Dear (artistic director),

Thank you for opening my letter! My name is Ovid Lea. I have recently graduated in Drama and Theatrical Arts from the South-South-EastLondonCollege of Drama and Theatre Arts and am currently available for work! I have wide acting experience, having played major roles from Danny Zuko in Grease (Captain Bligh High School Theatre 1995) to Hamlet (Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead SSELCD Studio 2000). However, having completed my training in writing for the stage, I am more interested in pursuing writing work. I have worked in ensemble, adapting the original piece ‘Hyagog’from improvisations, I have adapted the first six chapters of ‘Alice in Wonderland’ for physical theatre and written my own play, ‘Alex in the Bartlesphere’, which I directed and for which I received a distinction.

I’m sure you get many letters praising your work, well I’m honest enough to say that I have never seen a single one of your productions and as such I am perfect to bring fresh ideas into your creative environment.

I am hard working, enthusiastic, imaginative, I’ve been told I’m a great company member and I am committed to a theatrical life.

Thank you for reading. I look forward to hearing from you.

Best wishes,

Ovid Lea

Ovid folded the letter together with his CV and headshot and stuffed it into an envelope. It was his last one; the rest had been folded through letterboxes across the West End and north London, delivered by hand to directors and producers yet to discover their luck. He sat on a bench, squinting out across the wilder scrublands of Hyde Park’s north-west regions. Low-branched trees broke the small plain into a network of exposed, yet private spaces. Heads poked from the grass, two toddlers rampaged around a picnic; Ovid had spotted a woman sitting up reading a book and he could not tell, and was keen to know, if she was wearing a pale beige bikini-top or none at all. She was slightly blurred and Ovid wondered if he would soon need glasses and, if so, was laser-eye treatment available for actors on the NHS. He turned back to a second-hand copy of Sejanus his Fall that lay open in his hand, three quarters of the pages turned, though Ovid had not got past Jonson’s introduction. He took an apple from his backpack and bit into it. A man wearing a Havana hat walked past, led by chinchilla. Ovid sighed and turned back to Sejanus. He read ‘The next is, lest in some nice nostril, the quotations might savour affected, I do let you know, that I abhor nothing more; and have only done it to show my integrity on the story, and save myself on those common tortures…’ the common torture of not knowing what a full stop is, Ovid thought.
            “What does it mean?” he grunted, and slammed the play onto the bench. Ovid knew there was something rich, to be desired in these classics, something at least with which to spice conversation, to arm oneself in the arena of the arts. But, my god, they did go on, and to a purpose that was as obscure to Ovid as the girl in the maybe-bikini. Was she even a girl, he wondered. She could be very old indeed and he would merely have been imposing a fantasy upon an entirely unsuitable…
            “I don’t blame you.”
The voice came from next to Ovid on the bench. He looked up. A woman in a sleeveless top, woven through with strips of silver and purple fabric, her hair covered with a headscarf of intricate, autumnal, possibly Arabic design, was smiling at Ovid. He hadn’t noticed her sit down.
            “I’m sorry?’ he said. The woman nodded towards the abandoned play. Ovid noticed the way her jeans seemed filled with thigh, like a ship’s sail shaped by a powerful wind.
            “I said I don’t blame you, giving up on that play. He’s a pedantic old bore.” Ovid laughed, relieved that he hadn’t been caught out peeping at the sunbather.
            “I wouldn’t know,” he said, “I haven’t got past the introduction.” The woman smiled. Ovid looked directly at her for the first time. Her brown eyes seemed not to blink as she regarded him. Her nose was flattened, suggesting perhaps West Indian genealogy.
            “I imagine him as one of those people who would corner you at a party and insist on reciting his work to you, breaking off to explain the complicated bits, assuming you haven’t understood them. Then, as he gets drunker, he starts asking your opinion and then you’ve got two choices: lie, encouraging him to repeat the exercise with some other stooge next time; or tell him that you think he’s pompous and obscure and risk a tantrum. Don’t you think?”
