Shipwreck
By Anne Washburn
Directed by Rupert Goold
CREATIVE TEAM
Writer: Anne Washburn
Direction: Rupert Goold
Design: Miriam Buether
Costume Design: Fly Davis
Light: Jack Knowles
Sound: Paul Arditti
Video: Luke Halls
Composition: Max Perryment
Voice: Brett Tyne
Costume Supervision: Lisa Aitken
Casting: Amy Ball
Associate Designer: Joana Dias
Associate Video Designer: Zakk Hein
Resident Director: Caitlin McLeod
CAST
Khalid Abdalla
Fisayo Akinade
Raquel Cassidy
Risteárd Cooper
Elliot Cowan
Tara Fitzgerald
Adam James
Justine Mitchell
almeida.co.uk/shipwreck
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TRANSCRIPT:
I mean the Constitution is a particularly damning bit of evidence anyway, that particular bit of practice where you can take… my four year old daughter. Who is not a reliable tier of her own shoe. Whose requirement of a stuffed owl to sleep with is so inflexible that we have a second backup stuffed owl on hand in case there is an (unspecified) owl tragedy. Whose very favorite activity is the telling of terrible terrible meandering absurdist jokes with mysterious punchlines.
You can take this child and - you can actually, you are legally entitled to remove this child from my arms, and to give her to another person. In exchange for money. And that person can take her and… can set her tasks. Tasks which she does not enjoy, and which in no way educate her, or stimulate her creativity or make her a better more disciplined person with greater potential for success upon completion tasks which exhaust her, bore her, and wear her down tasks which cause her to feel despair, and loneliness this person can keep her up long past her bedtime until she is bewildered they don’t ever have to give her that surprisingly expensive vanilla sheep milk yogurt she loves so much as a special treat they can give her crap cheap food full of hormones and corn syrup and dye, they can let her hunger and when she stumbles, and she hurts herself, and she cries, no one has to pick her up, and to kiss her, and to make it better.
There is a place he does not go, that he moves right over. No one has to love her. And I will never see her again. And she will never see me again. And she will always know that her daddy, that her daddy, that her daddy couldn’t protect her.
It will take him a moment to continue. He will continue. You can sell my child to a stranger. And you can sleep soundly at night. And that particular, in a post-Enlightenment landscape of proto secular human rights theologies, that does strike me as being particularly about race.
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