The Recruiting Office by Dave Duggan; abridged extracts: text and audio

The Recruiting Office by Dave Duggan 

DCSDC and DTUC Workers' Rights and Social Justice Week on-line Festival 2020

Hello there. Sé do bheatha. My name is Dave Duggan, presenting abridged extracts from my play, The Recruiting Office. I wrote and directed it, as a Sole Purpose Production, in 2004. It toured community venues in the district. I planned to do a new production and tour, as part of the Festival, organised by Derry City and Strabane District Council and Derry Trades’ Union Council, for Workers’ Rights and Social Justice Week. You know what happened to those plans. 

So here’s some lockdown theatre then, in this year’s on-line festival. 

1. A young man and a slightly older woman, wearing suits, turn up at the recruiting office. The man speaks first.

MAN: I’m simply looking for work. To get on the job. Here, at the recruiting office.

WOMAN: Me too. So let’s get down to business.

MAN: Business? Have you an education? A trade?

WOMAN: I had. Seamstress. Overlocker. Cuffer. Stitcher. I’ve done more than twenty years in the shirt factories. All closed. Have you a trade?

MAN: None. I’m a scholar.

WOMAN: If you were not so well dressed, I would have taken you for a poet. Such soft hands.

MAN: I work in software. (beat, explaining) Computer code. Not verses.

WOMAN: I worked in hardware. Hard wearing shirts that women crafted and machined until the world had no use for us. He’s not here then? Nobody is here then?

MAN: No.

2. They’re both looking for work. As are many, many others. But who should 

get the job in the software sector? The woman doesn’t hang about.

WOMAN: What brought you here?

MAN: Hunger and ambition.

WOMAN: The first I know about. The second I’ve never really understood. And what would you do to satisfy this hunger?

MAN: Anything.

WOMAN: You would take any job he’d give you?

MAN: Beggars can’t be choosers.

WOMAN: Now you’re a beggar. Something of a comedown from a scholar. When did that happen?

MAN: Soon as I left the university. I have debts. I have a loan to repay. I want a job.

WOMAN: Ah yes. But do you deserve one?

MAN: I’ve studied. I’ve been good. I’ve kept my nose clean. I’ve kept quiet. 

I’ve bought all the things I was told to buy. I’ve lusted after all the things 

I was told to lust after. I’ve watched the films they told me to watch. I’ve dreamed the dreams they told me to dream. (beat) I bought the suit.

WOMAN: And you will do anything for this job?

MAN: Anything.

WOMAN: You’ll work in a sweatshop for low wages and under cut anybody else who works in the same way? You’ll do anything he says?

MAN: Yes. I can’t make demands.

WOMAN: You can’t make demands! You’re not a beggar. You’re a slave.

3. The woman worked in shirt factories, long closed. She sings.

WOMAN:

The clock on the wall says twenty to three

And that’s where it stopped so we all could see

The shirt factory girls, who sweat for their pay

Bent over machines at work everyday

The shirt factory girls ‘tis true what they said

Held the city together with a twist of their thread

The shirt factory girls when all’s said and done

Worked the day long to take home the mon(ey)

The shirt factory girls they danced through the gate

Past cameras and press intent on their fate

The factories flew off to sunnier climes.

And left them to fend in more flexible times.

4. The man is not convinced.

MAN: What are you on about? This is about hunger and ambition? Simple. 

I only came here for a job.

WOMAN: You only came here for a job! Any job that he will give you? So, you can hand over control of your whole life to him?

MAN: It’s the deal, isn’t it? That’s what I’m here for. And if that’s what it takes to satisfy my hunger, all my hungers…………My hunger for food, shelter, light, heat, clothes, cars, holidays, spare cash to have a pint with my mates when I want to – normal things - the chance to meet someone and start a family, a house we could live in …

WOMAN: And for that you’re prepared to sell your soul?

MAN: You’re making too much out of this. It’s not a pact with the devil. It’s only a job. It’s a simple thing.

WOMAN: If it’s such a simple thing, then how come jobs are so hard to come by? 

5. Any wonder the man has such a bitter view of the world of work.

MAN: We just have to put up with certain things. That’s the way the world is.

WOMAN: But why should we have to beg? Is there no dignity in this?

