Set Description
Imagery in the printed version begins with the opening staged directions. Although the audience will not be privy to this information under usual circumstances, the director and production designers should be responsible for delivering the intent as actual visual imagery. That the playwright has a specific concept in mind for the setting design is more than clear from these directions:
The play opens in a small inner suburban police station built fairly recently but already having an air of decrepit inefficiency. SERGEANT DAN SIMMONDSs, fat and fiftyish, lounges at a battered old desk from which he surveys CONSTABLE NEVILLE ROSS as if he were auditioning him for a crucial role in some play.
The Puppet Master
This opening description situates Simmonds as a manipulative puppet master who has managed to get to fifty, get fat and keep his job because he has learned how to avoid getting his own hands dirty. As the play progresses to its climax, the imagery of Simmonds as a conductor of mayhem—one of those conductors who put their whole body into the job—reaches its visual zenith in the metaphor of his remaining at center stage while the violence he incites remains unseen even by him, offstage, as nothing but a symphony of horrifying sounds:
(ROSS can take it no longer. He goes temporarily berserk and launches himself at KENNY who is taken by surprise and drops the chair. ROSS knocks him to the floor, punches him and starts to bash his head against the floor. KENNY breaks free and backs away in terror at the ferocity of ROSS’S attack He breaks away and moves out into the kitchen, which is offstage. ROSS chases him. There are crashes and blows offstage. SIMMONDS grins to himself.)
Oh My God, They Killed Kenny!
Actors are advised to ignore most stage directions which indicate response performance they are supposed to be giving unless it is an absolute requirement central to the overall cohesion of the play. A good example is the imagery which describes in vivid detail certain performance choices the actor playing Kenny is expected to provide. The necessity of the actor’s performance at the very least appropriating the intent these directions is self-apparent:
(During SIMMONDS’ speech ROSS’S eyes pass to KENNY and they fix in horror as he sees that KENNY is sitting bolt upright with a frozen look of terror and pain in his eyes. He has just suffered a massive and catastrophic cerebral haemorrhage as a result of his injuries. His can drops to the floor. ROSS gets to him just as he topples off his chair, and lowers him to the floor.)
The Removalist
For those not familiar with this Australian term, the equivalent would be something between a representative of a moving company hired to physical transport possessions from one domicile to another. The unnamed removalist here has been hired for a job that is more like a cross between a mover and a repo man: the stuff is will still belong to Kenny, but it is going to be removed whether Kenny agrees or not. The removalist enters in the midst of two police officers investigating alleged domestic abuse charges against Kenny and remains committed to his job throughout the investigation’s transformation into police brutality on its way to officer-involved homicide. The image of his steadfast committing to putting the requirements of his job and his own cocksure awareness of how best to do that job becomes the very image of the apathetic citizen willing to overlook inhumanity as long as gets paid for the work he’s done.
