Restless

CAST OF CHARACTERS

ESMIE   A Suffragette in her early 30/40s. A fashionable and academically minded woman from a privileged upbringing.

EDGAR Her husband. A conservatively-minded businessman in his 50s. A class-bound individual, from an affluent background and who opposes suffrage for women.

LOCATION
The living room of their marital home in Summertown, Oxford.



   
Basic Plot Outline

This play is about a husband struggling to come to terms with his wife's political ardour. It takes place in the couple's home late at night and has just the one continuous, unbroken scene. Approx running time 75 - 90 mins.

The play starts off with the two characters offering up some semblance of normality. There is, however, a residual tension underlying the bland civilities on show. The issues stalking the two characters are too substantial to ignore for long. ESMIE tries to negate the problem at first by resorting to humour. But eventually she is forced to push back on her husband’s overly intrusive manner and does so with the heat of her own convictions.

Act One

July 1913

Late Evening. The comfortably furnished room of a house in Summertown, Oxford. A clock strikes eleven. EDGAR checks his fob-watch and opening the front of the clock delicately adjusts the minute-hand. He closes the clock front and sits tentatively in a leather chair drumming his fingers on the arm. WE HEAR a door slam shut and ESMIE enters in her hat and coat. She glances momentarily towards her husband who stands and – without so much as acknowledging her presence – walks to a small drinks table. He pours himself a sherry from a glass decanter. Esmie tries to ignore the strained atmosphere and unpins her hat. She drops it idly on a chair and then takes off her coat, folding it neatly over the chair back.

ESMIE: I saw the lights on. (a slight pause) Why did you not go to bed?

EDGAR: I wasn’t tired.

                                                          PAUSE

ESMIE: It’s beautiful out. I heard a Nightjar, I think.

EDGAR: You walked home?

ESMIE: No, of course not. I actually took a tram, for once.

EDGAR: You didn’t want to take a cab?

ESMIE: On this occasion, no. Everyone seemed to leave at the same time. I was with a group of nine or so. (amused) Hah! On the way back we had this one rather scrawny undergraduate mount some sort of solitary protest. This was just as we passed the Bodleian. He stood there glaring at us from the middle of the road and then - deliberately and very pointedly - turned his back on us. How we all laughed – my, but we laughed. Ruth, I think, had to be stopped from yanking off his hat and throwing it to the other side of the road. Apart from that one niggardly gesture, it was all rather jolly. I was there talking to a new girl, Rachel. She asked if I was going as far as St Giles and could she tag along. We had a long conversation, all the way to where I got off. She’s younger than me and as tough as a button – though not from the area, I think. She lodges with her aunt in Wolvercote. (a slight pause) What’s the matter? Why are you so gloomy – so detached?

EDGAR: Do you know what time it is?

ESMIE: Of course, I know what time it is, but I was asked to help.

EDGAR: To help in what way?

ESMIE: Well, just the usual. (a slight pause) Edgar? (with resignation) Stacking benches, tidying up the hall. Then later, I was tasked with talking to some of the newer faces – point them through the particulars of membership; and what they might expect from one week-to-the-next. One rather shabbily dressed girl – a domestic – couldn’t even write her own name. Seemed to put her out dreadfully. And so I asked her if she wanted to repair to some place quieter. There was a room next door. I must have talked to her for over twenty minutes. When she left, oh, goodness! There was such a smile on her face. As if I was a milliner delivering some hat.

EDGAR: I wonder that you didn’t take a cab. You normally do take a cab. It would have been the safer option – the more thoughtful one, given that I worry so.

ESMIE: (irritated) It’s a five-minute walk. From the tram stop to here is five minutes.

EDGAR: But at this late hour – with not a soul by. What were you thinking?

ESMIE: Oh, Edgar, please. No more.

EDGAR: Esmie, why are you steeping yourself in all this nonsense of theirs?

ESMIE: Why are you so brittle all of a sudden?

EDGAR: I want an answer. (a slight pause) Well?