MAN: We’re living in the real world, in case you hadn’t noticed. There is a price to pay. I’ve got to work for somebody.

WOMAN: But on what terms? (beat) Say he comes in here today and says ‘right, young man, you’re on, here’s your contract. Sign it.’ What will you do?

MAN: What will I do? Why I’ll sign it.

WOMAN: Will you even read it?

MAN: ‘Course I’ll read it. But I won’t get too worried about it. It’ll probably be just a standard thing anyway.

WOMAN: Just because it’s standard doesn’t mean it’s right. What about union 

membership, rates of pay, severance details, maternity and paternity leave, 

sick benefits, pension rights…

MAN: Give over, will you? If I start asking about them things, I’ll never get a job. 

You'll only cause him bother. You’ll only want to start a union and never stop 

complaining about tea breaks and holidays. 

WOMAN: And what’s wrong with that? What kind of a place is he going to run if he 

won’t allow a union?

MAN: If you want to get ahead in a place like this you have to keep your nose clean 

and your head down.

WOMAN: How can you possibly keep your nose clean, when your head is so far down, it’s up his arse? 

6. So, the woman shows the man a new reality, one built on dignity.

WOMAN: You think it’s all briefings and meetings, freshly ground coffee and brandy, black tie and golf links. But could you handle the call about redundancies?

MAN: You’re being unrealistic again. (beat) Lets say he comes in now, and he gives you a job, hands you the contract and all. You’d read it of course. But would you sign it then?

WOMAN: Only if it met my terms and conditions.

MAN: Then you’ll starve. You’ll never get a job. You’ll hunger and you’ll waste away and all your experience and all your fine words will count for nothing.

WOMAN: I said I didn’t understand ambition. But now I realise I understand it only too well. I am ambitious. For my rights. Rights that people like me, and your parents, have struggled for over the years. Rights that are always under threat, unless we hold 

together.

MAN: What are your terms and conditions?

WOMAN: Above all else, I want my dignity.

MAN: (beat) So do I. 

WOMAN: On those terms and conditions, I will sell my labour. (beat) I will work for him. I will work for anybody. God knows I’ve done enough of it down the years, but I will not be anybody’s slave. Service but not servility. 

Those are my terms and conditions. Is that enough ambition for you?

MAN: As you said, it’s not so simple a matter. We need to co-operate.

WOMAN: Unite. Yes. Welcome to the world of work.

And so ends the play. 

You’ve been listening to abridged extracts from The Recruiting Office by Dave Duggan, as part of 2020’s Workers’ Rights and Social Justice Week, an on-line Festival run by Derry City and Strabane District Council and Derry Trades’ Union Council. 

The full text of the play can be found in Plays in a Peace Process by Dave Duggan, published by Guildhall Press and available from Little Acorns Bookshop, Easons and on-line. See you at the full production in next year’s full festival. Slán. All the best. 

https://soundcloud.com/user-804835907/daves-the-recruiting-office

©Dave Duggan April 2020

www.facebook.com/DaveDugganWriter

VIRUS-TIME SHORT TALKS No. 4: CAT

No. 4 The Designated Cat

It took me five minutes to work out what day it is. Lockdown Monday number 4? Or is it Sunday? It always feels like a Sunday on our street now.

I woke up thinking about the word ‘cat’ and the way people use it to say that something they ate, drank, wore or experienced was not satisfactory. 

Like. What did you think of that new Scorsese film? Cat. 

Are you wearing that shirt for a bet? It’s cat.

Someone somewhere probably reviewed the musical CATS as cat, as in ‘I seen that thing in the West End. The one with all the cats. It was cat.’ The musical is based on a 1939 book of poetry T S Eliot wrote, on an afternoon off from his work as publisher at Faber and Faber. The book’s not cat.

You now have learned enough to see

That cats are much like you and me

And of people whom we find

Possessed of various types of mind.

Our house has a designated cat that visits us everyday. Cats got together at the start of the lockdown – they use miaow, not zoom – and divided up the estate. They keep an eye on us. The sturdy black one, with the red collar, covers four houses up. The grand tabby one, lustrous as a Seville orange, covers the houses near the Doctor’s surgery. Our street’s well catted. 