            “I do,” Ovid agreed. The woman continued to stare.
            “Are you an actor?” she asked. Ovid grinned.
            “Yeah. Well, I do a lot of things,” he held his hands palms outwards as if admitting to a crime, “I’ve directed a couple of things, I’ve written a couple of plays,” he added, doubling his oeuvre with a single word, “and I’m working on a novel,” he concluded, which was a lie.
            “Really,” the woman’s eyes mooned, “what’s your novel about?” she seemed so impressed, as Ovid would have been with himself had he actually been working on a novel, that he felt honour-bound not to disappoint her.
            “It’s about…it’s hard to explain, there are several, you know, several stories interweaving, and…”
            “Pitch it to me in less than ten words,” she winked. Ovid braced himself.
            “Man meets curious woman on bench, invents novel,” he replied. The woman laughed.
            “What’s your name?” she asked, stretching an arm out across the back of the bench and leaning back. Inwardly, Ovid sighed. The introduction of his name into new acquaintance never came without questions. He had considered writing an explanation, like Ben Jonson, and handing it over when introducing himself, explaining why his stodgy, small and large C conservative father Timothy had chosen to name his only son after an a poet who had chosen to retell the history of the world as a series of mostly non-consensual acts of copulation. Ovid had always wondered over this disparity until his uncle Todd, tongue loosened by the Famous Grouse, confided one new year that Timothy had thought Ovid to be the author of the poem If, by Rudyard Kipling. It was only years later that Timothy learned of his terrible, irreversible mistake. On that day of revelation Ovid had noted Todd’s moustache twitching with submerged, indecent mirth and had postulated, quite correctly, that Todd was both the source and instigator of Ovid’s fateful naming.
            “My name’s Ovid,” he said, and waited for the response. The woman gave an incredulous smile.
            “Come on, you’re joking?”
            “No. Ovid’s my name. I’ll tell you the story one day.”
            “Will you, now?”
            “What’s your name?” The woman paused and looked away into the trees, granting Ovid an opportunity to scan the swell of her breasts and, below, her belly curving the fabric of her top.
            “Olympia,” she replied. Ovid picked up his play and stuffed it into his bag.
            “You’re taking the piss,” he muttered.
            Alright, my name’s Bathsheba,” this seemed plausible to Ovid, who was as unfamiliar with the Bible as a jellyfish with a Saharan afternoon.
            “That’s a nice name,” he ventured.
            “Ovid, that’s not my real name, come on…”
            “Well how should I know?”
            “Okay. I’ll stop teasing you. My name’s Sherry.”
            “Really?”
            “Oh, yes. Short for Scheherazade,” she began to laugh and Ovid wondered how old she was. He was laughing with her. This was fun.
            “Are you hungry, Ovid?” she asked.
            “Always,” Ovid replied, which was true. The woman allowed herself to examine him up and down.
            “You could do with feeding up, you’re just the just the right side of lithe but a whole tropic south of macho,” she decided. “Let’s walk,” she stood up, certain of Ovid following, which he did.
            “Are you a prostitute?” he asked, groin tingling nervously, “because I’m broke.” The woman reeled for a moment, swaying between incredulity and mortal offence. Then she laughed again.
            “No, I’m not. But at least you’re not the kind of boy who does the deed then pulls out his pockets,” she put her arm around Ovid’s waist and he let her. Her fingers began to softly knead the flesh above his hip bone, which suddenly felt insufficient, the wrong side of lithe. “Anyway,” the woman added with mock, maternal gravity, “if you’re broke, we’d better see if we can’t fix you.”  They strolled through Hyde Park towards one of the northern gates; stories, beginnings and endings, and squirrels, drifting through the middle distance.

