In year 11 my friend Max Taylor and I had to write a play for our GCSE exam and I just found it saved amongst my notes. It was a highlight of drama for me. So here it is a play called Prospector written by Max Taylor and Joanna Walton - Students of Bluecoat Academy.
Prospector
Background:
A Gold rush, similar to the California and New South Wales Gold rushes, has emerged in the midlands of England and is bleeding the lands dry. Prospectors from all over the world have gathered to seize the gold. However, this has caused gravel and mercury to contaminate nearby lakes and streams. Barney, a sudden veteran prospector from southern England, has been lodging with Hattie, a widow of a farmer, for six months. Hattie’s son, Peter, has drunk water from the nearby brook on the farm and has fallen ill from mercury poisoning.
Setting:
Peter is in an off-stage room SL and this is not seen throughout. A Doctor is nursing Peter and has asked the two to wait outside. Barney is sat SR facing Hattie, SL. He is in a white t-shirt, quickly-changed, still dirty from mining. Hattie gesticulates with a tissue- she has been crying.
Barney and Hattie are faced opposite each other, anxious and tense.
-Performance begins with a dumb show-
Hattie: I want you to leave tomorrow at the crack of dawn.
Barney: I have nowhere to go
Hattie: I assumed you’d be filthy rich from all that dirt under your fingernails.
Pause
Barney: You shouldn’t blame me.
Hattie: It’s your fault
Barney: I’m not taking responsibility for something I have not actively made happen.
Hattie: It’s you - your kind - your people.
Barney: We’re called prospectors. It’s an occupation, not a spe-
Hattie: (interrupting) Well your occupation may be stripping my son of his life next door and there’s nothing I can do about it. (Pause) Your careless throwing-away of toxic…things…very much defines how futile and selfish you are.
Barney: I know as well as you do what’s happening, don’t talk to me as if I don’t know.
Another pause.
Barney remains staring at Hattie, but she looks away
Hattie: Close your mouth
Barney: What?
Hattie: (correcting him, in a motherly way) Pardon.
Barney: (forceful) What.
Hattie: Close your mouth. You are not a fish.
Barney: Peter isn’t well, but that doesn’t make me a replacement.
Hattie: A replacement? Oh, so he IS going to die-
Barney: -Stop blaming me-
Hattie: -And you’ll still be healthy-
Barney opens his mouth to speak but stops himself
Hattie: I wish it was the other way around.
A long pause.
Barney: Why aren’t you asking me to leave now?
Hattie: If you didn’t care about him, you would have already left.
Barney: You need to know that prospectors are doing good work. If we carry on the way we do-
Hattie: -if you carry on the way you do, we’ll both be next door barely breathing.
Barney: There are some things we need to tweak. (Hattie huffs) There are some mistakes we need to correct; those mistakes have only come about due to over enthusiasm and eagerness to save the world from this economic crisis.
Hattie: The economic crisis that they themselves have made.
Barney: The economy is…
Hattie: (gets up out of chair and starts speaking directly to Barney) I don’t care. I don’t care about this invisible force of the economy that is harming so many people out there. We got ourselves in this mess. (walks towards DSC and speaks to the audience breaking the fourth wall) Look at me, my husband died two years ago on Tuesday, leaving me in charge of 50 acres and an 8 year old with aspergers. I’ve been on and off medication, sleeping pills; out in freezing fields for 14 hours a day scraping together a shitty harvest that barely gets us by. So I took him in. I thought, it’s a big farmhouse, there’s work being done in the nearby rockies…that’s what Peter calls it…I’ll take in a worker. Next thing you know, he comes along with his work ethic and hunger for more. And at the start, I liked him. I really did. He defined everything I should have been – an independent, hardworking adult that’s bitten off more than she can chew. But that work, over there, those workers, didn’t care about me. They tipped any gravel or toxins or whatever it is into any nook or cranny they could find and here we are. Peter, ten year old Peter, drunk from the brook when he got thirsty whilst playing outside, like he always has. But this time, you, you greedy gold miner people have poisoned him, probably killing him.
Barney: He’s not dead.
Hattie: He’s as good as dead.
Pause
Barney: Do you ever pray?
Hattie: Only when I need God.
Barney: The economy…
Hattie: I don’t care.
Barney: We both have our invisible forces.
BLACKOUT.
Lights back up. Barney and Hattie are still on their separate sides of the room, and still anxiously waiting, but are more comfortable. Time has passed.
Barney: Stop looking at the door.
Hattie: Did he definitely say we can’t go in?
Barney: He needs time. He’s a doctor: he knows what he’s doing.
Pause.
Hattie: How long now?
Barney: The same as a minute ago.