Our end of the street was designated the chocolate-coloured one: dark chocolate and milk chocolate patterns, with a streak of Tia Maria along the back. His breast is caramel, like a coffee, with added Irish Cream whiskey liqueur. 

He comes in under the front gate, in a reverse limbo, then he rubs himself round the corner. He sits on the windowsill of the room where I work. He gives me the deadpan stare: “what are you looking at? Get on with it.”

Then he’s over the wall, onto the wheelie bins like a parkour-specialist, a quick skite round the vegetable patch, then he bounds onto the compost heap, where he rests on the old carpet covering the furnace-like bio-mass below him. And in recent days he has the sun heating him from above. 

Our designated cat dozes, with one eye open. He’s still on call.

I’m inspired to write a cat-sat-on-the-mat poem, in homage to TS Eliot. One reviewer called it ‘a wasteland’. 

Here comes the Designated Cat. 

Who bears not one ounce of fat

When the weather is sunny

He lies on his tummy

On the compost heap’s designated mat.

Aye, you’re right. That’s cat.

Broadcast on BBC Foyle, The Breakfast Show, 27.4.2020 

Available on BBC Sounds


www.facebook.com/DaveDugganWriter

VIRUS-TIME SHORT TALKS No. 3: SPORT IN THE GARDEN

SPORT IN THE GARDEN 

I’m back playing hurling, since this thing started. You know: the fastest field sport in the world. Hurling. When women play, it’s called camogie. The pitch is bigger than a soccer pitch. The best pitch is Croke Park. The goals are like rugby goals, but with a net on a lower cross-bar. It’s all over the world, like the virus, but a good one. China, US, everywhere. 

They call it shinty in the highlands and islands of Scotland. If you watch shinty, you can see where the golf swing came from. It’s the most ancient stick and ball game, played by the gods and by mythical women and men.

I’m back at it, on the stretch of grass that runs from the front hedge, facing the street, to the low wall at my neighbour’s side. Lockdown hurling. I have a length of about 5 social distances, which is a new unit of length. One social distance is 2 metres or 6 foot six, in old money. That’s the height I was aiming for when I was 17, but I hit a five foot ten ceiling that stayed in place for the following fifty years.

I played hurling when I was young, so pucking about is a nostalgia thing, as well as exercise. The sliotar, the leather-cased ball, is hardy and makes a dullsthockwhen it meets the hurl. It doesn’t fly out on to the street. I also have a tennis ball, skittish as a puppy, and it often abandons me in the hedge. 

You can hardly blame it; for not wanting to get a whack with the hurley. They say that if you lose a sliotar and you can’t find it, wait ‘til you lose the second one and you’ll find both. That’s why there’s always two remotes behind the cushions on the sofa. 

I found the sliotar and the tennis ball, where they’d perched on a mesh of twigs, like guillemot eggs on a cliff-edge. Though they’re not at all like guillemot eggs, which are pear shaped. Check them out. I’m home-schooling myself every day since the lockdown started.

So, with the good weather, I’m up and down the five social distances of grass a couple of times a day and I’m thinking about all the mature women and men engaged in marathons of sorting in sheds, attics, back-bedrooms, under beds and on top of wardrobes. 

They come upon hurley sticks, made of ash, hockey sticks, made of hickory and cricket bats, made of willow; lacrosse nets (not many of them around here) and let’s leave the baseball bats buried for a while yet. 

They come upon rugby balls, soccer balls, ping-pong balls, shuttle cocks, even more tennis balls, bowls for carpet and for grass and O’Neill’s Number 5s Gaelic footballs. And they’re out there in yards, front steps, back gardens whacking, tapping, kicking, throwing, swinging and flicking, then gently strolling after the strucken object, reliving glory days when the grass was lustrous green, the sun was gorgeous gold and there were no ceilings on the heights you could get to and no lockdowns. Only sport. 

(SFX: WHISTLE) Is that the whistle?

Broadcast on BBC Foyle, The Breakfast Show, 20.4.2020 

Available on BBC Sounds

www.facebook.com/DaveDugganWriter

WORKING WITH WORDS

My work involves shaping words into stories, stories that become novels or dramas for stage and screen or talks on radio. I am experienced and capable. Most of the time. But not now. Now, I’m stumbling over words. I continue. In a crisis like this, words, and how we use them, matter.