Ovid was no Casanova. Even, perhaps, the opposite. He can be imagined as the composite of all the great Giacomo’s conquests; those serving-girls, dancers, daughters of magistrates, strangers at roadside inns that punctuate the cynical libertine’s progress towards disappointment. Ovid was a master of getting himself seduced.

“So. Do you often roam the parks and gardens offering literary criticism and free meals?” Ovid asked, sipping from a glass of red wine that, he was happily certain, was far too good for his palate.
            “No, Ovid, I don’t,” the woman replied. She was leaning forward over the table, resting on her elbows, holding her own glass in both hands before her like a libation. Ovid pushed his chair back and thanked the waiter who lifted away a sauce-streaked plate that had contained three scallops and a sprig of something green. They had been talking about Ovid’s childhood, but he was reaching the part where his mother joined the convent and wanted to change the subject.
            “You still haven’t told me your name,” he said.
            “Thank you, Tony,” the woman said, warming the waiter with a smile. She explored the globules of candlelight that had become trapped in her wine, oozing and pulsing. “Okay. So you want to know who I am. No, you must know who I am. Everything about me.”       
“I didn’t say that…”
            “My name’s Alison. I’m a dressmaker, and I grew up in the west country.”
            “Oh,” Ovid nodded, “whereabouts?”
            “Bath,” Alison replied with, Ovid thought, excessive emphasis, “boring school, boring childhood. Been married five times…”
            “Bloody hell.”
            “Old and rich, the first three. They were jealous,” she chuckled at the memory, “but I could turn the jealousy round on them; I’d throw a fit if challenged, accuse them of sharking around with dolly birds, even when they were so old they could barely tie their own shoes. That soon shut them up and by evening I’d have a new wardrobe as often as not,” she laughed. “Outlived them. Then I married for love. Bad mistake. He used to knock me around for reading Spare Rib…” she traced a circle in the wine, which dripped from her finger. Ovid flushed with anger.
            “The cunt,” he declared, chivalrously. Alison looked up at him, frowned for a second; then her face took on an aspect that Ovid saw sooner or later on the faces of most women he met, a sort of baffled, protective, lecherous maternity.
            “Oh, you lamb,” Alison whispered, reaching and brushing Ovid’s cheek with static she must have picked up from the carpet, or so it seemed to Ovid, “You haven’t read anything have you?”
            Ovid batted her hand away.
            “Is that another smart-arse reference?” he asked, “you’re making me feel stupid. What was that one, Shakespeare, Joyce, Virgil…” he tried to think of another author but embarrassment had confused him so he stared, red-faced and defiant, across the table. With kindness, and some effort, the woman restrained an emergent grin.
            “It was Chaucer, the Wife of Bath’s Prologue. You should read it. Don’t you get this yet? I’m not going to tell you who I am. And every time you ask, I’m going to bullshit you. But I’m sorry I hurt your pride. Maybe I did it just so I could make it up to you.” They left just as the main courses were arriving - steak for the woman and sole for Ovid. The woman did not pay, neither did Tony try to stop her leaving. Ovid assumed she had a tab.

They hailed a taxi. Ovid spent the journey kneeling on the back seat, his small hands insufficient for the woman’s generous flesh, yet eager, scampering like terriers across a velvet-grassed hillside. She kissed him with soft certainty, holding him in the longest embrace of his life, sucking the air from him and easing it in again until she became a greater lung and he forgot where he was and when the cab drew up outside a terraced house the likes of which Ovid had never entered but only peered through the window, where he was sure to see six-seater dining tables, paintings with ornate frames hanging on the walls and fitted bookshelves, floor to ceiling hardbacks.
            “I love your house,” Ovid murmured as he tugged off the woman’s headscarf revealing braided hair tied back in a short pony tail.
            “When my husbands died, they left me everything,” the woman flashed a smile and the two of them shuffled crabwise down a tiled hallway, fumbling at one another’s fly buttons. She licked his neck upwards, stretching an earlobe with her teeth. Ovid, who was ticklish, giggled. “Get upstairs, last door on the landing. Get undressed and wait for me,” she gasped into his ear, the words arriving humid and loud. Ovid half-ran up the stairs, stumbling and bashing his knee. There were paintings in frames along the walls, just as he’d hoped. He ran to the far door and threw it open.

