Fionnuala's Reviews > Confessions of an English Opium Eater

The Opium Eaters, a comedy, based on the sleeping habits of Thomas de Quincey and Marcel Proust.

Characters:
Marcel Proust
Thomas de Quincey

The curtain goes up on a bedroom scene. Two of the walls are cork-lined, the third is a bare stone wall roughly coated with Roman cement. In the angle of the two cork-lined walls is a narrow wrought-iron bedstead covered with an eiderdown quilt and beside it, a night-table on which lie books, papers, and a little brass bell.
Against the stone wall there is a brass bedstead piled high with blankets, and beside it a night-table on which lie books, papers, and a little gold bottle.
There is someone lying on each of the beds.

Marcel Proust:
Longtemps, je me suis couché de bonne heure...
(Propping himself on his elbow, he becomes aware of the audience and immediately reaches for the bell which he rings impatiently while calling out for his servant to come and close the curtains):
Françoise, Françoise, il faut fermer les rideaux - il y a une foule immense devant la fenêtre!

Thomas de Quincey, (sitting up in his bed angrily):
My dear sir, desist immediately from your tintinnabulous propensities. These velvet drapes will be closed at the end of the scene and not before, so you are wasting your breath, which I see you have little enough of, in calling for it to be done ahead of time. And indeed your feeble efforts are doubly futile since the character you call for is not even in the play, and the people you speak of are only the audience, such a harmless group that is in no way to be feared, unlike the horrible hoards who people my own dreams; and can I caution you, dear sir, for I perceive you to be something of a valetudinarian, against becoming a confirmed heautontimourousmenos...

Marcel Proust, (rubbing his eyes):
Bougre! Qui est-ce qui me lance des propos incompréhensibles plein de mots intérminables et de phrases impénétrables?

T de Q, (swinging his legs over the side of the bed):
Ah, you wonder who addresses you in such elaborately constructed language? Allow me to introduce myself.
(He walks to the centre of the stage)
I am Thomas de Quincey and you and I are characters in a play, and please note, my dear sir, that this play is in English, and therefore oblige us by refraining from any outbursts à la française henceforth. I might remind you also that this play is being staged in the year of our Lord, 2013 to mark the bicentenary of the events contained in one of the chapters of the most famous of my works, the essay with the much disputed title among my peers of 'Confessions', yes, my dear sir, not a sensational 'Diary of an Addict', but the humble Confessions of an English Opium Eater, and a work furthermore in which my contemporaries believed I was being too confidential and too communicative..

MP, (rising from his bed to look at a calendar hanging on the wall):
But if this is indeed the year 2013, then this play is surely meant to mark the centenary of the publication of my most famous work, my 'Recherche', that single work on which I devoted the labour of my whole life, and had dedicated my intellect, blossoms and fruits, to the slow and elaborate toil of constructing it...

T de Q, (holding up a document):
I think that you are on the wrong page of the script, my dear sir, those are in fact my lines, taken directly from page 175 of the 'Confessions', referring to my own life’s work, begun upon too great a scale for the resources of the architect alas, and which because of the very subject of this play, was likely to stand as a memorial of hopes defeated, of baffled efforts, of materials uselessly accumulated; of foundations laid that were never to support a super-structure, of the grief and the ruin of the architect.

MP, (moving towards the front of the stage and speaking directly to the audience):
Strange how these words of his recall my own fears and doubts concerning the completion and future acclaim of the 'Recherche', although I always subscribed to the belief that true works of art are slow to receive their full recognition, and must wait for a period when the author himself will have crumpled to dust. This centenary celebration, and your devoted presence proves me right.
(He nibbles on the corner of his moustache and mumbles to himself): Where are the Bergottes and the Blochs? All gone and forgotten while I alone have survived to become the keystone of modern literature...

T de Q, (lying down again upon his bed):
But alas, opium had a palsying effect on my intellectual faculties...

MP, (walking across to T’s bedside table, picking up the gold bottle and sniffing its contents):
I too have often reflected on the kinds of sleep induced by the multiple extracts of ether, of valerian, of opium...

T de Q, (closing his eyes):
I must now pass to what is the main subject of these confessions, to the history of what took place in my dreams. At night, when I lay in my bed, vast processions passed along in mournful pomp; friezes of never-ending stories, that to my feelings were as sad and as solemn as if they were stories drawn from times before Oedipus or Priam, before Tyre, before Memphis.

MP, (massaging his temples):
I feel something quiver in me, shift, try to rise, the glimmer of a visual memory, the elusive eddying of stirred-up colours...a magic lantern full of impalpable iridescences, multicoloured apparitions where legends are depicted as in a wavering, momentary stained-glass window...

T de Q, (in a dreamy voice):
A theatre seemed suddenly opened and lighted up within my brain, which presented nightly spectacles of more than earthly splendour. As the creative state of the eye increased, a sympathy seemed to arise between the waking and the dreaming states of the brain in one point, that whatsoever I happened to call up and to trace by a voluntary act upon the darkness was very apt to transfer itself to my dreams...


MP, (going back to sit on the side of his bed):
Yes, what one has meant to do during the day, one accomplishes only in one’s dreams, that is to say after it has been distorted by sleep into following another line than one would have chosen when awake. The same story branches off and has a different ending.

T de Q:
All this and other changes in my dreams were accompanied by deep-seated anxiety and gloomy melancholy, such as wholly incommunicable by words...

MP, (lying down):
But my sadness was only increased by those multi-coloured apparitions of the lantern..

T de Q:
The sense of space, and in the end the sense of time, were both powerfully affected. Buildings, landscapes, &c., were exhibited in proportions so vastly as the bodily eye is not fitted to receive....

MP, (closing his eyes):
In Combray, I moved through the church...a space with, so to speak, four dimensions - the fourth being Time - extending over the centuries...

T de Q:
The minutist incidents of childhood, or forgotten scenes of later years, were often revived...

MP:
I have many pictures preserved by my memory of what Combray was during my childhood..

T de Q:
The following dream...a Sunday morning in May...Easter Sunday..right before me lay the scene which could really be commanded from that situation, but exalted, as was usual, and solemnised by the power of dreams...the hedges were rich with white roses...

MP:
It was at Easter...in the month of May that I remember...in the church..little branches of buds of a dazzling whiteness...

T de Q:
I find it impossible to banish the thought of death when I am walking alone in the endless days of summer...


MP:
That summer day seemed as dead, as immemorially ancient as...a mummy


T de Q:
Zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz...........

MP:
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Audience:
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Readers:
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