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The Playpen

The Cut Shakespeare

British Beauty

Millenium Community Play at St-Mary-In-The-Castle, Hastings, revived at The Tabard, West London. Sophie, a wild country girl grows up in deepest Sussex as the daughter of a gamekeeper, who is head of the household of Barbara Leigh Smith Bodichon, women’s rights campaigner and, with Bessie Parkes, editor of The Englishwoman’s Journal. Barbara is a friend of Preraphaelite painter Dante Gabriel Rossetti who loves to visit her country home in Sussex. It just so happens that on a visit Rossetti one day decides to draw the wild Sophie. Published in Women’s Worlds.

Photos

Script Excerpt

Sophie: You drawn lots of people?

Rossetti: A few.

Sophie: That why your eyes are playin’ up?

Rossetti: My father went blind.

Sophie: My Grandad was blind. Accident on a farm. Made him a right rebel. Captain Swing an’ all that … My Dad says it was his own fault. Shoulda looked what he was doin’.

Rossetti: (Drawing) Ahuh.

Sophie: What do you think?

Rossetti: I can’t express a view, Sophie, I don’t know the circumstances.

Sophie: That’s what I say. We don’t know the … whassnames.

(Pause. ROSSETTI draws.)

Sophie: I shall say that to my Dad next time he tells me off. How dare you express a view, you don’t know the … whassnames.

Rossetti: Circumstances.

Sophie: Yeh, them.

(Pause. He draws, she fidgets.)

Sophie: I suppose, in a way, you’re expressin’ views all the time.

Rossetti: Ah, you mean ‘view’ as in landscape.

Sophie: Countryside.

Rossetti: We call that landscape.

Sophie: All right. (Mock pompous) If that’s your view. (She’s starting to enjoy this)

Rossetti: I should introduce you to Ruskin.

Sophie: Who’s he?

Rossetti: A critic. He believes we should be true to nature.

Sophie: Oh ar. Go round nood, does he?

Rossetti: (Laughs) I shall tell him that.

Sophie: Tell my dad while you’re at it. Nature drives him wild. Anything natural, he’s not happy ’less he’s pruned it, put a collar on it an’ got it to sit up an’ beg.

Rossetti: Anything natural like you, you mean.

Sophie: How d’you know that?

Rossetti: I had parents once too.

Sophie: An’ kids?

Rossetti: My wife died.

Sophie: Oh sorry.

Rossetti: She came here, you know. I drew her here.

Sophie: Oh really …

Rossetti: She was just an ordinary girl. Lizzie her name.

Sophie: Really.

Rossetti: She drove her father wild too. Following her nature …

Sophie: Nature ever get to you, do it?

Rossetti: These days I do mainly portraits.

Sophie: I suppose faces are just a different kind of view, really.

Rossetti: Not really. A ‘view’ implies a thing out there, in nature, the landscape. But a ‘portrait’ means something you interpret, portray … And what you look at and how you see it can be very different indeed.

Sophie: As different as you and me. (ROSSETTI looks up at her) Landscrapes don’t look back fer a start.

Rossetti: A different kid of inspiration altogether.

Sophie: ’Specially with no clothes on.

(She looks straight at him. ROSSETTI looks uncomfortable)

Sophie: Don’t worry, I won’t tell my Dad. –– ’Cept of course he ain’t my dad cos I’m illy- … illy-

Rossetti: Illegitimate.

Sophie: That’s the one. You shocked?

Rossetti: Why should I be? I can be a bit of a bastard myself.

(Sophie laughs raucously. They get the giggles together.)

Sophie: You do many girls then?

Rossetti: I don’t think I heard that quite properly.

Sophie: Drive you wild, do they?

Rossetti: I’m not sure we should be having this conversation …

Sophie: Don’t worry. Down in the village they all think I’m rollin’ in the hay with you anyway …

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