ROS leaps up, dissembling madly.

ROS: You never! It's a lie! (He catches himself with a giggle in a vacuum and sits down again.)

PLAYER: We're actors… We pledged our identities, secure in the conventions of our trade, that someone would be watching. And then, gradually, no one was. We were caught, high and dry. It was not until the murderer's long soliloquy that we were able to look around; frozen as we were in profile, our eyes searched you out, first confidently, then hesitantly, then desperately as each patch of turf, each log, every exposed corner in every direction proved uninhabited, and all the while the murderous King addressed the horizon with his dreary interminable guilt… Our heads began to move, wary as lizards, the corpse of unsullied Rosalinda peeped through his fingers, and the King faltered. Even then, habit and a stubborn trust that our audience spied upon us from behind the nearest bush, forced our bodies to blunder on long after they had emptied of meaning, until like runaway carts they dragged to a halt. No one came forward. No one shouted at us. The silence was unbreakable, it imposed itself upon us; it was obscene. We took off our crowns and swords and cloth of gold and moved silent on the road to Elsinore.

Silence. Then GUIL claps solo with slow measured irony.

GUIL: Brilliantly re-created-if these eyes could weep!… Rather strong on metaphor, mind you. No criticism-only a matter of taste. And so here you are-with a vengeance. That's a figure of speech… isn't it? Well let's say we've made up for it, for you may have no doubt whom to thank for your performance at the court

ROS: We are counting on you to take him out of himself. You are the pleasures which we draw him on to- (he escapes a fractional giggle but recovers immediately) and by that I don't mean your usual filth; you can't treat royalty like people with normal perverted desires. They know nothing of that and you know nothing of them, to your mutual survival. So give him a good clean show suitable for all the family, or you can rest assured you'll be playing the tavern tonight.

GUIL: Or the night after.

ROS: Or not.

PLAYER: We already have an entry here. And always have had

GUIL: You've played for him before?

PLAYER: Yes, sir.

ROS: And what's his bent?

PLAYER: Classical.

ROS: Saucy!

GUIL: What will you play?

PLAYER: The Murder of Gonzago.

GUIL: Full of fine cadence and corpses.

PLAYER: Pirated from the Italian…

ROS: What is it about?

PLAYER: It's about a King and Queen..

GUIL: Escapism! What else?

PLAYER: Blood

GUIL: Love and rhetoric.

PLAYER: Yes. (Going.)

GUIL: Where are you going?

PLAYER: I can come and go as I please.

GUIL: You're evidently a man who knows his way around.

PLAYER: I've been here before.

GUIL: We're still finding our feet.

PLAYER: I should concentrate on not losing your heads.

GUIL: Do you speak from knowledge?

PLAYER: Precedent.

GUIL: You've been here before.

PLAYER: And I know which way the wind is blowing.

GUIL: Operating on two levels, are we?! How clever! I expect it comes naturally to you, being in the business so to speak. The PLAYER's grave face does not change. He makes to move off again. GUIL for the second time cuts him off. The truth is, we value your company, for want of any other. We have been left so much to our own devices after a while one welcomes the uncertainty of being left to other people's.

PLAYER: Uncertainty is the normal state. You're nobody special.

He makes to leave again. GUIL loses his cool.

GUIL: But for God's sake what are we supposed to do?!

PLAYER: Relax. Respond. That's what people do. You can't go through life questioning your situation at every turn.

GUIL: But we don't know what's going on, or what to do with ourselves. We don't know how to act.

PLAYER: Act natural. You know why you're here at least.

GUIL: We only know what we're told, and that's little enough. And for all we know it isn't even true.

PLAYER: For all anyone knows, nothing is. Everything has to be taken on trust; truth is only that which is taken to be true. It's the currency of living. There may be nothing behind it, but it doesn't make any difference so long as it is honoured. One acts on assumptions. What do you assume?

ROS: Hamlet is not himself, outside or in. We have to glean what afflicts him.

GUIL: He doesn't give much away.

PLAYER: Who does, nowadays?

GUIL: He's-melancholy.

PLAYER: Melancholy?

ROS: Mad.

PLAYER: How is he mad?

ROS: Ah. (To GUIL :) How is he mad?

GUIL: More morose than mad, perhaps.

PLAYER: Melancholy.

GUIL: Moody.

ROS: He has moods.

PLAYER: Of moroseness?

GUIL: Madness. And yet.

ROS: Quite.

GUIL: For instance.

ROS: He talks to himself, which might be madness.

GUIL: If he didn't talk sense, which he does.

ROS: Which suggests the opposite.

PLAYER: Of what?

Small pause.

GUIL: I think I have it. A man talking sense to himself is no madder than a man talking nonsense not to himself.

ROS: Or just as mad.

GUIL: Or just as mad.

ROS: And he does both.

GUIL: So there you are.

ROS: Stark raving sane.

Pause.

PLAYER: Why?

GUIL: Ah. (TO ROS :) Why?

ROS: Exactly.

GUIL: Exactly what?

ROS: Exactly why.

GUIL: Exactly why what?

ROS: What?

GUIL: Why?

ROS: Why what, exactly?

GUIL: Why is he mad?!

ROS: I don't know!

Beat.

PLAYER: The old man thinks he's in love with his daughter.

ROS (appalled) : Good God! We're out of our depth here.

PLAYER: No, no, no-he hasn't got a daughter-the old man thinks he's in love with his daughter.

ROS: The old man is?

PLAYER: Hamlet, in love with the old man's daughter, the old man thinks.

ROS: Ha! It's beginning to make sense! Unrequited passion!

The PLAYER moves.

GUIL: (Fascist.) Nobody leaves this room! (Pause, lamely.) Without a very good reason.

PLAYER: Why not?

GUIL: All this strolling about is getting too arbitrary by half-I'm rapidly losing my grip. From now on reason will prevail.

PLAYER: I have lines to learn.

GUIL: Pass!

The PLAYER passes into one of the wings. ROS cups his hands and shouts into the opposite one.

ROS: Next! But no one comes.

GUIL: What did you expect?

ROS: Something… someone… nothing. They sit facing front. Are you hungry?

GUIL: No, are you?

ROS (thinks) : No. You remember that coin?

GUIL: No.

GUIL: What coin?

ROS: I don't remember exactly.

Pause.

GUIL: Oh, that coin… clever.

ROS: I can't remember how I did it.

GUIL: It probably comes natural to you.

ROS: Yes, I've got a show-stopper there.

GUIL: Do it again.

Slight pause.

ROS: We can't afford it.

GUIL: Yes, one must think of the future.

ROS: It's the normal thing.

GUIL: To have one. One is, after all, having it all the time now… and now… and now..

ROS: It could go on for ever. Well, not for ever, I suppose. (Pause.) Do you ever think of yourself as actually dead, lying in a box with a lid on it?

GUIL: No.

ROS: Nor do I, really… It's silly to be depressed by it. I mean one thinks of it like being alive in a box, one keeps forgetting to take into account the fact that one is dead… which should make all the difference… shouldn't it? I mean, you'd never know you were in a box, would you? It would be just like being asleep in a box. Not that I'd like to sleep in a box, mind you, not without any air– –you'd wake up dead, for a start, and then where would you be? Apart from inside a box. That's the bit I don't like, frankly. That's why I don't think of it..