ESMIE: I won’t demean us both by answering your question – I won’t. (a slight pause) I might have known you’d take a jaundiced view.

Edgar starts to place his reservations in a wider context.

EDGAR: For you to go there out of curiosity seemed tolerable enough at first. It was what….some eccentric foible which we could pass over. It was Esmie up to her old impetuous self. I didn’t want to lay a cold hand on your obvious enthusiasm for it. I made the reasonable assumption that you’d tire of it after so long. But you haven’t. And now you let these women have the run of your life.

ESMIE: Oh, that’s ridiculous!

EDGAR: Investing so much time in what they are about – these fractious women – where will it lead?

ESMIE: I don’t want to talk about it.

EDGAR points up his more worrying concern that ESMIE might become attached to the more restive elements within the Suffragette group and at some point actively participate in their clandestine activities.

EDGAR: I’m asking you a simple question: why must your membership of this group run to such lengths? There is no sense of proportion to the way you offer them support – and for all I know…..encouragement. (contd).

                                                          PAUSE

EDGAR: (contd). I want an answer.

ESMIE: To what?

EDGAR: I want to know if your commitment to such will go on as it is now. Additionally, if you intend to follow through on what they ask – if what they ask is legally suspect?

ESMIE: What they ask or do not ask is none of your business. You have no way of knowing anything. I would not tell you what was asked – or declined.



EDGAR then widens his concerns still further to speculate on the harm it could do to their social standing. He also suggests that she is being manipulated by the group to further their agenda.

EDGAR: The issue is one which could prove costly, do you not think? In social terms, as in everything else? It could unpick what we are – should you fail to address it.

ESMIE: (testily) For myself, if I am allowed to wonder at your rag-tag assumptions – the fault lies in your own exacting state of ignorance.

EDGAR: To have you lost and so conspicuously lost in what they are about…..

ESMIE: I am not by any means lost.

EDGAR: It can’t be right, letting such go on to the extent that people wonder at your life away from this house. (assertively) You are under my roof! You would do well to remember such.

ESMIE: (dismissively) Ach!

EDGAR: These women, Esmie, don’t you see how much they have suborned your way of looking at the world.

ESMIE: My way of looking at the world for what it is or isn’t?

EDGAR: Don’t try obfuscate the issue.

ESMIE: Well, don’t you misappropriate the facts.

EDGAR: There is a stigma to your going there so often. I am at a loss to understand what personally you hope to gain from it. (a slight pause) For the Esmie that I know to be so gullible. I mean, you put yourself at their disposal week-on-week. This is the third such meeting in what, five days? (a slight pause) Esmie, what you are about is not that easy to ignore. The friends we have recoil at what is going on. Do you not see that? Your interest, your commitment to this one divisive – I would say atrocious – issue colours everything around.

EDGAR then adds to this line of argument by suggesting that she is setting a bad example for the servants and that as someone from a privileged background she should be more conscious of her responsibilities towards the people around her.

EDGAR: Esmie, I want to be accommodated on this matter. This is not to my mind fit for what we are – for how we are viewed. Not just the family, but the domestics hang about the issue in a way that is not healthy. They ask each other things. I hear as much. What the mistress has been up to – what she knows but will not tell.

ESMIE: (coldly) The servants in this house or in any other can think what they want.

EDGAR: The servants are in need of set relations. Like the rest of us, they follow rules. They need to be in lock-step with the very people that they serve – in looking at society as a what…..a shared enterprise. What is habitual to their sense of place, what they as much as we, find pertinent is that this form of common ownership – the values that we have – are not distorted. What they know, have known, they trust. There is no room for ambiguity on that which binds us the one-to-the-other. The country has no more important or a better means of going forward than by – for want of a more apt phrase – ritualised assent. Is that not so? (a slight pause) Our standing in this neighbourhood – in this street – has some measure of importance even to a scullery maid.

ESMIE: Such is a shade too melodramatic even for my provincial tastes.

EDGAR: I’m telling you, the servants are themselves opining on the matter. Why the mistress does not ever criticise the misdeeds? Does it not occur to you that this is generating adverse comment?



