Play With a Tiger and Other Plays

DAVE: Good, then I hate you.

ANNA: Good, then get out, go away. [She wheels to the window, looks out. He goes to where his duffle bag is, picks it up, drops it, and in the same circling movement turns to face her as she says] I hate you because you never let me rest.

DAVE: So love is rest? The cosy corner, the little nook?

ANNA: Sometimes it ought to be.

DAVE: Sometimes it is.

ANNA: Ha! With you! You exhaust me. You take me to every extreme, all the time, I’m never allowed any half-measures.

DAVE: You haven’t got any.

ANNA: Ah, hell. [she flings her shoes at him, one after the other. He dodges them, jumps to the bed, crouches on it, patting it]

DAVE: Truce, baby, truce …

ANNA [mocking him]: You’re going to love me, baby, warm-hearted and sweet? Oh you’re a good lay baby, I’d never say you weren’t.

[The sound of screechings and fighting from the street. ANNA is about to slam the window down, stops on a look from DAVE.]

ANNA: Last night the four of them were scratching each other and pulling each other’s hair while a group of fly-by-night men stood and watched and laughed their heads off. Nothing funnier, is there, than women fighting?

DAVE: Sure, breaks up the trade union for a bit … [this is black and aggressive – she reacts away from him. He looks at her, grimaces] Hell, Anna.

[He goes fast to the mirror, studies the black cloth.]

DAVE: What’s the pall for?

ANNA: I don’t like my face.

DAVE: Why not?

ANNA: It wears too well.

DAVE: You must be hard-up for complaints against life …

[looking closely at her] You really are in pieces, aren’t you? You mean you went out and bought this specially?

ANNA: That’s right.

DAVE: Uh-huh – when?

ANNA: When we quarrelled last time – finally, if you remember?

DAVE: Uh-huh. Why really, come clean?

ANNA: It would seem to suit my situation.

DAVE: Uh-huh … [he suddenly whips off the cloth and drapes it round his shoulders like a kind of jaunty cloak, or cape. Talking into the mirror, in angry, mocking self-parody] Hey there, Dave Miller, is that you, man? [in a Southern accent] Yes, Ma’am, and you have a pretty place around here. Mind if I stay a-while? Yeah, I sure do like your way of doing things … [accent of the Mid-West] Hi, babe, and what’ve you got fixed for tonight? Yes, this is the prettiest place I’ve seen for many a day … [in English] Why, hullo, how are you? [he crashes his fist into the mirror]

[ANNA, watching him, slowly comes from window as he talks, first crouches on the carpet, then collapses face down – she puts her hands over her ears, then takes them away.]

DAVE [into mirror]: Dave Miller? David Abraham Miller? No reply. No one at home. Anna, do you know what I’m scared of? One of these fine days I’ll look in the glass, expecting to see a fine earnest ethical young … and there’ll be nothing there. Then, slowly, a small dark stain will appear on the glass, it will slowly take form and … Anna, I want to be a good man. I want to be a good man.

ANNA [for herself]: I know.

[But he has already recovered. He comes to her, pulls her up to sit by him.]

DAVE: If that God of theirs ever dishes out any medals to us, what’ll it be for?

ANNA: No medals for us.

DAVE: Yes, for trying. For going on. For keeping the doors open.

ANNA: Open for what?

DAVE: You know. Because if there’s anything new in the world anywhere, any new thought, or new way of living, we’ll be ready to hear the first whisper of it. When Dr Melville Cooper-Anstey, imagines God, how does he imagine him?

ANNA: As Dr Melville Cooper-Anstey, two sizes larger.

DAVE: But we’ve got to do better. Anna look – the walls are down, and anyone or anything can come in. Now imagine off the street comes an entirely new and beautiful phenomenon, a new human being.

ANNA: Jewish boy – you’re a good Jewish boy after all waiting for the Messiah.

DAVE: That’s what everyone’s waiting for, even if they don’t know it – something new to be born. Anna, supposing superman walked in now off the street, how would you imagine him?

ANNA: Superwoman.

DAVE: Oh OK.

ANNA [in despair]: Me.

DAVE: I know. I know it. Me too. I sit and think and think – because if we don’t know what we want to grow into, how can we shape ourselves better? So I concentrate until my brain is sizzling, and who comes in through the door – me!

ANNA: Just once it wasn’t me.