I trip over the word ‘together’ in the phrase ‘we’re all in this together’. I see a self-isolating older woman, on tv, receiving a food box from a local charity. I see a self-isolating billionaire on his yacht. This woman and this man are both in it, but they are not ‘together’.

They experience the crisis under different conditions. Economic, social and political underlying conditions. An economist says that resources are limited. The economist has a meagre view of the word ‘resources’. He doesn’t see the billionaire on the yacht. Or the woman with the food box. He doesn’t know how political the word ‘resources’ is.

I dodge round the word ‘gazump’. It describes a deal where another buyer comes in, trumping the original buyer, taking the deal. This is happening with medical equipment today. The big economies out-bid the smaller ones. Ships with vital stocks are intercepted on the high seas. Our public representatives experience gazumping. They trawl the world for masks, aprons, gloves, drugs and ventilators. In the words of murderous Mafia Dons: It’s not personal. It’s just business. 

I fall into the mire of the words ‘money’ and ‘power’.

I plough through a waste-land of war metaphors. Words like ‘front-line’, ‘victories’, ‘heroes’ and ‘invisible enemy’ are everywhere. In London, the source is World War Two. In Dublin, it’s nineteen sixteen. We are not in a war. We are in global public health crisis. The War on Terror and the War on Drugs are still running. Where are their successes? 

Another war gears up. War-profiteers emerge. A well known political figure, prominent in the pro-Brexit push, profits from an investment fund that touts the ‘super normal’ returns from buying collapsing companies then selling them on.

The metaphor of falling and rising has particular importance this weekend. Friday marks the falling. Sunday marks the rising. Even for people who do not see the divine in the story, the metaphors are heartening.

I work with words, using my underlying conditions. I am fortunate. I have a good room to work in. I have pens, papers, a laptop, an internet connection, dictionaries, a phone line, food in the cupboard. I have loved ones, neighbours and friends. My underlying medical conditions are challenging. I got THE LETTER. I’m lying low, missing my children and grandchildren.

I continue to work. When I leave my desk for a break, I find an amaryllis plant in full bloom. The stem is tall. It bends gently under the weight of the blossoms adorning it. They are shaped like the amplifying horns of an old gramophone. They show the colours of a Spring early-dawn sky: cerise and pink, white and rose. I return to my desk, affirmed by an old word. Beauty. I continue.

Broadcast on BBC Foyle, Mark Patterson Show, Friday 10^thApril 2020, Good Friday 

Available on BBC Sounds

www.facebook.com/DaveDugganWriter

VIRUS-TIME SHORT TALKS No. 2: COMMUNICATION

COMMUNICATION 

I’m watching loads of war films since this thing started. They’re all just propaganda, I know. No matter who makes them. Santa brought me a box-set of Powell Pressburger films and when I looked them up in my film reviews book, they got four and five stars. So I’ve been watching them. Naval battle ones, in particular. Something struck me. If you’ve ever watched a World War 2 naval battle film, there’s always a scene involving communication between big ships, military and merchant, subs too, using a spotlight with venetian blinds across the front. I think shutters would be a better word. Yes, a spotlight with shutters across the front. With a young operator standing beside it, cranking a lever that clatters the shutters open and closed, sending dark and light across the waves.

The young operator looks like he should be at the kitchen table doing his homework, as his mother and father chat, smoke cigarettes and swill mugs of tay. All in luminous black and white. Instead he’s on board a battle ship rattling the shutters to send messages to other ships. VOICE All Captains to Fleet Command Eleven hundred hours

That’s the call to a pow-wow with the Admiral. For all I know the young operator could be sending football results VOICE Blackburn United three Manchester Rovers nil or something more domestic VOICE What did you have for breakfast? We had the porridge again.

It got me thinking about communication. So did the big birds.

I was sitting on the low wall in the garden, drinking a mug of coffee, taking a break from work, on one of those sunny days we had. I heard honking and when I looked to the sky, shimmering clear and blue above me, I saw big birds – are they geese? are they swans? – flying over the radio station, over my neighbour’s house, over our estate and on towards the hills behind.

If they are swans, they might be moving from the grasslands around Bellarena, to fly to the calm sea lough beside the causeway at Inch Island.

I reckon they are swans. Someone will know and they can communicate to the rest of us, not with a shuttered spotlight or by honking. Communication, you see. 

