The Unreturning (NHB Modern Plays)
By Anna Jordan
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About this ebook
Their stories, set at different times over a hundred years, are beautifully interwoven in Anna Jordan's The Unreturning, a play that explores the profound effect that war has on young people's lives, and asks – what does coming home really mean? What is home? And when experience has shattered you into a million pieces, will home help to put you together again, or treat you as an ugly truth it does not want to confront?
The Unreturning was premiered at Theatre Royal Plymouth in September 2018, in a co-production between Frantic Assembly and Theatre Royal Plymouth, before touring the UK.
Anna Jordan
Anna Jordan's play Yen won the 2013 Bruntwood Prize for Playwriting. Her other plays include: We Anchor in Hope (Bunker Theatre, London, 2019); The Unreturning (Frantic Assembly & Theatre Royal Plymouth, 2018); Pop Music (Paines Plough & Birmingham Repertory Theatre, 2018); Chicken Shop (Park Theatre, 2014); Freak (Assembly Rooms, Edinburgh, 2014); Closer To God (Best Play and Audience Award at the Offcut Festival, 2009) and Just For Fun – Totally Random (Best New Writing at the Lost One Act Festival, 2009). As a director her work has included Crystal Springs (Eureka, San Francisco, 2014) and Tomorrow I’ll Be Happy by Jonathan Harvey at the National Theatre Shed as part of the 2013 Connections Festival. She is Artistic Director of Without a Paddle Theatre, Associate Director at Theatre503, London, and teaches acting and playwriting.
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The Unreturning (NHB Modern Plays) - Anna Jordan
Prologue
Longing
NAT. I want to return to my home.
I want to find myself there.
I want to meet myself coming back!
And I’ll say to myself – what kept you, dickhead?
I want to greet the landscape! Disappear into it
I won’t just look
But I’ll touch.
Bury whole limbs in the sand
Lean into the wind
Feel the spray on my face
Salt on my tongue
Nourish my heart.
I want to tear across the Valley Bridge
Heart thumping in my chest
I want to go everywhere we went on our boards
With my brother
The VRcades
The firefight simulators at Luna Park
All will reopen just to greet me.
I want to scan our front door again
Hear that familiar beep and clunk
I want to find the ghosts I’m looking for
Need to find them – flesh and bone
But if I can’t?
I’ll lie on the floor of every room in Our House.
Face down. Soak up our history from the carpet.
Feed on the past.
And when my heart is full?
I want to leap off the headland in all my clothes.
Enter the water with a violent crash
No Fear!
And then
Silence.
I allow myself to sink.
Watch the bubbles that come from me rise to the light
I’ll make my peace with the sea
Childhood fears
And fraught journeys of adulthood
Erased as the North Bay envelopes me
In the dark and the calm – alone
I am Home.
FRANKIE. I want to return to my home.
I want a hero’s welcome.
I want fanfares, and parades, and brass bands and
the back room of The Lion? Luke and Ket and Ryan and
banners, and balloons and sausage rolls and Jägerbombs and
Golden Balls Frankie is coming home!
I want to lose myself in the face of my mum. And my sister.
Does that sound gay?
I want to speak to my nan for like a whole hour – maybe
more!
Greet the Front Door like an old friend.
Rest my forehead on the cold brick of the garage wall
lie under the skylight on my mum’s bed
and watch clouds
I wanna answer the landline!
Run my fingers through the shag pile
Stick my head in the fridge!
I want to go out.
I want to go out out.
Drink and dance and shout for no reason
start in the spoons and end up in Vivaz
lines of coke in the back of an Astra
in a pub car park.
Feel invincible
(Chants.) SCAR-BA-DOS!
I want to sing in the streets
And shag lamp posts
And puke in the gutter
(His tone changes.) And they will never know
(Beat.)
None of them will ever know what I –
I want to run on the sand with my dick out. Salt in my
nostrils. Wind in my hair.
I want to brave the waves.
ROAR into them:
I OWN THE COAST.
Let them dissolve me. Reduce me to mist and foam.
Let them take me back with them into the dark – forever
A shadow
A creak in the floorboard
Of Home.
GEORGE. I want to return to my home.
I want to drink tea.
Hear the clink of the china and the glug of the pour.
Tea with my kin.
Hot. From a pot.
I want my mother to read my leaves and tell me
‘There’s nothing to fear, dear George!
Just clear flat roads ahead.’
I want to see Rose.
I want to walk along the front with Rose.
I want to hear her voice.
Make her laugh.
Give her what she wants.
A little version of herself to fall in love with!
A little version of me…
We’ll take the cliff lift down to the bay
Catch a show at The Spa
Take a rowboat out to sea
I want to run along the sand
like a kid tearing through back-of-his-hand streets.
For no reason but to feel the wind on my cheeks.
The sting of salt.
I want to be part of something I understand
Good English voices, plump round faces…
Not dark hollows for eyes and open wounds for mouths I want
roast beef.
I want to wake in the night shouting for Rose and find
she’s there.
My wife by candlelight.
I want to smell her carbolic lavender smell.
I want to hide in her petticoats.
I want to rip them.
NO.
I want to protect her.
I’ll gather her up in my arms
and hold her in my hands like this, see, my little bird
and squeeze her and squeeze her until her
little bones break.
Tear off her wings.
No!
NO!
PLEASE!
Beat. He gathers himself.
I want to be with her
need to be with her
she’s Home.
ACT ONE
Leaving
Focus: FRANKIE.
CHORUS