DAVE [excited]: Who?

ANNA: I was sitting here, like this. I was thinking – if we can’t breed something better than we are, we’ve had it, the human race has had it. And then, suddenly …

DAVE: What?

ANNA: He walked in, twitching his tail. An enormous, glossy padding tiger. The thing was, I wasn’t at all surprised. Well tiger, I said, and who do you belong to?

DAVE [furious]: Anna, a tiger walks in here, and all you can say is, wild beast, whose label is around your neck?

ANNA: I thought you wanted to know.

DAVE: Go on.

ANNA: The tiger came straight towards me. Hullo tiger, I said, have you escaped from the zoo?

DAVE [mocking]: Of course he’s escaped from the zoo. He couldn’t be a wild tiger, could he?

ANNA [she kneels, talking to the tiger]: Tiger, tiger, come here. [she fondles the tiger] Tiger, tiger – The tiger purred so loud that the sound drowned the noise of the traffic. And then suddenly – [ANNA starts back, clutching at her arms.] He lashed out, I was covered with blood. Tiger, I said, what’s that for … he backed away, snarling.

[ANNA is now on her feet, after the tiger.]

DAVE [very excited]: Yeah. That’s it. That’s it. That’s it.

ANNA: He jumped on to my bed and crouched there, lashing his tail. But tiger, I said, I haven’t done anything to you, have I?

DAVE [furious]: Why didn’t you offer him a saucer of milk? Kitty, kitty, have a nice saucer of milk?

ANNA [beside the bed, trying to hold the tiger]: Tiger, don’t go away. But he stared and he glared, and then he was off – down he leaped and out into the street, and off he padded with his yellow eyes gleaming into the shadows of Earls Court. Then I heard the keepers shouting after him and wheeling along a great cage … [She comes back opposite DAVE.] That was the best I could do. I tried hard, but that was the best – a tiger. And I’m covered with scars.

DAVE [gently]: Anna.

[They kneel, foreheads touching, hands together.]

[The telephone starts ringing.]

DAVE: Answer it.

ANNA: No.

DAVE: Is it Tom?

ANNA: Of course it isn’t Tom.

DAVE: Then who?

ANNA: Don’t you really know?

[She goes to answer telephone, it stops ringing. She stands a moment. Then turns to him, fast.]

ANNA: Love me Dave, Love me Dave. Now.

[DAVE rolls her on to the carpet. They roll over and over together. Suddenly she breaks free and begins to laugh.]

DAVE: What’s so funny?

ANNA [kneeling up, mocking]: I’ll tell you what’s funny, Dave Miller. We sit here, tearing ourselves to bits trying to imagine something beautiful and new – but suppose the future is a nice little American college girl all hygienic and virginal and respectable with a baby in her arms. Suppose the baby is what we’re waiting for – a nice, well-fed, well-educated, psycho-analysed superman …

DAVE: Anna, please stop it.

ANNA: But imagine. Anything can come in – tigers, unicorns, monsters, the human being so beautiful he will send all of us into the dust-can. But what does come in is a nice, anxious little girl from Philadelphia.

DAVE: Well Anna?

ANNA: Well Dave?

[A fresh burst of fighting from the street. ANNA moves to shut the window, DAVE holds her.]

DAVE: I’m surprised I have to tell you that anything you shut out because you’re scared of it becomes more dangerous.

ANNA: Yes, but I’ve lived longer than you, and I’m tired.

DAVE: That’s a terrible thing to say.

ANNA: I daresay it is.

END OF ACT TWO

Act Three

ANNA and DAVE in the same positions as at the end of Act Two – no time has passed.

ANNA: Yes, I daresay it is.

[She goes to the light, switches it on, the room is closed in.]

ANNA [as she switches on the light]: I must be mad. I keep trying to forget it’s all over. But it is.

[From the moment ANNA says ‘It’s all over’ it is as if she has turned a switch inside herself. She is going inside herself: she has in fact ‘frozen up on him’. This is from self-protection, and DAVE knows it. Of course he knows by now, or half-knows, and still won’t admit to himself, about JANET. But he is trying to get through to ANNA. He really can’t stand it when she freezes up on him. From now until when Mary comes in should be played fast, wild, angry, mocking: they circle around each other, they do not touch each other.]

[ANNA goes straight from the light switch to the record-player, puts on ‘I’m on My Way’, goes to the bottom of her bed, where she kneels, and shuts Dave out by pretending to work on something.]