The room was almost completely dark, the daylight outside denied by heavy, crimson curtains. Ovid pulled them open a little way and looked around. Above the bed there was a mirror in a gilded frame decorated with cherubs. The bed itself was king-size and piled with cushions, covered with a rich blanket showing scenes of Indian erotica. Ovid hopped across the room, climbed out of his trousers and jumped onto the bed, which received him with the satisfied ripple of a whale’s belly. Hanging from the walls were masks and strange, ornate headgear. The masks were Kabuki, demonic or rose-cheeked; African, roughly-chiselled as if in haste for the ceremony; there was a rounded civil war helmet on what seemed a custom-made wall bracket; a medieval helmet, plumed with lattice visor; there was a Versailles bonnet, a wimple, and various custom-made animal masks. Ovid stared at them, finding himself the naked centre of an audience of little gods. Either this woman invests a lot of money in her sex-play, he thought, or she’s in theatre. In the corner of the room there stood, dressed upon a mannequin, a costume for a giant bird, something with a long beak, thin as a butterfly’s proboscis. Glue gems crowned the mask’s skull.  The rest of the costume was a giant smock, with wings stretching out below and beyond the arms in wired, feathered linen. They seemed to stretch out as if protesting a violation of territory, yet Ovid had never felt safer. He wriggled out of his pants, put his hands behind his head, lay back and waited. The door swung open and the woman entered, wearing a satin dressing gown. Neither spoke. She walked to the edge of the bed then crawled onto the blanket. The dressing gown fell open and Ovid, without thinking, slid forwards and took the weight of a breast in each hand, nibbling at her neck. She shrugged the dressing gown over her shoulders and Ovid traced kisses down her exposed arms, stretching his palms wide across her buttocks. Her arms crossed around his back and she drew him in to her, trapping Ovid’s erection in the convex/concave spooning of their bellies. The house seemed to shudder slightly.
            “Wow,” Ovid whispered, “did you feel that?” The woman froze. ‘What…” Ovid began, but she cupped a hand over his mouth.
            “Shit,” she hissed, “it’s my husband.”
            “I thought he was dead,” Ovid stammered.
            “Are you home, Cleo?” a deep, male voice called from downstairs.
            “I’m in the bedroom, love,” the woman called back, “just having a read”.
            “Aha! One moment. I’ll get my shoes off,” the reply boomed. The woman bit her lip.
            “I’d love a cup of tea,” Cleo hazarded a diversion.
            “Tea later,” then, quieter, “bloody laces.”
            “Cleo? Cleopatra? Are you serious?” Ovid gawped, too scared to focus on the danger, “I’ll get under the bed.”
            “Can’t. Costume storage.”
            “Wardrobe?”
            “Whole room for that.”
            “Then what, where…” Ovid thought he was about to cry but Cleo, naked, thick-set yet nimble as a dancer, was already disrobing the mannequin, which was little more than a few wooden poles joined by ball-sockets. She folded it into the corner. 
            “Get these on,” she thrust the bird mask and smock at Ovid who, stunned, took them without protest. “Now get in the corner and stick your arms out.” Ovid did so and was transformed into a curlew, or perhaps an ibis. Cleo gathered his clothes together and bundled them beneath the surface contents of a washing basket in the opposite corner of the room, then threw herself onto the bed just as the door opened and a man entered, though Ovid could only see his back and that he was holding Ovid’s backpack at his side. When he spoke, the man’s voice was a rich, chocolate woodwind.
            “Naked in the afternoon?” he asked, “What are you doing?” Cleo looked flustered.
            “Only what you do with those magazines behind the shoe-tree when I’m out for an afternoon. It’s not a crime is it?” she stared up at him, embarrassed yet making no attempt to cover herself. Perhaps, Ovid thought, to keep his eyes on her.
            “A crime? Never. To be encouraged always, my love,” he held up the backpack. “Whose is this?”
            “It’s mine.”
            “Oh. I’ve never seen it.”
            “I have eight bags, dear. Can you describe a single one of them?” Cleo raised an eyebrow and sat up. The man shrugged.
            “Not a one of them, quite true.” Still he stood there, uncertain of something. Had there been a graph of the declining strength in Ovid’s arms compared with his growing realisation of the husband’s bulk, the lines would cross in around two minutes. “I thought you hated Jonson’s tragedies,” he added.
            “Have you been going through my things?” Cleo snapped, rechannelling her alarm as indignation.
            “Well…” the man retreated a little, “I didn’t recognise the bag and…and you can’t be too careful these days, with strange bags and things…”
            “Go and make me a cup of tea, love.”
            “Really? I thought maybe we could...”
            “I’m all hot from my own play, lover,” Cleo purred, “You make tea, I’ll have a shower, and we can meet back here in ten minutes.” The husband laughed, turned towards the door, then turned back.
            “Where did you get that CV from, the one in your bag?” he asked.
            “Will you leave my things alone, man?”
            “Yes, I promise. Where did you get it from? The boy looks interesting. Hopelessly naïve, obviously, but, you know. Interesting.”
            “I was having lunch with Margot at Café Flo and he came over, he’d worked with her on some show or other and she introduced me by name which I hate and so he was all over me and really, wouldn’t leave until I took his CV and promised to have a look at it.”
            “Ovid Lea…funny name.”
            “Tea, Julian.”
            “Ha. Rhyming slang. Cup of tea, Ovid Lea. ‘What’ll you have?’, ‘cup of Ovid, Doris!”
            “Christ, put the kettle on.”
            “With wingéd feet, my dear old serpent,” he left the room.

