SPARE
a paranormal comedy
written and performed by John Constable
John Constable’s solo show is a paranormal comedy inspired by the life and work of Austin Osman Spare. The play is set in the artist’s studio at the Elephant and Castle, on the night it was bombed during the 1941 blitz. In the course of the night, Spare’s greatest act of chaos magic unleashes unpredictable consequences.He battles with the spectre of Adolf Hitler and other entities, on his journey to a consummation ‘beyond all, nothing, and neither neither’.
What if this play, cunningly disguised as a biographical drama, is, in fact, the vehicle for a practical demonstration of Chaos Magic? The play of Mr Austin Osman Spare’s unconditioned mind, even now unfolding before our soon to be astonished eyes.
(from SPARE by John Constable)
SPARE, commissioned by Southwark Mysteries, was first performed in Treadwell’s bookshop and at The White Bear theatre, Kennington.
SPARE is an extraordinary, visionary work of art and magic…
I was enthralled throughout… I cannot recommend the play enough.Sarah-Jayne Farrer
Several people have asked if they could read the script. I decided it’s easiest to post it up here. All rights reserved and permissions must be sought to do anything other than read it. 🙂 Enjoy!
SPARE
a play by
John Constable
for Ion Alexis Will
(1940-2010)
“The more Chaotic I am, the more complete I am”
Austin Osman Spare (1886-1956)
SPARE was first performed at Treadwell’s Bookshop,
and at The White Bear Theatre, Kennington,
London, 2013
directed by Di Sherlock
with John Constable as Austin Osman Spare
(c) John Constable
John Constable is hereby identified as author of these works in accordance with section 77 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. The author has asserted his moral rights.
All rights whatsoever in these works are strictly reserved and application for performance etc. should be made before rehearsal to United Agents, 12-26 Lexington Street, London W1F 0LE (www.unitedagents.co.uk)
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or medium including electronic media, computer diskette or tapes, the Internet, or photocopying without the prior written consent of the author
In 1904 the artist Austin Osman Spare exhibited at the Royal Academy. He was initially hailed as a ‘young London genius’, though his work soon proved too ‘weird’ for most critics.
Rejecting the fashionable Mayfair art-world, Spare rented a studio on the Walworth Road, Elephant and Castle. He painted portraits of working-class ‘Southwark types’ which he sold in local pubs. He explored intuitive ways of accessing the Unconscious, experimenting with automatic drawing and with psychically-charged symbols, or sigils.
In later life he was befriended by Steffi and Kenneth Grant, who sought to interpret his esoteric practice and to record his extraordinary tales, such as how he once came to paint a self-portrait as Hitler; and how his studio was destroyed by a German bomb on the night of 10th May 1941.
*
In this play I have drawn on a few of Spare’s many stories to evoke – though not to presume to encapsulate – his extraordinary life and work.
My sense of the man was enhanced by an H. V. Morton article (Daily Herald, 13th October 1937) and by the book Borough Satyr: The Life and Art of Austin Osman Spare, edited by Robert Ansell. My thanks to the Cuming Museum and Southwark local studies library, and to Caroline Wise and Michael Staley, who generously offered access to their private collection of Spare’s paintings. I would also like to thank Katharine Nicholls for her patience and creativity in providing lighting, sound and stage management for the first performances of the play in the downstairs room of a bookshop.
JC
SPARE
a paranormal comedy in one act
The action takes place in Austin Osman Spare’s studio,
56a Walworth Road, Elephant and Castle, London.
In Eternity, as revealed on the night of 10th May 1941.
*
A garret. An empty picture-frame on an easel.
An artist’s smock hangs on a hook.
A table and chair. On the table: a crystal ball; paint-brush and palette; paper.
A cannibalised wireless with exposed wires and valves.
Recorded sounds may be transmitted over the wireless.
The voices of the various entities and other characters are channelled by SPARE.
