Sea Wall

Simon Stephens

• Publisher: Methuen Drama
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781350114661
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Theatre Playwriting

There's a hole running through the centre of my stomach. You must have all felt a bit awkward because you can probably see it. Sea Wall is a delicate monologue, completely devastating and beautifully powerful. Alex's story, spoken directly to the audience, begins full of clear light and smiles, as he speaks about his wife, visiting her father in the South of France, having a daughter, photography, and the bottom of the sea. His tone is natural, happy and engaging, with flickers of questions about belief and religion glimpsed under the surface. But his contentment falls away into deep and heart-breaking grief, crumbling to pieces with a vividness that is incredibly moving.

Sea Wall

Alex She had us, both of us, absolutely round her finger. Fundamentally she achieved this through the way she looked at us. It shouldn’t have been a surprise that the way she moved her head to one side should leave me basically on my knees or more akin, I should say, to a slightly tepid pool of just water, but what was more surprising was the effect it had on him.

Anything she wanted he gave to her. Anything she demanded he agreed to. And he agreed to everything with this same little smile on his face. The smile of a man who in actual fact was little more than four years old. I’m not saying I wouldn’t have agreed to the same and more in his position, but it just seemed in some way more, what? Downright surprising? Coming from him.

He wasn’t that kind of man. He was a soldier. When I say ‘was’, I mean was. I mean he used to be. Between 1968 and 1984 he was a soldier in the British infantry. He reached the rank of Lieutenant Colonel. He did five tours of Northern Ireland. And this was when, you know, doing a tour of Northern Ireland was more than just a few games of pool and a chat with some kids outside a fish and chip shop. Some of the photographs he took.

He used to have a Polaroid camera and some of the things that, after he’d had a few drinks, he’d get out of his box to show me. You wouldn’t have thought they were of Northern Ireland. There was something about them that I found in some way, you know, surprising.

He always refused to talk about South Georgia. Never mentioned it. I asked him about it one time and his face turned, within the matter of a few seconds, literally grey. Slate grey.

And even when he eventually retired from the army he retrained as a maths teacher for Christ’s sake! I would have liked to have seen him teach. I can imagine the kind of teacher he was. I don’t think he would have worn many cords. I don’t think he would have shared too many coffees with the sixth-formers.

Come and play with me. Read me a story. Can I sit on your lap? Where’s Grandpops? Oh! There he is. Not his kind of, scene, you know? But he did it with her.

The first thing I learned about photography I learned when I was a kid. If you’re taking a portrait photograph, if you possibly can, then take it from below the subject. It renders the subject actually oddly, what it does is it renders them not more heroic, not more godlike, oddly it renders them more human. And if you can take it in natural light, if you can capture the way the light falls, at the start of or at the end of a day especially, then it can be –

He used to try to convince me that the existence of, the discovery of and the understanding of the relevance and possible uses of the irrational number which is commonly and internationally and historically known as Pi, that is, to five decimal places, the number 3.14159, is irrevocable proof of the existence of God...