The big birds fly together in a flexible chevron, an arrowhead tracing a clear path through the air. The honking keeps the big birds in sync., even as they heed social distancing advice.

Honking is not much use to me and my neighbours, though sometimes we do grunt at each other. I was never a fan of grunting or honking, as a means of human communication. Honking is for the birds. Like tweeting. I couldn’t get past giggling when someone said I should be on twitter, like I should be on marzipan, like it was some new wonder food. It’s for the birds, really.

I know loads of people have digital communication devices. But not everyone has them. If we each had one of those shuttered spotlights, we could flash dark and light at our neighbours. If the corner shop had one, we could flash our orders and local pigeons could step up to do deliveries. No honking, tweeting, droning, but the odd coo-coo. I mean, it’s just a thought.

Broadcast on BBC Foyle, The Breakfast Show, 6.4.2020 

Available on BBC Sounds

VIRUS-TIME SHORT TALKS No. 1: THE STREET

The Street 

I wonder if your street is as quiet as mine these days. It’s quiet like it was when me and my young family moved in thirty years ago. Kids played on the street: chase; bikes and scooters; footie. The street changed, of course. Kids grew up. Cars, vans and lorries grew more numerous. The street got busy and dangerous. The street thinks it’s an avenue, but it’s a street, a fine street and a busy one. But not now.

There is a junction with a major road, then a radio station on one side and a housing association complex on the other. There is a triangle of trees and grass, showing signs of early Spring growth, in the ironically pleasant weather.

After the radio station and the housing association complex, there are semi-detached family homes, built soon after World War 2 and containing the first indoor toilets at the time, so I’m told. They’re on one side, while the original terrace climbs the other, with two small streets of terraced houses off. There used to a shop at the start of the terrace. I remember a butcher had it, a well-known local runner, who did a good line in sausages and bacon for the weekend fry. The street rises and at the top there is a doctor's surgery on the left – it used to be a church for a Brethren community – and opposite, there is a much-used corner shop.

My street is bounded by one of the city’s arterial routes; by an avenue that leads to a great park and by another road that is named for an academy. There are shops, bookies, take-aways, hairdressers, pubs, cafés, a mini-mart and a terrific local vegetable shop, within walking distance. This is, as the French say, my quarter. Mon quartier. Or as they say in LA, this is the Hood. My neighbour-hood. And I am one of the neighbours. 

A handy number of us neighbours stood at our doors last Thursday night at eight o’clock to applaud health and other essential workers, currently bearing the brunt of the burden of these times. It was dark and mild, calm and peaceful. Myself, and other neighbours and families, fidgeted about until I started clapping. Other people started clapping too, probably before me.

I saw a woman, at the top of one of the side streets. She clapped and held up her camera, as if she was at a party. The man next door, himself a health worker, clapped and waved. Two women, who live further up, clapped over the hedge to the people next door. Someone let out a whoop. Halfway up the terrace a woman held a torch and shined it about. I could see forms and silhouettes, in pairs and family groups, all separated and all joined, in the dark, in the action and in the moment.

A white saloon car drove by. The driver held his phone out of the window, taking video. It was an event he wanted to remember and to share. I am on facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram, twitter or some other digital nowhere, standing at my front door, one of a two-person household, clapping and grinning. I am lost and preserved in the cloud.

The best moment was when the clapping stopped. People stood about, quietly chatting or calling across the street to each other. Then, four houses up, two pairs started clapping again. I thought – is it not over? There was someone outside the hedge, with a phone, taking video. The clapping was for the health workers again and this time it was for the camera. Like an encore. The clappers were so good the first time that their audience – and with camera phones and the internet, that means people in many parts of the world – their audience wanted to see the show again. Who knows, the people four houses up might go on tour?

Then it was over. Really this time. Everybody went in. Households shut up again. Street lights stayed on, but only to illuminate the quiet. The street was empty, like a crystal vessel, delicate and fine, ready to be filled with the red wine of life. But not yet. The clapping filled it briefly. And it will be filled again, when neighbours spill onto the street again, busy making it busy.

Broadcast on BBC Foyle, The Breakfast Show, 30.3.2020

Available on BBC Sounds

www.facebook.com/DaveDugganWriter