Apparitions and other visual effects may be projected into the room.
Projections of Spare’s art may be shown before and after the performance, to music.
*
(LIGHTS UP. Enter THE ACTOR, wearing a vest, workman’s trousers and boots, not yet in character. He addresses the audience:)
ACTOR Ladies and gentlemen, may I remind you to switch off your phones.
Thank you. Before we begin, I think it’s only fair to… No, not warn you… We’re all adults, aware to some degree what we’re getting into here, attracted, in part, by the reputation, the glamour – and I use the word advisedly – which precedes the subject of this work. Oh, we actors are a superstitious lot, but… well, something happened… it’s happening now… something that isn’t in the script. Only it is!
Ten. The play begins with this prologue, in which I am required to address you as the actor, not yet in character, to hint at some unearthly presence lurking behind these words, some unspeakable… At first, I dismissed it as mere artifice, a dramatic device, some post-modern variant on the Verfremdungseffekt. I hinted as much to the writer, and asked if that was his intention. He just laughed and said his intention was to put these thoughts into my mind and that I should carry on thinking them until they became my own. The thing is, before I know it, I do! I find myself thinking them, until now – and this is the thing – even as I speak these lines, I hear them as my own… my own thoughts, thought for me across space and time by our playwright… and, before him, by their original author, the subject – and object – of the work, Mr Austin Osman Spare.
Nine. Austin Osman Spare devised an idiosyncratic magical system for the unconscious projection of conscious thought. The way it works is: you have to think it – the thought, the desire – and then forget all about it, get out of the way and let it do its secret work. As if… as if the thought could take on a life of its own.
Eight. And the thought occurs to me: what if? What if, in this play, as in his own magical works, Spare is indeed a conduit, a channel for the reception and transmission, ingress and egress of entities from other worlds?
Seven. What if this play, cunningly disguised as a biographical drama, is, in fact, the vehicle for a practical demonstration of Chaos Magic?
Six. A play conceived as an Act of Magic, the invocation or evocation of beings as yet unknown to this world, yet I fear all too familiar to our Borough Magus. The play of Mr Austin Osman Spare’s unconditioned mind, even now unfolding before our soon to be astonished eyes. “Going down…”
Five. Basic psychic protection: whatever happens, whatever manifests, whatever frightful visions may flit before you, do not attach! Only observe. In shining emptiness…
Four. Now, even as I speak these words, I begin to comprehend their hidden purpose. Namely: to – Three. Two. One. – to hypnotise… put us all into this… light trance… this relaxed yet vigilant state of heightened awareness… leading us, imperceptibly, beyond words, to the thresh-hold, the liminal zone… Here, the door.
(The ACTOR puts on the artist’s smock, scrutinising himself in the picture-frame as in a mirror. He sings snatches of a music hall song (e.g. Knocked ‘Em In The Old Kent Road), going into character as SPARE. Lights fade to a spotlight on the table)
SPARE Now, we have only to knock…
(AUSTIN OSMAN SPARE sits at the table)
Knock knock. “Who’s there?” Austin. “Austin who?”
I saw this stage medium once , at the South London Palace, back before the war – on the bill with Marie Lloyd and old Vesta Tilley. Very good he was too – doing cold readings for the punters, passing on messages from the other side. Only when he got to me, he was flummoxed. Never seen so many bloomin’ spirits!
(Knocks twice, then speaks like a showman)
Spirits, Powers, Elementals, and you nameless dwellers on the threshold – welcome. To Mr Austin Osman Spare’s auto-sĂ©ance, a practical demonstration of magic and mediumship: divination, invocation, evocation, telepathy, teleportation, astral projection and all-purpose psychic transformation. Mr Spare’s invincible spell to set all beings free!
