ABSTRACT
This chapter will identify and consider what each scene contributes to the first impressions made by the play. Scene /one deserves particular focus, as it is the longest scene in performance, but is intensely and insistently enigmatic in the questions it generates. It also sets up a practical challenge for the production team: how to suggest and interpret physically the initial stage directions, ‘3.24 a.m./The M60 ring road./A car circles the city./ZEPPO drives. OLLIE listens.’ The limitations of realistic body language (and literalist props such as a steering wheel or car seats) will result in a static enclosure: I suggest it may be better if effects of lighting and sound evoke the setting and premise, permitting the performers a larger spectrum of body language and interactive gesture. Indeed, the third presence, ‘a figure in a Cthulhu mask’, raises further questions: is this a character in the play (who will become identifiable later in the play, perhaps as Keaton) wearing a mask? Or is H.P. Lovecraft’s unnerving demon Cthulhu to be portrayed as an actual character in this play? Or can this be made indeterminate?
