Well, Daddy, are you watching this?Diane Samuels and Tracy Ann-Oberman
WHO Arnold Lasky, thirty-five, Jewish, from Liverpool.
TO WHOM His dead father.
WHERE The living room of the Lasky family house, Hope Street, Liverpool.
WHEN Monday 5th July 1948.
WHAT HAS JUST HAPPENED Arnold Lasky and two of his three sisters have been living in the family home, bequeathed to them on the death of their father a year earlier. Arnold is a talented scholar. He speaks several languages and is a gifted artist and musician, but when he falls in love with local girl, Debbie Pollack, and subsequently marries her, his hopes turn sour. His wife is overbearing and, following the birth of their son, Arnold loses all artistic and academic ambitions. Having been roped into working for the council, he gives up on his PhD. Then, while his wife embarks on an affair with Councillor Peter O’Donnell, Arnold, who is now also working as an accountant for Debbie’s father, a butcher, slips further and further into debt. He has a gambling habit, which is costly, and, by the end of the play, having first remortgaged the house without the sisters’ permission, he is forced to sell it to his father-in-law. Here, as he is pressured to make over the deeds, he imagines talking to his dead father and wonders what he would have made of it all.
WHAT TO CONSIDER
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Gertie, Rita and May are the names of his three sisters. |
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As the only boy he was adored and much money was spent on his education. |
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He knows he has wasted his time and squandered his opportunities. Worst of all, he has disappointed his sisters. Decide to what extent his gambling is a reaction to his overwhelming sense of failure. |
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His sister, May, describes him as having become ‘fat and sweaty’. |
By the time of the monologue, Arnold and Debbie have had two children. Arnold has come to loathe his wife. |
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Familiarise yourself with the plight of the Jews during the Second World War and the key political and historical events that lead to the formation of Palestine as the new Jewish State. |
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‘Kvetch’ is a Yiddish word meaning to complain, grumble or moan. |
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‘YomTov’ are Jewish holidays. |
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The play is a reworking of Chekhov’s Three Sisters. You may like to read the original. |
WHAT HE WANTS
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His father’s approval. (Regardless of the fact that it is too late.) |
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To give vent to his feelings of frustration and claustrophobia. |
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To justify his own weakness at what he is about to do. |
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Forgiveness. |
KEYWORDS existed weighty bought sell expect expecting snuffed interfering nowhere
Arnold
Well, Daddy, are you watching this?
He picks up a pen from the table.
When did you and Mummy first take over from the Weinbergs and move in here? Before the Great War. Before the four of us existed. And now you’re a grandpa, so I’m sure you’ll understand that our Bobby and baby Marilyn must be well taken care of. That’s the only reason I’m doing this, Daddy. And Joe Pollack is family. A more doting grandpa you couldn’t hope to find. And the mortgage is weighty. I don’t suppose that this is quite what you hoped for me. To be bought out. Or to sell out. Depends how you look at it. But then not much ends up how we expect, does it, Daddy, when you’re stuck in a community of, what, ten thousand Jews, that seems like it’s about fifty thousand strong. God help me. Small-minded busybodies always poking their nose in, giving advice, expecting you to fit in and not stand out. And all they care about isn’t learning and books and the meaning of life or the beauty of art, but what they eat and what’s scarce and endless bloody weather and could they one day afford their own car or even a television, now wouldn’t that be something? And they enjoy a few drinks and cigarettes, if they can get hold of any these days, and a good gossip and a right old kvetch and bit of rumpy-pumpy behind the hubby’s back and a new hat for Yom Tov and on and on and on it goes, and this is what they teach the kids whose spark of life is snuffed out just like theirs so that they carry on being the same small-minded, tunnel-visioned, self-important, interfering busybodies going nowhere for ever!
He looks through the papers sadly.
Oh Gertie. Oh Rita. Dearie, dearie me. Oh May.