(SPARE laughs at his own ‘snake-oil’ spiel)
Nah! No need for all that palaver. Just get out of the way, Austin, and, in your absence, in shining emptiness, they come. And come they do, the Astral dole-queue: shadows and spectres, hungry ghosts still hankering after the old flesh… the faces in the green mist… a proper pea-souper, twisting and coiling, snaking along the railway arches down Catkillers Alley… to number 56a Walworth Road.
(The wireless crackles to life: a burst of atmospherics and swooping frequencies. Spectral light on the picture-frame. SPARE drapes a shawl over his head and steps into the frame, speaking in a wheezy old Welsh woman’s voice, “channelling” MRS PATERSON:)
MRS PATERSON Bad boy! Call this a sĂ©ance? Take my eye off you five minutes, and where are we? “Calling all spirits?” Think we can just open up the Astral to every dosser down the Old Kent Road? Love a duck! Carry on on like this, we’re going to wind up possessed… by ourselves! (cackles) Yes, it’s me, Austin… Mrs Paterson, old crone taught you all you know… back when you was the copper’s lad in Kennington. Well, don’t stand there gawping like a rabbit in the headlights. To work. To be free! Free from what? From yourself! (cackles) Now do I true-say, or do I piss in your pot? You got a spell to cast, your greatest test to face. So… Fiddle-faddle, let’s skedaddle!
(Wireless atmospherics fade. Lights up on the garret. SPARE folds and sets down the shawl, coming back to himself)
SPARE True, as ever, Mrs P! No need for all that ceremonial mumbo-jumbo. The subconscious mind has the power to manifest our deepest desires. But! Our conscious identification, our attachment to these desires is the very thing that blocks their realisation. The magic only works when we get out of the way. But how? How do we free ourselves from ourselves?
Let’s say our hypothetical Sorcerer has taken a shine to a certain Woolworth’s shop-girl. Call her June. He devises a clever love-spell to charm her. But if… in the act of casting the spell, he should happen to think of her – even for an instant – ‘e’s put the kibosh on the ‘hole caboodle! ‘e’s gone and turned ‘er into “The Other”. The more his conscious mind desires her, the more he repels her. What to do?
Your basic magical conundrum: we don’t do it. It does itself. And the key – to Everything and No Thing and Neither Neither – the key… is the sigil. The glyph, the hieroglyphic symbol of your desire…
(SPARE takes the paintbrush, paints a symbol on paper)
Think of it as you draw your sigil, hold it in mind, the object of desire – invest, embed, bury it deep within the sigil – and then forget all about it! Get out the way and let it do its secret work. For your heavy-duty spell like this, it’s best not to to even think about it. It already knows what it is. And what it wants…
So, this sigil does not represent June. This spell has nothing to do with any feelings yours truly may or may not have for a certain Woolworth’s shop-girl. I could have had her, mind – I seen the way she looks at me – only I’m mates with Jack, her old man… Nah!
Here, now, I, Austin, think of June only to distract my conscious mind from seeking to know the True Desire behind this sigil.
(SPARE stares at the sigil on the paper, then tears it up, scattering it like confetti)
This sigil embodies the unconditioned Self – the eye, the hand, perfectly aligned, Desire and Will, at one – a Spell so invincible that it may not be thought nor spoken… Speak no more, Austin!
Five. Assume the Death Posture.
(SPARE steps into the frame to assume the ‘Death Posture’, clenching his hands behind him, tensing)
Four. Holding the sigil in your mind’s eye, hold your breath! The instant you lose consciousness, the subconscious activates, releasing the power in the sigil. Three. Observe your reflection in the mirror, stare at it until you see through it – the body and its reflection – here, there and Neither Neither. Two. One.
(He makes magic passes with his hands to mask his face, freezes. He speaks with a German accent; answers as himself:)
“Knock-knock.” Who’s there? “Austin?” Austin who?
