACEY gets up to help her. TRACEY pops open a bag of chips and starts munching as she throws the contents of old cups in pot plants, struggles with clothes racks, shoves mess under cover. Over the following conversation, DAISY starts to throw things in the pantry while TRACEY takes them out again to replace them in an orderly fashion. From the fridge DAISY manically grabs the ingredients for fancy canapés which she throws on the bench.

What are you doing?! You’re making crumbs!

TRACEY: All this effort—isn’t it a bit regressive, Daisy?

DAISY: I don’t know what you’re talking about! Shove those dishes in the picni...