Pause.
Hattie: groaning What do I do?
Barney: You’re thinking about Jim again, aren’t you?
Hattie: (nodding, but not moving her focus) He’s six feet underground. I’m starting to think Peter will join him before I do.
Barney: unsure of what to say You’d have me.
Pause, Hattie gives Barney a disapproving look
Barney: You need someone.
Hattie impulsively stands to start doing something, but there is nothing to do.
Barney: Sit down.
Hattie: Don’t tell me what to do.
Barney: You look pale
Hattie: (remembering something) Oh
Barney: What?
Hattie: (correcting him again) Pardon.
Barney: What.
Hattie: You said pale. I remembered…I left a pail outside…(goes to exit DSR)
Barney: No, stay here-
Hattie: -I’ll forget-
Barney: goes to grab her –It’s freezing-
Hattie jolts round at the touch of Barney’s hand on her and tries to pull away. Barney does not let go. Hattie starts helplessly slapping at him, unsure whether her intention is to hurt him or not
Hattie: GET OFF ME. GET OFF, I’M FINE! JIM!
Barney: (overlapping) SIT DOWN. YOU NEED TO SIT DOWN.
Barney sees no option but to push her to the floor over his knee. She is now on her back balanced on his knee facing him. Silence. Barney removes his knee and she drops to the floor. There is an awkward eye contact where Hattie realises that she just called him Jim and that he threw her to the ground and the same for Barney, Hattie just called him Jim and he just threw her to the ground. Barney returns to his side of the stage. Hattie slowly gets up and brushes herself down.
Hattie: Gentlemanly.
Barney: What?
Hattie: again Pardon.
A pause. Barney inhales, then grabs his chair and turns to her with it lifted in his hands.
Barney: Do you know how HARD this is for ME?
Hattie: For YOU?
Barney: Suddenly I’m a STRANGER again!
Hattie: I’m losing faith in you
Barney: Because you’re BLAMING ME
Hattie: (rising to the anger) Who am I to blame then? The rest of your people?
Barney: We’re NOT PEOPLE, WE’RE…
He drops the chair to the floor
Barney: Prospectors.
BLACKOUT.
Lights back up. The chair Barney dropped has not been moved. Barney has instead resulted to sitting on the floor, cutting paper into pieces. Once again, time has passed – throughout, they are exhausted of waiting
Barney: Would you ever leave the farm?
Hattie: I would have.
Barney: If?
Pause.
Barney: (filling silence) I always had this vision of myself – 33 – I don’t know why so specific – but somewhere with a balcony…a balcony with a view. I guess it meant wealth, ‘cause, you know, those big houses have those balconies, with views. I can see it, I can see the sea and I’m not here or anywhere round here – somewhere hot. Abroad. Away from everything. Everyone. On a balcony. A big balcony with its own mini-bar, and there’s a sunset. Pink and orange and gold shining onto the little white ripples and its perfect. It’s so vivid that I have to get it. I have to live that moment. So now I see myself as a time bomb. If I’m, what, 33, 35 maybe, and I don’t have my balcony then…I’ve failed. I’ll adjust my life according to the fact that I am not what I was meant to be. Who knows, maybe I’ll be there this time next week…this time tomorrow…I mean, I’ve got no idea how much I’m getting for this job…
Hattie: all you care about is bloody money. You don’t know what it’s like to have a family, to have real happiness.
Barney: I’m tired of this.
Hattie: (sarcastic) Really? (stands up walks to the overturned chair and spitefully picks it up heavily placing it back in place) Because I’m still PARTYING.
Barney: Has anyone told you how spiteful you are?
To Barney’s surprise, this does not stir Hattie.
Hattie: I don’t talk to those ones any more.
Barney: That everyone is so nice to you, and supports you so much, but you still use them as a punching bag.
Hattie: I’m a Taurus.
Barney: And you have this incredible way of making people feel so terribly sorry for you.
Hattie: Sorry for me? See that’s where you’re wrong. No one feels sorry for me. They feel sorry for (sarcastically) poor old Jim, who didn’t deserve to die, or poor Peter having to deal with me as a mother. No one gives a shit about me. No one would care if it were me that died. But they don’t know my story, they don’t know the things I’ve seen and the pain I’ve felt. They don’t know why I’m on all this medication. But I do. And I know that no one cares. Not Jim. Not Peter. Not even you. All I ever wanted was to be happy. Now I know I’ll never smile again. I will be forever the lonely sour widow who lives on a farm, and no one will know my story.
Barney: You’d have me… tell me your story.
Hattie: (muttering) No, no (cynical) You’ll never be Jim.
BLACKOUT.
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