Revolution takes place on and near a skyblue Gerbil exercise wheel which the two players—Estragon and Oregon (reunited from Brief Play # 4, Getting By), who will participate only in High Art enterprises—seem to regard as something akin to Alexandr Vesnin’s constructivist set for the Alexandr Tairov production of G.K. Chesterton’s The Man Who Was Thursday, staged at The Chamber (Kamerny)Theatre in Moscow in 1922-23.
In what follows, Estragon plays Lucian Gregory, an anarchist poet. Oregon plays Gabriel Syme, recruited by Scotland Yard to an anti-anarchist police unit.
ESTRAGON (standing on the now stationary wheel): All poetry is revolution. Revolt is the very essence of poetry!
OREGON (standing on the stage floor, near the exercise apparatus): Nonsense. Poetry is based on law, not on revolution. Poetry builds form, it doesn’t dismantle it.
ESTRAGON: You have the soul of a town clerk. You are a pocket bureaucrat, an enemy to life!
OREGON: You about talk about the spurious glories of poetry? Do you know what is the highest, most poetical achievements of human creation? I’ll tell you, my ragged little anarchist. It’s the timetable for the London Underground.
ESTRAGON: You fool! You pedestrian! You manhole cover!!
OREGON: For my part, I don’t think you’re really very serious either about your poetry or your anarchism. I think you simply enjoy assuming any available recalcitrant position. I think you like taking stands and assuming stances. You have convinced yourself your distaff life is creative only because it is oppositional.
ESTRAGON: Oh yes? Well, you’ll see. How about mingling a little more with the oppositional? Come with me to an anarchist meeting being held tonight. I’m going to introduce you there to seven fascinating men—each of whom will alter your life profoundly.
OREGON: And who might they be?
ESTRAGON: Think of them as the seven days of the week. I’ll introduce you first to “Monday.”
ORGEGON: A reasonable place to begin. And when do I meet the others “days”?
ESTRAGON. In the second act. Be patient, O Unimaginative One!
(curtain)