DAVE [shouting across music]: Anna. I could kill you. [as she ignores him] … come clean, what have you been really doing in the last weeks to get yourself into such a state?

ANNA [shouting]: I’ve been unhappy, I’ve been so unhappy I could have died.

DAVE: Ah come on, baby.

ANNA: But I can’t say that, can I? To say, You made me unhappy, is to unfairly curtail your freedom?

DAVE: But why the hell do you have to be unhappy?

ANNA: Oh quite so. But I didn’t say it. I’ve been sitting here, calm as a rock, playing ‘I’m on My Way.’

DAVE: Why?

ANNA: It would seem I have the soul of a negro singer.

DAVE: Oh Christ. [He turns off the record player.]

ANNA [too late]: Leave it on.

DAVE: No, I want to talk.

ANNA: All right, talk. [He bangs his fist against the wall.] Or shall I ask you what you’ve been doing in the last few weeks to get yourself into such a state?

[A silence.]

ANNA: Well, talk. [conversational] Strange, isn’t it how the soul of Western man – what may be referred to, loosely, as the soul of Western man, is expressed by negro folk music and the dark rhythms of the … [DAVE leaps up, he begins banging with his fists against the wall.] I’m thinking of writing a very profound article about the soul of Western man as expressed by …

DAVE [banging with his fists]: Shut up.

ANNA: I’m talking. Looked at objectively – yes objectively is certainly the word I’m looking for – what could be more remarkable than the fact that the soul of Western man …

DAVE [turning on her]: You have also, since I saw you last, been engaged to marry Tom Lattimer.

ANNA: Don’t tell me you suddenly care?

DAVE: I’m curious.

ANNA [mocking]: I was in lurve. Like you were.

DAVE: You were going to settle down?

ANNA: That’s right, I decided it was time to settle down.

DAVE: If you’re going to get married you might at least get married on some sort of a level.

ANNA: But Dave, the phrase is, settle down. [she bends over, holds her hand a few inches from the floor] It is no accident, surely, that the phrase is settle down. [DAVE stands watching her, banging the side of his fist against the wall.] I’m thinking of writing a short, pithy, but nevertheless profoundly profound article on the unconscious attitude to marriage revealed in our culture by the phrase settle down.

[DAVE lets his fist drop. Leans casually against the wall, watches her ironically.]

DAVE: Anna, I know you too well.

ANNA: An article summing up – how shall I put it – the contemporary reality.

DAVE: I know you too well.

ANNA: But it seems, not well enough … We’re through Dave Miller. We’re washed up. We’re broken off. We’re finished.

DAVE [with simplicity]: But Anna, you love me.

ANNA: It would seem there are more important things than love.

DAVE [angry]: Lust?

ANNA: Lust? What’s that? Why is it I can say anything complicated to you but never anything simple? I can’t say – you made me unhappy. I can’t say – are you sure you’re not making someone else unhappy. So how shall I put it? Well, it has just occurred to me in the last five minutes that when Prometheus was in his cradle it was probably rocked by the well-manicured hand of some stupid little goose whose highest thought was that the thatch on her hut should be better plaited than the thatch on her neighbour’s hut. Well? Is that indirect enough? After all, it is the essence of the myth that the miraculous baby should not be recognized. And so we are both playing our parts nicely. You because you’re convinced it can’t happen to you. Me because I can’t bear to think about it.

DAVE: Anna, you haven’t let that oaf Tom Lattimer make you pregnant.

ANNA: Oh my God. No. I haven’t. No dear Dave, I’m not pregnant. But perhaps I should be?

DAVE: OK Anna, I’m sorry. I’m sorry I made you unhappy. But – well, here I am Anna.

ANNA: Yes, here you are. [in pain] Dave, you have no right, you have no right … you’re a very careless person, Dave … [She gets off the bed and goes to the window.] What’s the use of talking of rights and wrongs? Or of right or wrong? OK, it’s a jungle. Anything goes. I should have let myself get pregnant. One catches a man by getting pregnant. People like you and me make life too complicated. Back to reality. [looking down] My God, that poor fool is still down there.

DAVE: Anna, don’t freeze up on me.

