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Ohio Impromptu
Background >
Character
 
A man is haunted by the words he once wrote of his experience of personal loss and inescapable suffering. The autobiographical account recorded his rejection of a time ‘when there was a chance of happiness’. Now he is nothing more than his account’s Reader and Listener. These two entities are all that constitute his present existence.
An autobiographical monologue cannot be told directly by a person’s former identity, which no longer exists. With first person identity no longer existing, the condition of that human existence may only be recounted now in the third person. The memory of the man that existed may now only be articulated and listened to, by his Reader and Listener.
The identity of the autobiographical ‘I’ being but a memory, the original first person account can now only be reported as something that ‘he’ said:
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R: Finally he said, I have had word from–and here he named the dear name–that I shall not come again. I saw the dear face and heard the unspoken words…
Or, more accurately, the first person account must be expunged entirely – for necessary recognition of the loss of the first person – by L’s knocking interruption:
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[L knocks.]
R: Saw the dear face and heard the unspoken words…
So often has he listened to the memory that he and it have grown ‘to be as one’. Memory has consumed all his attention. Reader and Listener have come to resemble one another. Nothing else characterises his present existence. ‘They’ are all that remain of the identity once articulated by ‘I’.
Eventually fused ‘as one’, ‘they’ can only but cease to be when – like all humanity – their words are all ended and the darkness envelopes them. With ‘nothing left to tell,’ the human condition is exposed as one ‘of mindlessness. Whither no light can reach.’
 
‘I wanted to … create this extraordinary image of a man talking to himself’, writes Charles Sturridge, Director. ‘I particularly wanted to literally encircle the action – to wholly convince the eye that there were two palpable beings, who were separate entities, who at the end of the piece become the same. Hence the complicated physical technique of remote-control camera, which is a machine-driven camera which can effortlessly replicate its movements, so that you can shoot both actors with exactly the same movement. If you have a still camera, there's no problem, you can just move the actor; but in this instance, I wanted the camera to literally encircle the action, to draw us into the story we are being told.’
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