Dennis Kelly: Plays One

moved, you know, no sign of her for the rest of the night, and I'm thinking, reactions and responses, patterns, violence breeding violence, and the next night she's in a bit further and I'm looking at her tail thinking ‘that's been cut off’ and I don't think it was, I think she's a Manx, I think they're born without tails, and the next night she's further in and I'm beginning to get used to this, beginning to look forward to it. And the next night she's in and she's eating and from then on she's in every night; she's on my lap, she's following me around, she's waiting on the window ledge for me when I get home. And we sit there every night and I'm thinking behaviour and patterns and is it actually possible to break these patterns or whatever and she's eating and meowing to be let in. Every night. And one night she scratches me, out of the blue, cats, you know, just a vindictive cat-scratch, look:

Shows him.

see?
MARK: Yeah.
LOUISE: Just here.
MARK: Yeah.

Beat.
LOUISE: She knew she'd done wrong.

Took her three nights to get back into my lap. And I'm stroking her and thinking. Warm, delicate, you know. And I put my hands around her neck. And I squeeze. And I squeeze. Until her neck is about the thickness of a rope. And still I squeeze. And I'm sitting there – and this is last night – with this dead cat in my lap, and I thought I'd come in and see you.

And here I am.

LOUISE: I think a lot about what makes people do things. What makes us behave in certain ways, you know. Every night I been thinking about this. Trapped in whatever, behaviour, I dunno, cycles of violence or something and is it possible to break, these cycles, is it possible to break… And I'd be sitting there thinking about this and this cat, this gorgeous cat with no tail would come to my door, I'd have the back door open because the garden looks, and she'd be terrified at first, it looks beautiful it really does. So I bought some food for her and the first time she just sniffed at it and ran away, the moment I

THE LAST CHICKEN ON EARTH
MICHELLE: My mother died of Joy. On the day that I was born, while I sat there hanging in my mother's fluid, suspended in aspic, my thumb in my mouth, my mother and father experienced a wave of joy so profound that as it washed over them and frothed on their skins they instinctively knew that not to find expression for this heat would mean the end of all three of us, the fabric of our bodies collapsing on a molecular level in the face of such extremes of energy and so my dad cooked a chicken. He had seen this on TV. A man cooking a chicken. He had to do this because of the bundle of life wrapped up in my mother's belly – me, yes me – a mess of skin, flesh, bone, placenta and God's holy bounty about to become detached and walk amongst them bringing happiness and purpose to their lives. That was how they felt. It was. You can imagine their irritating smiles as they sat in expectant silence, this ever expanding growth of chromosomes rendering words useless, occasionally catching each other's eye and laughing like streams, my dad capering now into the kitchen, if a sixteen-stone man who in all probability was pissed can be said to caper.

Chicken was definitely the answer. When this man on the telly cooked chicken you could tell that he understood joy, you could tell