ELLIE A jilted bride in her mid 40s.
JARELL A jilted groom in his 50s.
LOCATION
The vestry of a church in Oxfordshire. January 2018
Photo by Petr Ovralov on Unsplash
Basic Plot Outline
The play is one continuous, unbroken scene with a running time of approx 30 - 35 mins. ELLIE has been jilted at the altar. JARELL tries to comfort her but is at the first attempt rebuffed. Their exchanges are quite varied but with JARELL the more settled, undemonstrative of the two personalities, he often has to tolerate the intemperate outbursts of the feisty and opinionated bride-that-never-was. In time, the two discover an affinity of sorts and then with a further unexpected revelation of JARELL'S (and for which ELLIE does not thank him) an unlikely bond forms.
Act One
January 2018
The vestry of a church in Oxfordshire. ELLIE is sat on the vestry floor amongstthe billows of her wedding gown. She is smoking an e-cigarette and stares vacantly out, her tear-stained face blotchy and streaked from where her make-up has run. Enter JARELL
JARELL: You must be Ellie?
ELLIE: Yeah? (sarcastically) What tipped you off?
PAUSE
JARELL: Vaping in the vestry, is that allowed?
ELLIE: (wearily) Oh, fuck off! (contd).
PAUSE
ELLIE: (contd). And I’m not coming out until people have gone home. (contd).
PAUSE
ELLIE: (contd). You wouldn’t have a mirror, would you?
JARELL: No, how would that work? (a slight pause) Do you have a smart phone handy? You can use the camera function on it.
ELLIE: (testily) Where on this would I keep a smart phone, dick!
PAUSE
JARELL: Your make-up has run a bit but you look fine, Ellie.
ELLIE: (wearily) Oh, right.
JARELL: Just a bit streaky.
ELLIE: Streaky? You mean, like doused in ink?
JARELL: You look fine.
ELLIE: (spikily) Don’t give me ‘fine.’ My face is having its own party to which I am not invited. I do not look fine. (contd).
PAUSE
ELLIE SINKS INTO ANOTHER BOUT OF CRYING.
ELLIE: (contd). I have a hundred-and-seventy-two friends on Facebook and one of them is the man who left me at the altar today…..But never mind…..I know where he lives (spluttering into more tears)…..with me. (a slight pause) You see, what would make a man want to do that?
JARELL: What would make a woman?
ELLIE LOOKS AT HIM QUIZZICALLY AS HE
TURNS UPSTAGE.
ELLIE: Sorry, I’m giving off ‘as much noise as signal.’ (loudly blowing her nose on a tissue). He used to say that to me all the time.
PAUSE
JARELL: Are you going to be alright?
ELLIE: Me? I’m going to reinvent myself as a person who runs marathons. (a slight pause) Why are you smirking at me? I scrub up quite well.
JARELL: I’m sure you do.
ELLIE: I’m very trim for my age. Lycra suits me - everyone says so.
PAUSE
JARELL: Your other one - has he left any sort of message in between?
ELLIE: Sort of. His core crowd of mates have all decamped to the pub. One of them was tasked with giving me the bad news.
JARELL: That’s tough.
ELLIE: (with a weary acceptance) (shrugs) Yeah, well. (a slight pause) I don’t recognise you. You’re not family so you must be a mate of his. The church is full of his mates - and their mates. All these men. Why would you invite so many strangers? You’d be what, some mate-five-times-removed?
JARELL: (ignoring the question) Your other one - what does he do?
ELLIE: He’s a Systems Analyst…..and a berk. (contd).
SHE BOWS HER HEAD AS IF ABOUT TO CRY
AGAIN, BUT STOPS HERSELF.
ELLIE: (contd). (sadly, to herself) ‘There is no mystery so great as suffering.’ - Oscar Wilde. (contd).
PAUSE
ELLIE: (contd). What’s your name?
JARELL: Jarell.
ELLIE: Jarell? What sort of a name is that?
JARELL: It’s Scandinavian.
ELLIE: You don’t look Scandinavian. (a slight pause) Scandinavian for what?
JARELL: Apparently, it means ‘Strong,’ ‘Open-minded.’