(He removes his hands to reveal his face, in trance. He reanimates energetically, as HITLER:)
HITLER Austin Osman Spare? Ah, there you are! No use hiding, Mr Spare. Even here, in the wilds of the Elephant, we will track you down! So… this is where the Great Work is done. You see, Mr Spare, you may not know me but… suffice to say, I am intimately acquainted with your life’s work. I do a bit of painting myself, and we share a life-long interest in the occult…
I make no bones about it, Mr Spare, I‘ve had my eye on you since that Academy exhibition… 1904. You would have been only – what? seventeen? Ja! Our “Young London Genius”. “The darling of Mayfair.” Yet, even then, you must have known, such work would never endear you to your Great British Public. Na? Your Satyr with his unheimlich phallus? Your Witch flaunting her – how do you say? – her hairy twat? Your “weird fantasy… monsters of horrible form, decadent shapes and grotesque allegories” – not my words, Austin, The Daily Mail.
Nein! Das ist kein decadence! Ja, Austin – if I may call you Austin, and please feel free to call me Adolf, Austin – even then, I understood: this Art is the pure expression of your Tantra – Sex und Death – to arouse the desire – ja, und… the horror – in equal measure, until the Adept passes beyond all attachments, at one with the object of desire. You invoke the darkness only so as to transform it by the power of your Will. Ach! – but who else shared your prophetic vision?
(HITLER peers into the crystal ball)
I spy with my little eye… Or is it “scry”. Ja ja. I scry… But why is it? When I “scry” your life, I see no future; only the dwindling of the light. Your Beardsleyesque grotesques? No longer modern. You turn your back on Mayfair, walk away from fame and fortune, to wind up in some – forgive me! – some pokey little hovel in the slums of south London. Our forgotten genius! By now, you should be painting society portraits, heads of state… But no! You prefer to sell them in the pubs for – what? Two, three guineas! – your dockers and fishwives, your “Southwark types” – any one of whom would sell their souls for the money you could earn from one commission!
(SPARE surfaces from trance, arguing with his HITLER persona:)
SPARE What would I do with it? I have no dependants, don’t drive a motor-car, wouldn’t own a house if you paid me! Nah! I’m content with life’s simple pleasures… Catch a show at The Sarf or The Troc, pint of mild at The White Bear – if I’m lucky a bunk-up with the barmaid! I can have a good night out for sixpence.
HITLER And that’s it? This is how you repay your youthful promise? Doing your little automatic doodles? When you could be shaping the future of humanity? What is it, Austin? What stops you from becoming what you were born to be? Because all that can change in the blink of an eye. Austin Osman Spare, I am here to offer you a singular commission… To realise your own heroic destiny.
SPARE Just my luck! Adolf bloody ‘itler! What do you want with an old tramp like me?
HITLER “Old tramp”? You don’t fool me. This is the disguise of a Master! You are my Magus, because you, Mr Austin Osman Spare, are a natural! Und, I need a painter. The commission is yours for the taking. You have only to name your price!
SPARE You want me to do the dirty with Mephistopheles?
HITLER (laughing uproariously) No! I want you to paint my portrait! To capture my physical likeness, ja – und! – to reveal my eternal destiny. There is a plane at Croydon Aerodrome, waiting to fly you to Berlin. There you will live and study with me. Together we will usher in the New Aeon. You can have whatever you want – an entire Joy Division of willing Tantrikas, all waiting to serve you! Tell me what you want.
SPARE (speaking carefully) I want… you… to resign as German Chancellor with immediate effect. You will publicly renounce your power, your authority, your poisonous little philosophy, everything you ever did or said or thought or were. You will come to live here, with me, in abject poverty and utter obscurity. Then, maybe then, I’ll teach you to be human.
HITLER Naja. I like your spirit, your combative nature. Yes, we have more in common than you may like to think – even our moustaches. You could be my doppelgänger! No, Austin, you and I were born to be more than merely human. The True Master – the Ăśbermensch, the Superman – he takes the world by the scruff of the neck, gives it a good shake and then shapes it to serve his Will.
