Full Length Plays

Laid Upon A Pebble-Bed
Author	SINNOTT, Richard - Other Plays by this Author - Contact Author
Format	Full-length.
Synopsis	THE PLAY WAS ORIGINALLY PRODUCED AT THE JENNIE LEE THEATRE, BLETCHLEY AND WAS FAVOURABLY REVIEWED IN 'THE TIMES' BY ANTHONY MASTERS. Martin and Grace have been married for thirty six years. They wed in 1953 when he was twenty-four and she twenty-one. Martin has recently been forcibly retired from his post as a Geology lecturer at an F.E. College in the West Midlands. Embittered, vindictive and emotionally impotent, he does not enjoy his marriage, his three adult children who never visit or especially his early old age and seeks solace in working his way systematically through the Birmingham phone book, making insolent or abusive phone calls. Grace meanwhile - homely, indulgent and excessively 'wifey' - would seem merely to be the innocent, loving, victim of circumstance, but she too has her vices; spying on her immediate neighbours bedroom with a telescope. A ground-laying, relatively harmless first half gives way to a bleaker, confrontational denouement, wherein personality and actions transpose into emotional and literal ammunition. For as the play progresses and Martin becomes more and more empty it grows clear that he has always wanted to leave Grace but has never had the guts. And so ever the coward, he attempts, via drunken Russian Roulette with an army revolver, to provoke her into leaving him. But Grace flares only briefly – alluding to what sounds like an accusation of sexual molestation of his own children and the reason they have refused all contact with him since leaving home - before swaddling him with her lovingness again. We finally leave him in the blank despair of one who sees no other prospect than to watch himself grow old and die, as Grace prepares him the symbolically castrating 'nice cup of tea'. Yet although Martin is the obvious candidate for our dislike, we should come to realise that Grace has played just as acute a role as her husband in creating them both; gradually emerging as a woman who is not as green as, to her husband's eye, she is cabbage looking. We see that much of her wifeyness has been a deliberate and successful attempt to bind him to her, for in portraying the woman he thinks he has fashioned the more completely she ensures he can never leave her and he remains ignorant to the last. They deserve each other.
Cast	2M 1F MARTIN - 60 years old GRACE - 57 years old CONSTABLE - 35 years old
Production	Single set; interior of a Cotswolds cottage in 1989
Status	Available for performance
Website	www.richardsinnott.com/pebblebed.doc

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