Precious Little Talent (NHB Modern Plays)

Because eventually you have to close your mouth, stop staring, get the fuck off the rooftop and go to work and that’s what you have to believe in, you have to believe in getting up at dawn, and you have to believe in fourteen-hour shifts, you have to believe being alone is okay, you have to believe that shit magazine job might be the first step to something else. Rooftops, stars, midnight runs – they’re just going to make it harder to get up in the morning.

Aren’t I? Aren’t I? Because I can’t shake the feeling, Sam, that you, you and all your smiling and your starry-eyed fucking – I just walked up Fifth Avenue – and it’s all big and shiny and the cars are huge and the buildings all stretching themselves up into the stars and lights on Broadway all shouting their success into the night like everyone is just bound to be a big success! And then you go and sit in a café and all the waitresses are failed actresses and failed singers and on the subway there are a billion adverts for pissy little classes and you just know those waitresses are going to be serving coffee for the rest of their

ve spent my whole life jumping through these hoops that were meant to lead somewhere, I worked my arse off at school, at each stage, GCSEs, A-levels, I busted a fucking gut at uni whilst everyone else was getting pissed and getting laid and it was all meant to be so that when I left, I’d – I’d land somewhere. But it’s like I made it through the final hoop, fucking degree in my hand and smile on my face, ready to enjoy my job and my security and then someone just smacked me in the face with a fucking spade. I got sacked from a bar job, there aren’t any other crap jobs left, I haven’t landed anywhere.

them, I’m not flying the flag of revolution, I don’t have fire in my belly or idealism on my tongue and I’m not singing the song of change and why? Because I don’t know the words yet; but I will, we will. I won’t be forgotten.

what you believed in – just as long as you knew how to believe.
And just as he appeared and all the flags started waving and young kids started whooping and older men and women shed some quieter tears, Sam turned to me and he wrapped me right up in his scarf and he said –
‘Now, you’ve got to believe in this – right?’
And I looked at him, and he had this stupid smile on his face, grinning ear to fucking ear, and suddenly I realised what kind of balls it takes just to think that the world isn’t such a bad place.
But of course, Sam, Dad, even that new President of theirs, they weren’t really mine to believe in, not for ever anyway. No, us British, English – well, me – I’m not like

couldn’t really stop myself from finding it all horribly sad. (Controls tears.)
In January Sam took me away for the weekend – and when got to Washington, strangers were high-fiving each other and smiling and everyone seemed so – excited. It was that same feeling I’d had, on that rooftop on Christmas Day, right in the pit of my stomach, looking at all those tiny lights holding tiny lives and knowing that they were part of something – but that something was bigger than them – and it was good. And when it came to it, with the sun peeking itself out behind the Washington Monument, and looking down The Mall and seeing two million people waiting, exercising the muscle of – faith – well, I thought that it didn’t really matter

enemy and that’d make you want to fight and it’d make it clear what you were fighting for and it might even allow for a hero or two.
I said this to Sam, who, it transpired, one got used to over time – sure there were differences; sex, for example. I liked the British kind, angsty, passionate but essentially joyless and for him, well it was sort of like going to the Oscars, lots of tears and thank-yous and I felt he struggled with an overwhelming urge to clap at the end.
We sat with Dad, and played board games and talked and – Sam would take over when Dad forgot things, or when I found dirty plates in the cupboard or his shaving stuff in the cutlery drawer, or once when he struggled for my name – Sam stepped in at times when I just

’s a movement, isn’t it? That’s what they call it. When people feel the same thing in their soul at the same time – they call it a movement. I’ve always been jealous that I never got to ban the bomb, or burn my bras, jealous of people that lived through the war because, well, they had a common

A shitty unpaid magazine job and a job in a café, a flat that I can’t afford, a routine that stops me going mad, three friends that took me six months to make and stopped me feeling so lonely that I thought I was going to break in half, a lifestyle that keeps me busy enough that I don’t think about the fact my dad got buried yesterday, Sam – that, that is what I have to lose. So no, I won’t go running through London, I won’t – dance until dawn – I won’t run off to America – because you end up starstruck in a station or on a rooftop – with your mouth open

stars, midnight runs – they’re just going to make it harder to get up in the morning.
SAM. I can’t believe you’ve given up.
JOEY. I’m not giving up, I’m just getting started.
End of play.