SPARE “Vill”? I’ll give you “Vill”! “Will” is unconditional surrender to Life itself! Not some deranged automata dredged up from the sick mind of a failed painter! I’ll give you your portrait! Austin Osman Spare – self-portrait as Adolf Hitler.
(SPARE steps into the frame, striking a pose as the portrait, psychically smiting HITLER with each word:)
If you… are Superman… Let me be… forever… animal!
(Silence, then… an invisible cat mews, breaking the spell. SPARE steps out of the frame, kneeling to tease and stroke the cat with the paintbrush)
SPARE Ah, Schroedinger! What d’you reckon, eh Schroedinger? Adolf bloody ‘itler! Bit rum, eh? Touch of the old deja vu? Remember that business with old Adolf? Back in the summer of ’36.
(The cat’s mewing ceases)
And I did do that portrait… inscribed with my malediction… but whether I really flew to Berlin to paint him, or later abused the canvas in some obscure voodoo ceremony – another of those tales that grew in the telling until even I don’t know what’s what. And in the dream world, see how the stories get jumbled…
That’s all they are – stories! How I made it rain one day, out of the cloudless blue, conjured up a single cloud to rain on me and the Reverend Hugh Benson. And… Who was it? Fielding! Sir Everard Fielding of the Psychical Research Society! Came to test me. How I not only read his mind, but physically manifested its contents, the very things that were in it! I draw two sigils, for telepathy and teleportation. The very next instant his man-servant appears, clutching a pair of… “Your slippers, sir?”
(SPARE laughs, shaking his head)
Stories… If the act is true, it outlives you, goes out into the world to do its work. You’ve no further business with it. But… old age… if you don’t watch it, you fall half-asleep – wind up believing that that’s all you are, the sum of your stories. Even Mrs Paterson! The old witch in Kennington, taught me all I know – at least that’s what I later told young Master Kenneth. Did I make her up? You see, Austin? Trouble with inventing your own myth is you can wind up believing it!
(SPARE stops dead, suddenly wide awake and alert)
But I did get that offer to paint old Adolf. He’d somehow got hold of me here. Not in person of course! Through an emissary. Yes, that’s what he is, my Dream Adolf – an emissary. And in a dream working, the Emissary comes from within… some extrusion of self, some automata surfaced from Austin’s own abyssal depths!
(He examines himself in the mirror / picture-frame).
“Ja ja”, Adolf old chum, I’ve got your number.
(The spectral image of Spare as a demon appears, projected in the frame)
I see you, creature, thirsting to know Mr Spare’s secret ways. You know too much already: things only I can know. I have reified you, exteriorised my own shadow-self. I name you… Mortestophiles! Ha! There! Framed in the mirror: my Adversary! And, if I play my cards right, my Ally! Mortestophiles, I shall work you. I called you here to serve in the Great Work – to test me, yes! – and for your own edification! – your self-annihilation in Mr Spare’s infallible spell.
Let us take steps, Mortestophiles, let’s cut and shuffle the pack!
Dismember, re-member, cut and splice our own chronologies.
A crash-course, comrade, a psychic civil defence job! To cast
Mr Spare’s magic spell before the ghosts of nostalgia overwhelm us all with their phantom miasmas.
(Distant wail of an air-raid siren, rising, then falling, fading)
Bloomin’ air-raid! Hitler’s revenge? Well, Austin, maybe there is a bomb, with your name on it… Jerries mark their targets with two radio beams. Where the beams cross, that’s where the Luftwaffe dump their bombs. A sensitive like yours truly can detect those radio-waves. Tonight they light up an invisible Grand Cross over the Elephant and Castle. It all connects! It’s happening now.
Too late, Adolf old mate! The spell is cast! We’re all set to finish you off with a spot of south London sex magic.
