The Last Snog before Brexit

CAST OF CHARACTERS

Ronnie Plantagenet                         A staunch Brexiteer. 40s/50s

Hayley Tuttlesford                          A staunch Remainer. 20s/30s

Narrator One

Narrator Two

Narrator Three


The Play is set in February 2018



The play has two central characters representing opposite sides of the Brexit divide. Interspersed between their various exchanges are the comic monologues (delivered either by just the one narrator or by three). (The narrators could similarly be fragmented into a Chorus if required).

The Brexit Balderdash and the two Letters can be fitted into the play at various points (but which is at the discretion of the performers/director etc)

I wanted a contrast in tone between the bullish, unspun northerner of Ronnie Plantagenet (representing Leave) and that of the more subtle and mischievous character of Hayley Tuttlesford (representing Remain).

There is a similar contrast in terms of their ages/ regional origins and educational background.

Enter RONNIE PLANTAGENET and HAYLEY TUTTLESFORD. The two characters take up positions on opposite sides of the stage and address the audience directly.

February 2018

RONNIE: (greeting them) How do. Ronnie Plantagenet. Man-of-the-North. Brexit stalwart. Taking back our country…….so the Army doesn’t have to.

HAYLEY: Hayley Tuttlesford. Therapist and single-mother. Sympathetic to the plight of migrant workers. A Remainer (fixing him with a stern look) to the dirt beneath her fingernails. This is a satirical dart gun fired into the fat, rubbery hide of Brexit.

RONNIE: It is and here’s my first pro-Brexit Thought-for-the-Day: the only way to safeguard Brexit is to give pensioners two votes in all future elections.

HAYLEY: Folderol!

RONNIE: (to Hayley) What sort of a poncified word is that? (a slight pause) Okay, just to get one thing straight: Hayley and I are not an item.

HAYLEY: (pulling a face) Oh, how true that is! In fact, to lift a line from Frasier: ‘Just let me go and poke out my mind’s-eye.’ (she puts her finger in her mouth as if about to gag).

RONNIE: Hah! All that ‘satirical dart-gun stuff.’My guess is there’ll be a palette-load of that. I’m going to call it ‘Hayley’s Vomit.’ (a slight pause) A load of frothy student nonsense, I say it is. We don’t take any guff from your lot. You make the whole of Brexit sound so complicated, when it isn’t any such thing. It cuts no ice with us folk, I can tell you that for nothing. All that talk of Codicils and fixed-term Parliaments; who-is-buttering-up-who in the Commons Tea-Room. Swanky southern piffle! A no-frills, no-spills northerness. This is what we know works.

HAYLEY: (assertively) Dico sed verissima.

RONNIE: (confused) I beg your pardon?

HAYLEY: Jaycob – which I notice you spell J.A.Y.C.O.B – he’d know what that meant. Isn’t it your motto but in poncy Latin-speak? Dico sed Verissima/ Tell it like it is. (a slight pause) Ronnie, the floor is yours.

In Ronnie's first monologue, he expresses his frustrations at the ongoing difficulties of negotiating with the EU.

RONNIE: The EU are the novelty act that went global. Where did all this moxie of theirs come from? Their names are not so funny now they’ve got their act together. The like of Donald Tusk, Manfred Weber, Martin Schulz and Guy Verhofstadt are doing what they can to taint the chance of a workable outcome. They’re tut-tutting their way to victory is what they’re doing. (And our pathetic answer to their tut-tutting is to throw out the odd, simpering look). We couldn’t be more of a disappointment if we tried. We call ourselves a proud island nation. Why then, do we just cave in? This is not Brexit in its original form. This is death by a thousand tuts. Michel Barnier is the worst. He’s coming on like Liam Gallagher. Every chunk of the negotiation so far, it’s like him or some other Rock God slapping around one of the Pet Shop Boys.

In Hayley's monologue, she likens the EU to a huge ship on the world's oceans and which draws admiring report. The ship is under the captaincy of one Jean-Claude Juncker.

HAYLEY: Twenty-eight states working together. His pulse had always quickened at what they could achieve together. And then he thought about the British. (a slight pause) The British never quite belonged to the ship. They functioned for the most part as some shrill, abrasive know-it-all belowdecks and who claimed at times to feel more like a stowaway than any member of the crew. It would be good to have them put ashore in their own good time. The President would gladly suggest the nearest sandbar, if it was at all convenient – whatever rocky spit or fly-blown acre they preferred, and which could take the weight of their deluded, ornery selves. Anything would do, anything and anywhere that they might call their own, and after so long work themselves into a frenzy patrolling. Life would go on for them like some lugubrious sect, but everyone by then would be happy with the new arrangements.

Narrator One relates 'Brexit as a Much Loved Pie'

NARRATOR ONE: The serving Foreign Secretary gazed at the oak-panelled door. His stomach was roiling with hunger. He was famished.

Famished, he recalled, was Fame in Latin and Peinasmenos in Greek.

Everything had worked out swimmingly.

He’d managed to drift unnoticed from his downstairs office, closing the door as quietly as he could behind him. Not five short minutes since, there he was on tippy-toes, heading up the marble staircase to the Foreign Office Map Room.The Map Room was the one place in the Mothership where he was guaranteed a modicum of privacy.

It was in the Map Room that the trusted intern would deliver the goods, usually in a ministerial briefcase (one which the Foreign secretary himself had supplied). A very satisfying ritual had been established. First, there’d be a gentle tapping at the door and then Randy – of the mincing gait – would enter the room with a friendly smile. He’d place the briefcase on a lacquered table, snap open the locks and then leave.

The Foreign Secretary would then open the briefcase himself.

There inside was a brown paper bag. A brown paper bag with the logo Mottison’s Pastry Shop.

The aroma rising up was like a starting gun for his saliva glands. It would coil about his head and nostrils.

The wisp of a smile would form on the Foreign Secretary’s lips.

It was his moment-of-the-day.

For there, inside the paper bag was a Meat and Potato Pie – a big one.

The Foreign Secretary had never known a pie like it. It reminded him of the refectory at Eton and of his early days in London, when he sought out any culinary establishment which called itself a Chop House.

He would love to see the like of John Everett Millais or William Holman Hunt paint the inside of that pie. The warmth it gave off, could they capture that? The iridescent sheen which lay upon the gravy fat, the unctuous sauce which coated every joyous morsel.

Perfection indeed.