Synopsis:
Originally entitled 'The New Play'. Very personal, very experimental and not intended for performance. While trying to write The Old Ones the author developed writer's block. Accompanying this block was a profound urge not to write plays the old way. He was "…tired of the conventional stage with actors coming on and off, sets changing, slightly different characters with slightly different names …I decided to call everyone by their real name ... the play is about people and events I imagined were causing the block… technically ambitious I used everything - slides, films, the Czech device of 'Laterna Magica' …"
Excerpt:
"In all this - how can I concentrate sufficiently to write a play? There's another factor. This dreaded 'writer's block' is being inflamed by 'fiction fatigue'. I'm tired of inventing fictitious characters with fictitious names, engaging in face-lifts, nose-jobs, bone-restructures, all to hide my characters' original progenitors. So I'm writing this play about a play I can't write, and an irresponsible wildness of spirit has descended upon me. What, I ask myself, if I write a play in which everyone is named? Arnold would be called Arnold, Dusty would be called Dusty, Leah, my mother, called Leah? Perhaps if I could, just once, be relieved of the need for pretence, the block would shift. Perhaps. It's an interesting proposition, Arnold. Try it."