(SPARE takes up pallet and paint-brush and begins ‘painting’ in the empty frame on the easle. The wireless retunes itself: atmospherics, swooping frequencies, ghost voices. As SPARE paints, projected images from his work appear, dissolving one into another)
Calling all Muses – my Woolies girls, my Walworth Witches – age and beauty no object. I’d walk a Camberwell mile to bed a Beauty, but an Ugly? – not in my eyes! – an old girl, freed from hopes of marriage or procreation, free to pursue her own pleasure – she’s the girl for your Sex Magic, your Witches’ Sabbath. With her you do the act, free from the image of self and other, until there is only the Act, a single act of self-annihilation… the bliss of the Neither Neither…
Who shall we call? Helen of Troy? Come on, Austin, you can do better than Old Faust! You can have “whomsoever you desire”…
(He grins lasciviously, momentarily transformed into a satyr, picking up the shawl; then, checking himself:)
Nah! Not June. Stop it, Austin! Jack’s your best mate. You don’t want old June slipping in under the radar. You may well fancy the pants off her – but so long as the desire remains conscious it has no power to manifest. Go on then, Austin. Fixate your fill. (wraps the shawl around himself sensuously) Hold her in mind: June in her undies… but keep it conscious! Conscious! Or else before you know it, it’s…
(SPARE becomes JUNE, a south London shop assistant, clutching the shawl provocatively around her)
JUNE Well, Austin, ain’t you going to ask me in? Oh, don’t look so jumpy!
Didn’t you ‘ear the siren? Me old man’s on fire-watch. Everyone else is down the shelters. Looks like it’s just you and me, eh Austin?
(She opens the shawl, enticing him. SPARE comes out of his trance with a jolt. He stares at her, shocked)
SPARE (as himself) June! What are you doing?
(He answers himself as JUNE, coy, teasing)
JUNE Now don’t tell me you’re gettin’ cold feet. I seen the way you been lookin’ at me!
SPARE It’s true, June, I do fancy you… and I’m flattered! Only… the thing is… I’m in the middle of casting a spell.
JUNE Well, Austin, looks like it’s working a treat!
(JUNE opens the shawl, exposing herself, advancing. SPARE retreats, gets a grip on himself)
SPARE It isn’t a spell to get you, June, lovely as you are. That is, I was thinking of you – but consciously!
(He wanders away from ‘JUNE’, distracted)
It’s not supposed to work like that.
JUNE (spooked) ‘ere! What’s goin’ on? Austin?
SPARE I don’t know, June. I seem to have come adrift… like an old barrage-balloon… could do with a couple of heavy-duty cables to moor me. Is this it, then? The old Near Death Experience? The bomb already struck. Blown to bits! And ‘ere you are, Austin, flailing about on the Astral, still sunk deep in denial. Kiboshed by your own spell. So this how Death enters: in a misplaced sigil.
(He holds the shawl over him like a blanket, speaking as an OLD MAN, a south Londoner recalling the night of the blitz:)
OLD MAN Them incendiary bombs whip up a proper fire-storm. Shops, pubs, whole streets that had once seemed so solid – all gone in a night, as if they’d never been. Morning after… smoke, stink, rubble… one old boy stranded on the top floor of his house with the walls sheared away. Old Austin, his place took a direct hit: paintings, drawings, his life’s work gone. Like that! He’s out on the street, hell of a state. Council sent him packing like an old tramp. The Luftwaffe done their worst. Then your post-war planners went and finished the job! What was left of his studio got buried under the new shoppin’ centre. Our Lost Elephant…
(SPARE removes, folds and neatly sets down the shawl. He sits at the table, staring at the crystal ball)
SPARE The worst is, to see it coming. I am psychic after all. But I can’t see… don’t know… if I die… or if I somehow survive my own annihilation.
(Knocking, off. He reacts, alarmed)
SPARE Jack! He must’ve been lurkin’ in the back of my mind when I was messin’ about with June… June! Quick!