ANNA: You want to know what I’ve been doing? Well I’ve been standing here at night looking into the street and trying not to think about what you’ve been doing. I’ve been standing here. At about eleven at night the law and the order dissolve. The girls stand at their window there, kissing or quarrelling as the case might be, in between customers. The wolves prowl along the street. Gangs of kids rush by, living in some frightened lonely violent world that they think we don’t understand – ha! So they think we don’t understand what’s driving them crazy? Old people living alone go creeping home, alone. The women who live alone, after an hour of talking to strangers in a pub, go home, alone. And sometimes a married couple or lovers – and they can’t wait to get inside, behind the walls, they can’t wait to lock the doors against this terrible city. And they’re right.

DAVE: They’re not right.

ANNA: Put your arms around one other human being, and let the rest of the world go hang – the world is terrifying, so shut it out. That’s what people are doing everywhere, and perhaps they are right.

DAVE: Anna, say it!

ANNA: All right. You’re an egotist, and egotists can never bear the thought of a new generation. That’s all. And I’m an egotist and what I call my self-respect is more important to me than anything else. And that’s all. There’s nothing new in it. There’s nothing new anywhere. I shall die of boredom. Sometimes at night I look out into the street and I imagine that somewhere is a quiet room, and in the room is a man or a woman, thinking. And quite soon there will be a small new book – a book of one page perhaps, and on the page one small new thought. And we’ll all read it and shout: Yes, yes, that’s it.

DAVE: Such as?

ANNA [mocking]: We must love one another or die, something new like that.

DAVE: Something new like that.

ANNA: But of course it wouldn’t be that at all. It would probably turn out to be a new manifesto headed: Six new rules for egotists, or How to eat your cake and have it.

DAVE: Anna, stop beating us up.

ANNA: Ah hell.

[DAVE puts out a hand to her, drops it on her look.]

DAVE: OK, Anna, have it your way … You’re not even interested in what I’ve been doing since I saw you? You haven’t even asked.

ANNA: The subject, I thought, had been touched on.

DAVE: No, honey, I was being serious. Work, I mean work. I’ve been working. [mocking himself] I’ve been writing a sociological-type article about Britain.

ANNA: So that is what you’ve been doing for the last week. We were wondering.

DAVE [acknowledging the ‘we’]: OK Anna, OK, OK.

ANNA: What am I going to be without you? I get so lonely without you.

DAVE: But baby, I’m here. [at her look] OK Anna. OK.

ANNA: All right, Dave. But all the same … I sometimes think if my skin were taken off I’d be just one enormous bruise. Yes, that’s all I am, just a bruise.

DAVE: Uh-huh.

ANNA: However, comforting myself with my usual sociological-type thought, I don’t see how there can be such pain everywhere without something new growing out of it.

DAVE: Uh-huh.

ANNA [fierce]: Yes!

DAVE: All the same, you’re tough. At a conservative estimate, a hundred times tougher than I am. Why?

ANNA [mocking]: Obviously, I’m a woman, everyone knows we are tough.

DAVE: Uh-huh … I was thinking, when I was away from you, every time I take a beating it gets harder to stand up after-wards. You take punishment and up you get smiling.

ANNA: Oh quite so. Lucky, isn’t it?

DAVE: Tell me, when your husband was killed, did it knock you down?

ANNA: Oh of course not, why should it?

DAVE: OK Anna.

ANNA: Everyone knows that when a marriage ends because the husband is killed fighting heroically for his country the marriage is by definition romantic and beautiful. [at his look] All right, I don’t choose to remember. [at his look] OK, it was a long time ago.

DAVE: Well then, is it because you’ve got that kid?

ANNA [irritated]: Is what because I’ve got that kid. That kid, that kid … You talk about him as if he were a plant in a pot on the windowsill, or a parcel I’ve left lying about somewhere, instead of what my life has been about.

DAVE: Why take men seriously when you’ve got a child?

ANNA [ironic]: Ho-ho, I see.

DAVE: All right then, tell me truthfully, tell me straight, baby, none of the propaganda now, what does it really mean to you to have that kid?

ANNA: But why should you be interested, you’re not going to have children …

DAVE: Come on, Anna, you can’t have it both ways.

ANNA: No.

DAVE: Why not?

ANNA [angry]: Because I can never say anything I think, I feel – it always ends up with what you think, you feel. My God, Dave, sometimes I feel you like a great black shadow over me I’ve got to get away from … oh all right, all right … [She stands, slowly smiles.]

