'Believe again in lies fed by leaders and playwrights'

Today is the closing day for our Tiny Plays competition with Fishamble. In the last of our plays by leading writers, DERMOT BOLGERpresents 'Where Will We Go'

A playlet to close an evening of short plays

This playlet occurs when it appears that the evening of plays is over. The cast of the previous playlet have left the stage and stage-hands enter to seemingly dismantle the set. They bring on a ladder, hammers and saws, but work noiselessly, unobtrusively. An actress rises from the end seat as the stagehands enter, her timing letting the audience quickly grasp that she is a part of the play. As she speaks she holds the audience with her gaze, while quietly making her way to mount the steps to the stage. On stage she briefly observes and moves among the stagehands who seem oblivious to her.

Actress: Where will we go now, when we are not truly dead, but no longer live inside some actress; when we are condemned to be locked away inside the pages of an old script? When these carpenters strike the set, when we have no borrowed body to inhibit; no stolen voice to allow us say those things we desperately needed to say on the night we entered a playwright's imagination as they drifted towards sleep; when we demanded they switch back on the bedroom light and find a pen to let us speak; when we refused to stop haunting them until we made ourselves heard.

You – the audience – can simply go home. But we are trapped in the limbo we created when we indentured ourselves as phantoms of their imaginations. The writers knew our names the moment they began to write in bed or searched for a notebook when stopped at traffic lights. We ambushed them. One moment we did not exist: the next they knew every intonation of our voice, our past stories, our ultimate fates. We haunted them till they wrote us down – like we haunted you all evening, demanding you too play your part in giving purpose to our unlived existences.

Reaching the stage, she looks back at the audience.

But leave now. You’ve played your part. You were fed lies you chose to believe. Leave with the stage hands, the actors, the bar staff: only we belong here after the lights go out. We wait here like inhabitants of a ghost estate on the edge of a flood plain: apparently a place but not really a place because it exists on no map, its room still waiting to be inhabited.

It was all lies, a fantasy that felt real because people in the next seats seemed to believe in it too. This land we conjured never existed except during the brief seconds when you loaned us your belief so we could materialise, like an unexplained presence at a seance, seemingly real because everyone held their breath and surrounded disbelief.

Sadly it was a three-card conman’s trick. So blink now in the houselights, realise you’ve been collectively fooled again. Drive home past abandoned apartment blocks, roads petering out into nowhere. These are the backdrop to the greatest feat of theatre you never saw: where magicians produced rabbits from hats, illusions so grandiose no playwright could dare invent them.

Tonight I watched an actress walk nervously from the Green Room, skirt cables masked by tape and passing through muslin flats to dazzlingly become me – a character that doesn’t exist. It’s time we disappeared now, like people’s money and dreams.

Part of us goes home inside you: part of us lives on in the actors who played us. But in truth we’re trapped here, our voices flitting like bats between the fly-lofts after everyone has left. We wait here for you to let us live again; to gather strength from your empathy, your need to let yourself be seduced, surrender your trust, to believe again in lies being fed to you by confidence-tricksters, leaders and playwrights, in fabulous, unobtainable illusions that, just like us, are suddenly there, and, just as suddenly, are gone.

She exits. Lights go down on stagehands.

Think you can write a Tiny Play?

You have until close of business today to enter the Tiny Plays for Ireland competition and have your play staged by Fishamble The New Play Company. E-mail a play of no more than 600 words to fishambletinyplays@irishtimes.com.

Fishamble will choose the winners and pay each a fee of €250. They will work with the writer on the development of the commissioned plays and produce them from March 15th to 31st, at the Project Arts Centre, Dublin.