(He ushers ‘JUNE’ behind the picture-frame)
I cast the cloak of invisibility!
(He throws the shawl over the frame, hiding “JUNE”)
(calls out) Coming! (seeing ‘JACK’, innocently) ‘ello, Jack!
(He reacts, as JACK:)
JACK Austin, what you playing at? You’re meant to be on fire-watch! Austin! You off with the fairies? It’s me! Jack! We’re on duty mate! Didn’t you ‘ear the siren? (sniffs) ‘ere! You got a bit of skirt in ‘ere? (sniffs, suspiciously) Not any old bit of skirt neither. My Missus! June! Where is she? Eh? Where’ve you ‘idden ‘er?
SPARE What can I say, Jack?
(He shrugs apologetically, then makes a magic pass, whipping away the shawl to reveal the empty frame)
“Ta-dah!” There’s your Missus, revealed in all ‘er glory.
JACK What’s all this, June? Doin’ a spot of life-modelling? You’re going to get such a smackin’!
(He reacts, as JUNE, brandishing the paintbrush like a knife)
JUNE One more step and I’ll cut yer!
(SPARE is now playing JACK, JUNE, and himself)
SPARE Easy, June! Now look, Jack, I know it don’t look good, but if you’ll just pipe down and listen, I can explain… This very night, Jack,
I been doin’ a spot of magic… which, if it succeeds, will soon sort out old Adolf and his bloomin’ Blitzkrieg! And! Bestow blessings on all humanity. But, for this spell to succeed, I had to banish all thought of it from my conscious mind. See? I was thinking of your good wife, but only so as to facilitate the unconscious projection of my conscious desire. You could even say old June played a vital part: by distracting me from fussing over the true purpose of this spell, thereby allowing it to manifest in my absence.
JUNE Will you listen to ‘im, Jack. You can see for yourself, ‘e’s in no state to do me any harm!
JACK For goodness sake, June. Put your knickers on! (to ‘SPARE’) You arty-farties might carry on like this in Mayfair, Austin. Over ‘ere you keep your ‘ands off your mate’s Missus!
SPARE I’m tellin’ you, Jack, it’s not what it seems! Me and June was in the very act of putting a hex on old Hitler…
JACK We’re about to get bombed to buggery – and ‘ere’s you and the Missus doin’ conjurin’ tricks in the altogether!
SPARE Well then, mate, you better be gettin’ your Missus down the shelter.
JACK And just pretend it never happened?
SPARE It’s not what happened, it’s what we do with it. We can make heaven or hell right here on earth – it’s all down to what we choose to believe. Basic principle of magic: if we behave as if it’s true, the world will rearrange itself accordingly. What happened here – what’s happening now! – is an act of magic. Not your South London Palace conjuring tricks! Observable alterations in reality. Because if you believe it – believe me, Jack – there’s no harm done. You can go on loving June for all that she is. Accept that she has her needs.
JACK You stay out of ‘er needs!
SPARE Not only the future – we can change the past! We can choose to act as if nothing happened. All we have to do is erase every trace of suspicion and jealousy from your mind. Now, I’m going to count us down from five. When I click my fingers, you’ll wake up. Five. Four.
JACK Oh, no you don’t! You don’t hypnotise me!
SPARE Three. Two. One.
(He clicks his fingers: snaps out of his self-hypnotic trance. He is, once again, alone)
Gone… What a palaver! We go all round the houses only to get to where we already are! Because where else is there? The Eternal Female leads us ever on… to the final…
(He sits at the table, as at the beginning. Lights fade to spotlight on the table)
“Knock knock.” Who’s there? “Austin?” Austin who? Austin the ladies’ man? Austin the Fireman? Austin the Astral Wireless repair-man? Austin “almost a ghost already, only the bones go last”.
