An Intervention (NHB Modern Plays)

I’ve got a friend. Mahmoud.

Pause.
A
I’ve been here a while, you know that.
B
I’m sorry I w

know what had happened.

Until assembly one day.

Shit.

I want some crisps.

Sorry, that was a bad story and told even worse because I’m incredibly embarrassingly drunk.

But the important thing is the moral and the moral of it is that life is really difficult, and I understand why people drink.

A downs the drink.

Harmonica.

But lots of…

Drink.

And eventually he drank so much that he didn’t see any reason not to open his veins and let out the small amount of blood he had left, and he lay there in his room and died.

And in the morning he was found by his mother in bed, but he was so pale anyway that it took her ages to realise that as well as being unconscious he was also dead.

I was at school with him.

Casper. We didn’t. We didn’t

dn’t get in and he didn’t want to go out, because people would shout at him in the street that he was a fat pasty balloon boy so he stayed in, and if you were outside listening you might hear this sound…

A picks up the harmonica. She plays it, interspersed with drinking.

But he couldn’t do both at the same time. So eventually there was less of this.

Harmonica.

And more of this.

Drink.

Just a tiny bi

insults got to him and when he was thirteen he discovered alcohol and enjoyed that a lot, so much so that he drunk it all the time and there wasn’t much his parents could do to stop him, and it made him happy and they thought it important that he make his own mistakes so they didn’t say anything. He grew up a few more years till he was about seventeen, he liked the drink so much that he even played the harmonica less which if I’d been telling this story properly I would have seeded at the beginning, that all he really wanted was to be a harmonica player and the ironic problem was that he couldn’t drink and play the harmonica at the same time, and they were his two favourite things, and he’d lock the door of his room in the evening, so his parents

There was once this man called Casper, he was called that because when he was born, he was very pale, and had this big round head and his parents thought ‘oh! He looks like Casper the ghost’ so that’s what they called him, they thought it was cute, but unfortunately after he’d been called that he continued to suffer from anaemia and continued to be very pale, and his hair, although it grew a bit was light and wispy and never really covered his head in the right way, so at school and as he grew, the name Casper became a taunt that the other children shouted at him, they also called him things like Mr Big White Baby, and Sir Tit Head and these in