Selections from Deep Heat were first performed at a National Theatre Platform in London on 9 May 2011.
Deep Heat, subtitled ‘Encounters with the Famous, the Infamous and the Unknown’, contains verbatim monologues collected and edited by Robin Soans. The following excerpt is the written voice of twenty-five year old CAROLINE KENDAL, who hosts a radio programme featuring world music. Here we find her in the middle of one of her shows, sitting in a studio with headphones on. She introduces a musical track then removes her headphones to talk to the interviewer about her road rage experiences.
I’m Caroline Kendall with two hours of world music and it’s just coming up to nine minutes to five o’clock; and to take us up to the news, weather and the latest sports news and to put you in a romantic mood for the evening ahead, we have three Brazilian love songs with the generic title Come se voce estivesse la sung by Las Columbinas, and the girls’ voices are accompanied by nose-flutes, pan pipes, guitar, djembes, and the soft serenading of viola de gamba; so light a candle, open the red wine, and allow yourself to melt into the full embrace of Latin magic… (Headphones off.)
My road rage continues onwards and upwards. My anger knows no bounds. I’ll tangle with anything…giant buses, intercontinental juggernauts ferrying carcasses of frozen beef…it’s a disorder…I have to get them back…even if someone’s just looked at me. I was in Greenwich. I had the window down…these two scuzz-bags drew alongside…gave me that look…‘Get your tits out’…I gave them a filthy look, so they pushed in front. We went racing round…at the next lights I shouted, ‘Where did you get your driving license…the same place you got your shirts?’ They were wearing these crimplene shirts…one in orange, the other in pink, and they looked like Teletubbies only slightly less attractive…and the orange Teletubby got out and kicked the front of my car, and got back in again, and started driving off…my car’s called Pascal, named after a Swiss chef, and I thought, ‘Those bastards have dented Pascal’ and I chased them. My car horn wore out. George at the garage said he’d never known a horn wear out before. There we were at eighty miles an hour narrowly missing old ladies and packs of Brownies…I was shouting at them…’Bastard fucking Teletubby miscreant shit-bags’…got their number…we did two double-U turns on Tower Bridge… ended up outside Sadler’s Wells. They stopped their car, so I stopped mine…felt a bit stupid now, cos I didn’t know what I was going to do really. This time the pink Teletubby got out, came over to my car, ripped the car keys out and threw them in a hedge, and then pulled me out through the driver’s window, and dumped me on the pavement, and then drove off. I had bruises all up my thighs…I had to be at work in forty minutes to do my evening show…frantically phoning the police. A week later PC Plod came round to do the business, and then a week later I got a letter saying, ‘We’re not going to pursue this.’ I phoned back saying, ‘What the fuck are you playing at? Innocent female etc. etc.’ and demanded to be put on to someone more senior…and then more senior… eventually got to the bloke with five hundred pips on his shoulder, and he said, ‘The thing is, those two men were part of the Brinks Matt Robbery Gang, and they’re going down for twenty-five years anyway. It’s not really worth trying to get another six months on the sentence for menacing you.’ It turns out the man who pulled me through the window was the third most dangerous man in Europe. I didn’t chase anyone for a week after that.