ESMIE counters this argument by restating what the limitations are in societal, legal and educational terms for women. She then attacks what is his overly precious image of her as a woman, pointing out that it bears no relation to her more acutely complex self.

ESMIE: I hear what you say, but on a thing so personal to me I am not – nor will ever be – moved by it. Another thing, I will not have you stifle what I think and feel by talking of my place within this house. As if by doing so I should be grateful for my own small measure of authority. You expect me to do what….to forget that I am not your equal either in a Court of Law, the workplace or a voting booth? (a slight pause) All that self-effacing modesty you love in a woman. Edgar, I am not some figure from a painting. You did not marry some lank girl meditating by a pool. I am not some nude damsel in the Garden of the Medici. (sarcastically) Yes, but women should, they should demure on certain points. Am I that woman? No. Am I to keep from saying what is fundamental to me? No. We women have the right to study now but there is no certification.  I was a gifted academic and yet what was my reward in official terms? Nothing. Between the two of us, the University does not accord me any comparable recognition. We studied at the same University – I was assiduous while you were rather feckless – and yet which of us was properly rewarded at the end? You were. Because I am a woman. For all my many hours in the library, for being so absorbed, so utterly waylaid by literature, what did they value of that? Nothing. Nothing. No certification worth a light.  There has been no ceremony which has ever matched your own. Your father, brother, uncles can append their names with titles, but not me. And now you want to take from me my hopes and my opinions on this one matter. I must save what I think for the company of women – but only not those women. Is that it? And to benefit the servants and to hold with what we are and to keep the country free of upstarts and distorted views…..I must learn to be discreet where I can. In other words: keep my mouth firmly shut!

EDGAR then appeals to her sense of personal loyalty and for what they are as a married couple.

EDGAR: You owe me something in the way of empathy. Where not obedience, the empathy.

ESMIE: I owe you nothing of the kind. For wanting what seems natural, I have no guilt! And as for this world of recalcitrant females, these unconscionable hags, the like of all these noisesome suffragettes who threaten your sense of ease…..your entitlement…..I tell you now, I won’t be plucked from that world on some whim of yours. (a slight pause) Has marriage done so little for you, Edgar, that you can’t value it beyond what you can stymie? Know this: whatever moral compass I may have is not some adjunct of your own. (a slight pause) Astonishing. Do you then claim some right to bite down on my curiosity as and when you choose? My independence of mind is not worth much it seems. It sickens me the way that you obstruct or seek to deflect from what is so important. Women shall one day exercise their right to a vote – they shall - for all that you might stiffen at the prospect. For you personally, no, it should not happen. We must do what we can to keep society as workable as it was yesterday. You say that I have independence, but is that independence on my own terms or not? (a slight pause) (assertively) I covet what I covet – where I may and to what end! I will not have you throw a halter on my expectation!

EDWARD pours scorn on some of the working-class groups affiliated to the Suffragette cause. ESMIE rejects his prejudices and cites her own personal experience.

ESMIE: I’ve met some of these men and women. Tradespeople, grocers, common labourers, domestics. The grievances which you and others have imputed to them I do not detect. Working people have a reduced set of options, Edgar, as you well know. They are discouraged or prevented from standing as candidates for the two main parties. And why? Because they are too little representative of the party even though, in fact, they are more representative of the electorate. Parliament to them is like a building with no doors to it. Apparently, Disraeli’s ‘greasy pole’ is there to look at but not touch – as if they’d wandered into some museum by mistake. So who will offer them a home? The Labour Party or the Socialists will offer them a home. The socialists who you detest so.

ESMIE expands on the issue and links the various political causes to a drive for a more just and equitable society. She explains how as a woman her moral self is being thwarted by the status quo.