ELLIE: Are you sure it isn’t just Scandinavian for Gerald?
JARELL: I don’t know.
ELLIE: What do you do?
JARELL: Bricky.
ELLIE: (cynically) That’s great. A bit concerned for my state-of-health and they send some bricky I don’t even know. (slightly louder) Speak up, Bricky, I can hardly hear you above the sound of you scratching yourself.
JARELL is solicitous of ELLIE’S welfare and ignores her rather thorny attitude towards him whenever it occurs. Eventually, she starts to pander to her own curiosity as the kind of person he is.
JARELL is solicitous of ELLIE’S welfare and ignores her rather thorny attitude towards him whenever it occurs. Eventually, she starts to pander to her own curiosity as the kind of person he is.
ELLIE: You know, Winston Churchill was a bricklayer.
JARELL: I didn’t know that.
ELLIE: He had some mental issues to work through, so as a sort of therapy he used to build walls…..orchard walls, any sort of wall…..I read that in a book. (a slight pause) Most of your friends, are they bricklayers too?
JARELL: Most of my friends are scaffolders.
ELLIE: You and your mates - not exactly a nerd fest, is it?
JARELL: No, but they’re okay.
ELLIE: You know they have a reputation - scaffolders?
JARELL: I’m not sure what you mean.
ELLIE: For bestialising many a Saturday night. And you’ve not seen or heard of that? Yeah, yeah, just what….just boisterous blokes airing it out, eh?
JARELL: Can’t say. It doesn’t much tally with the people I know.
ELLIE: My experience of scaffolders is that they’re a bit unfiltered in the way they go about stuff - particularly to women and the more so to women who they’ve never met before.
JARELL: Most of the scaffolders I know are older.
ELLIE: But I bet they still drink.
JARELL: Yeah, they like a drink.
ELLIE: Older is to say what: men fifty and above who act like they’re twenty-two? The ‘alcopops?’
JARELL: Most of these are family men.
ELLIE: Oh, right. You mean ‘the touchline berks?’ Paunchy white males who stand watching their six-year-old play football - and who take it all a bit too seriously on their behalf. The ‘touchline berks,’ you must have heard of them? Following the referee to the Car Park, giving him - or her - a bit of grief.Showing a bit of moxie for the lad to take some pride in.
JARELL: I don’t get where you’re coming from.
ELLIE: I’m talking of a sub-species - scaffolders, by name….sat around some table in a manky pub.
JARELL: I’m sorry to disappoint you.
ELLIE: Ah! Right, so none of this is true? Of course not…..and neither do they talk about the sort of women they prefer. But then, long or short, they’re all the same length in bed. They don’t say stuff like that? (contd).
JARELL MERELY SHAKES HIS HEAD.
ELLIE: (contd). You know what, I was in a bar….where was it….in Rotterdam….and I was sat next to a stag do - some piss-proud group of English blokes. English to the dirt beneath their fingernails they were. Fathers with sons…..half of them were over forty - some over fifty. Then one of the younger ones, he walked right up to my table, dropped his trousers and hoicked out his penis - quite a big one. I was the only woman there and everyone laughed except me. And then one of the alcopops shouted out: “There you go, love, how would you like that paraded round your gums?” I phoned a cab and asked to have a female-driver….only when I got to the hotel it smelt like a fucking monkey-house. Some rugger party had just been turfed out of the foyer. I went up to my room….had a pizza….and cried….cried.
JARELL: We’re not like that. The lads I know are not like that.
ELLIE: (skeptically) No, of course not.
JARELL: No.
ELLIE: Don’t your scaffolder friends dog?
JARELL: Not sure. It’s not something you’d brag about.
ELLIE: Having indiscreet sex in public is alright, you mean, but just don’t blab about it - either to your mates or on Facebook? (a slight pause) Where did you get your suit?
JARELL: Town.
ELLIE: Do you know, I once had a boyfriend who wanted to have sex in a lay-by - all this traffic hurtling past. I was only twenty-three. But I told him: “No, not a chance.”
JARELL: Your other one….was he….was that a long relationship?
You make us sound like a pair of shoes!
Photo by Petr Ovralov on Unsplash
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