(The wireless crackles to life: atmospherics and swooping frequencies. A green mist fills the room. Spectral entities flit about. SPARE speaks in the voice of a disincarnate spirit)
You won’t escape us, Austin, even here, buried alive in your own obscurity. We coil up from the deep – crowds of us! Ghosts, phantoms, unfulfilled selves – snaking up from underground… the faces in the green mist…
(as himself) The Austin Automata… projections… reflections… my own self… delusions. I am… nothing. No thing. In me all things arise and vanish without trace…
Don’t fixate. Do not attach. No fear. There is nothing to fear. This is the Spell that sets free from fear, free from ourselves. Here is nothing for any entity to fix on to. Only an empty channel, an absence, our shining empty open track-way to the stars…
(He indicates the empty picture-frame. Spectral light on the frame. He steps into the frame to “count down)
Five. I am… Austin Osman… Four. No more… The true Spare part, slipped in a spell to work in my absence… Three. Let go to live by its own light… Two. Now and forever… shining… empty… empty…
The wireless crackles to life, retuning itself through atmospherics to the whine of a falling bomb.
One! Not one. And not “not”. Neither Neither… The bomb blasts 56a Walworth Road but there’s nothing left to destroy. Mr Spare has already left the garret.
(Sound of an explosion as the bomb detonates. Blackout.
Lights up. The ACTOR, no longer in character, briskly removes and discards the artist’s smock)
ACTOR Well, that’s that! All done and dusted! A Faustian fable… Mr Spare casts a spell: all hell breaks loose. Or does it? If our brief intercourse with the Borough Magus has taught us anything, it is that, with our Mr Spare, nothing is what it seems. True, all the fictions enacted herein are grounded in the facts of his life, through to that dreadful night of the inferno that engulfed the Elephant and Castle. Yes, and his place really did take a direct hit – the bomb searing its death’s-head imprint on the wall. Body blasted, blind in one eye, with crippled hand, hobbling about the ruins of the Elephant, a ghost, the shadow of Spare…
But he’ll live – to draw and paint close on a thousand new works – not bad for a dead man! Yes, on closer inspection, we see that Mr Spare is up to his old tricks. The action apparently takes place during the blitz, on the night of 10th May 1941. But observe how cunningly he subverts his own “chronologies”, cutting and shuffling his pack of tall stories, offering tantalising glimpses of autobiography, only to whip the rug from under our feet.
Those throwaway allusions to “young Master Kenneth”? Spare only met Kenneth and Steffi Grant after the war. They played an important part in his rehabilitation. The text is riddled with such clues: that all this is happening, not during the blitz, but fifteen years later – at the precise moment of Spare’s death, from “natural causes”, on 15th May 1956.
As if… As if the magic spell had worked – to de-construct, dismember, and then, literally “re-member” an alternate reality. He retrieves the detonation of the German bomb as the flash of Nirvana, the Buddhist paradise which to all the world looks like nothing at all, the negation of all categories, but which, to the Adept, reveals that “shining emptiness” to which his life’s work aspires and in which it finds, at last, its consummation. The Master walks through a hidden door in the wall of knives…
Now, counting us back down from: Five. Could it be that, even as we were distracted by the business with Jack and June, Mr Spare’s magic was at work within us.
Four. He may, or not, have played a part in the defeat of Hitler’s Third Reich. I leave that to future occult historians. But I put it to you that it is as if his mighty spell has already worked.
Three. That, in his chaotic way, he opened a door into Eternity, and that, if we dare to step through it, we may just catch a glimpse of our Borough Magus, cavorting on his “shining empty open track-way to the stars”. Two. And, if we listen very hard,
we may yet catch his echo: “One, two… One, two…”
(Spotlight on the ACTOR at the desk, slowly fading as he speaks SPARE’s last words, his voice fading to a whisper)
Knock, knock. “Who’s there?” Austin. “Austin Who?”
Austin All and Nothing. Austin Here and There.
Austin Neither Neither. I am… Austin… Osman… Spare…
(BLACKOUT)