ESMIE: Why in meting out my hopes and my sense of outrage, can I not do anything about it? Why am I as a woman locked out of any answer, large-or-small? Why must I lack all necessary means to change for the better the world into which I was born? Which I am told in church, in Parliament and elsewhere is a moral habitation? Each day I must be put in mind of what must be replenished of that world - what by some small act of my own, compacted there with others, benefits the system overall. For all my longing to do the right thing, why should there be limits placed on me? Limits that are emblematical of women right across the world, which utterly negates their grasp of what that world is or could be. Where is the practicality of such? It seems so absolutely clueless, thin. I do, I count for less. The blind passivity I followed therefore is a sham. My reasoning is scarce worth more than any child’s. In my dependent state, I lack what men would claim was a discriminating intellect. Whatever I may have of any sort of intellect is all but treated as an offshoot of your own, or is it not? It’s sickening to me that what I am is not enough. For all my loyalties, the values, morals I am meant to live by – these are always at the end clawed back. I asked you in bald terms: Am I a moral person? And your answer is, was: Yes. So why then place me at a distance to that moral world? I have so much to give.

ESMIE castigates some sectors of the British Press for their hostility to the Suffragette cause.

ESMIE: You have your own excuses fed to you, by journalists so-called, who dabble in excuses, who beyond that manufacture and perpetuate excuses round-the-clock. Journalists cooped up in some rat-trap of an office. Some great pillar of modernity, are they? It makes me want to howl with laughter. These men – and they are mostly men – they might as well be working for the State. The outrage they specialise in is what helps solidify your world, does it not? It comes to you freshly ironed from below-stairs, served up with your junket and your toast and marmalade. That vile newspaper of yours. You are happy to have it go at you like some ferocious nag. (angrily) Having your opinions shaped by a thing so insufferably partial!



ESMIE places the suffragette cause with the more recent political context and decries the seemingly duplicitous actions of the Government.

ESMIE: Why can’t you muster any worthwhile criticism of the Government? On any matter large-or-small you do, you take their every word on trust. Why are you so happy being as you are so ignorant? The Government reneged on certain things. Should we the Suffragettes be more forgiving after they have shown themselves to be untrustworthy? (angrily) We have been lied to! Ushered into grand rooms in the Parliament and elsewhere – Men of Office, of High Office fitting us around some worthless time-frame…..asking us to show a little patience for the sake of what might prove workable. We, the Suffragettes, they tell us, we must make allowances for disaffected parties in the House – their Old World sensitivities must not be overlooked. (a slight pause) (angrily) They graft one specious falsehood to another, and should we not go along they then regale the public with some story as to how unreasonable we are! The Prime Minister himself has lied to us! Has jollied us along with lies. Parliament is a fermenting pot of lies – of lies! Me, I would have the Government provide us with commitments – lasting commitments! I would have this ludicrous elite act in good faith….and I would have the newspapers abandon their disreputable practices for something vaguely ethical!

EDGAR: You would have the newspapers interpret these more militant acts but not in any ethical way. You would have them say that firebombing a person’s home is less a crime than it is a matter of context.

ESMIE: I want an end to the dissimulation! I want an end to the contemptuous lies! I want the promises they make to count for something and I want the newspapers to print the facts!



The play’s progression is away from the agitations of the campaign and towards what they have cost ESMIE in terms of a mental and emotional equilibrium. Through her association with the group, she has started to ask more telling questions relating to the place of women in society and how their world is represented in other non-political spheres. She starts to turn against how women are represented in Art and explains how the emphasis on the purely visual constrains society's perceptions of her true self.

ESMIE: At times, for me to walk into a milliner’s shop is less a delight than it is somehow fraudulent. Do you understand that at least?

EDGAR: Go on.

ESMIE: Except when I’m in that sort of mood I never make it past the door. I only stand there on the pavement looking in…..a long, dismembering stare…..the plate-glass window offers up so little in the way of shelter – it’s like a sieve. I look at that relentless, polished creature on the other side…..everything about her seems so clueless…..like a mannequin. The blue amethyst brooch is like a huge rivet holding all the finery in place. It’s a figmented self, as frivolous as it is foul. The thoughts which hack at my reflection, Edgar, you have no idea. So little of my real, my non-collusive self is ploughed back into that joyless stare…..