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 …