DAVE: Don’t give me that Mona Lisa stuff, I want to know.

ANNA: Well. He sets me free. Yes, that’s it, he sets me free.

DAVE: Why, for God’s sake, you spend your time in savage domesticity whenever he’s within twenty miles of you.

ANNA: Don’t you see? He’s there. I go into his room when he’s asleep to take a good long look at him, because he’s too old now to look at when he’s awake, that’s already an interference. So I look at him. He’s there.

DAVE: He’s there.

ANNA: There he is. He’s something new. A kind of ray of light that shoots off into any direction. Or blazes up like a comet or goes off like a rocket.

DAVE [angry]: Oh don’t tell me, you mean it gives you a sense of power – you look at him and you think – I made that.

ANNA: No, that’s not it. Well, that’s what I said would happen. You asked, I told you, and you don’t believe me.

[She turns her back on him, goes to window. A long wolf-whistle from outside. Another.]

ANNA: Let’s ask him up and tell him the facts of life.

DAVE: Not much point if he hasn’t got fifty shillings.

ANNA: The State is prosperous. He will have fifty shillings.

DAVE: No, let us preserve romance. Let him dream.

[Shouting and quarrelling from the street.]

DAVE [at window with her]: There’s the police.

ANNA: They’re picking up the star-struck hero as well.

DAVE: No mixing of the sexes at the police station so he can go on dreaming of his loved-one from afar even now.

[A noise of something falling on the stairs. Voices. Giggling.]

DAVE: What the hell’s that?

ANNA: It’s Mary.

DAVE: She’s got herself a man? Good for her.

ANNA [distressed and irritable]: No, but she’s going to get herself laid. Well that’s OK with you isn’t it? Nothing wrong with getting oneself laid, according to you.

DAVE: It might be the beginning of something serious for her.

ANNA: Oh quite so. And when you get yourself laid. [conversationally and with malice] It’s odd the way the American male talks of getting himself laid. In the passive. ‘I went out and got myself laid’ what a picture – the poor helpless creature, pursuing his own pure concerns, while the predatory female creeps up behind him and lays him on his back …

DAVE: Don’t get at me because you’re worried about Mary.

[He goes over and puts his ann about her. For a moment, she accepts it.] Who is it?

ANNA: Harry. [MARY and HARRY have arrived outside ANNA’S door. Can be seen as two shadows. One shadow goes upstairs. One shadow remains.] I hope she doesn’t come in.

DAVE: But he shouldn’t be here if Helen’s in a bad way … [as ANNA looks at him] Hell. [He goes across to the mirror, where he stands grimacing at himself.]

[MARY knocks and comes in. She is rather drunk and aggressive.]

MARY: You’re up late aren’t you?

ANNA: Have a good time?

MARY: He’s quite amusing, Harry. [She affects a yawn.] I’m dead. Well, I think I’ll pop off to bed. [looking suspiciously at ANNA] You weren’t waiting up for me, were you?

ANNA [looking across at DAVE]: No.

[MARY sees DAVE, who is draping the black cloth across the mirror.]

MARY: Well, what a stranger. What are you doing? Don’t you like the look of yourself?

DAVE: Not very much. Do you?

MARY: I’ve been talking over old times with Harry.

DAVE: Yes, Anna said.

MARY: I expect you two have been talking over old times too. I must go to bed, I’m dead on my feet. [There is a noise upstairs.] [quickly] That must be the cat. Have you seen the cat?

ANNA: Yes, I suppose it must.

MARY: I was saying to Anna, only today, I’m getting a proper old maid – if a widow can be an old maid, fussing over a cat, well you’d never believe when you were young what you’ll come to.

DAVE: You an old maid – you’ve got enough spunk for a twenty-year-old.

MARY: Yes, Harry was saying, I wouldn’t think you were a day over twenty-five, he said. [to DAVE] Did you know my boy was getting married next week?

DAVE: Yes, I heard.

MARY: He’s got himself a nice girl. But I can’t believe it. It seems only the other day … [There is a bang upstairs. A moment later, a loud miaow outside ANNA’S door.] Why, there’s my pussy cat. [Another crash upstairs.] I must go and see … [She scuttles out. HARRY’S shadow on the stairs.] [putting her head around the door] Isn’t it nice, Harry’s decided to pop back for a cup of coffee. [She shuts the door.]