Cleo dived over to the wash basket and began flinging Ovid’s clothes at him.
            “I’m so sorry about this, I’m a terrible woman, but you have to go.”
            “Go? Go how?” Ovid became tangled in his trousers and, still wearing the bird costume, wheeled across the room as if in a doomed attempt at flight. Cleo held him still and pulled the smock over his shoulders. There was something in the firmness of the action that tweaked Ovid’s recollection. It was a mother’s gesture, tender and commanding. He realised that Cleo was old enough to have given birth to him; and perhaps and older sibling, too.
            “You’ll have to go out of the window, Ovid,” her tone was that of a general ordering a much-loved but tactically dispensable private into no-man’s land.
            “The window? How? Do those wings actually work or have you got a ladder?”
            “Don’t be a baby. Just lower yourself down onto the ledge above the door: it’s flat. Then you can swing down from there.”
            “You’ve bloody done this before.”
            “Shut up and get your clothes on.”
            “I want my play back.”
            “Ovid! Focus.” Cleo hurried Ovid to the window and eased him onto the ledge. Light-headed, he tried to turn on his buttocks, ready to grip the sill and hope his grip could hold the weight of his body. He hoped Cleo would support him, but she stepped back from the window, for fear of being seen. Gritting his teeth, Ovid dropped onto the ledge and, thrilled by escape turned to complete his groundward journey.
            “Hey. You there,” a man in sports jacket and jeans called out to him. Ovid waved, held out his hands in a pacifying gesture, “what the hell are you doing?”
            “I’ve locked myself in,” Ovid grinned.
            “You’ve what?”
            “I lent my keys to my mum and the silly bag went out and safety-locked the door. I’ve got an audition at seven. This is the only way I can get out.”
            Oh,” the man said, frowning, “are you an actor?”
            “Yeah. Well, I write plays, that’s what I want to specialise in. And I’ve directed my own work.”
            “You don’t look very smart for an audition.”
            “No. Well, it’s a new company, you know, quite young and edgy, they do a lot of political stuff…street theatre…”
            I see. Well, good luck!”
            “Thanks, mate,” Ovid flicked the man a military salute. Satisfied, the stranger walked on his way, pleased and flustered to have been called ‘mate’. Ovid lowered himself above a flowerbed and let his small body drop into a feline crouch. No pain registered and so, free, Ovid stepped onto the stone porch and began to descend the few stone steps that stood between him and the public highway. Then he noticed his shoelace was undone, lifted his foot and pressed it against an ornamental pillar halfway down the steps to access his lace. The pillar tipped and, being a hollow, high ceramic garden vase, smashed loudly against the steps strewing them with soil and the scrawny roots of some forgotten, topless shrub. Ovid swayed amidst the wreckage, stunned. The front door flew open and Ovid was confronted by an unshaven man with a high mane of greying hair. His body was as Ovid had seen it from the back, wide-shouldered and tall but with a belly tightening his shirt like a badly-smuggled pudding.
            “What the fuck is going on?” Cleo’s husband, Julian, roared.
            “I’m sorry, I’m really sorry,” Ovid coughed the words, “I was just trying to tie my shoelace…”
            “Against my bloody vase? Why not use the kerb…hang on…” Julian pointed, his finger conducting a memory, “You’re that bloody actor, the one that bothered my wife. How the hell did you get our address?” Ovid stared, paralysed, hoping to convert himself into a bird, or tree, or some intangible gas. Anything to get away. Then inspiration clapped his head between its cymbals.
            “Margot gave it me,” he squeaked, “I mean…Margot gave it to me.” Julian’s face clouded, but his hands moved back towards his body, taking rest against his hips.
            “Margot Valentine?”
            “Yes. I asked her. I expect she told me to get rid of me. I can be pushy, sometimes. I suppose.”
            “The woman’s a bloody menace.”
            “What’s going on?” Cleo appeared behind Julian, wrapped in a dressing gown and looking anxious.
            “Your friend Margot gave this bloody actor our address. He’s killed our vase. I shall have words with her.”
            “Let me do it, love.”
            “So, what do you want?” Julian scowled down the steps at Ovid.
            “I want to act, to write…”
            “You say in your letter that you haven’t seen any of my work…” Julian drawled, “although as the letter is a photocopy I assume it’s the same one you hand out to everyone, from which I conclude that you are almost entirely unfamiliar with the modern stage, which I can understand, as the South-South-Eastern Hebrides College of Drama or whoever it was that rubber-stamped your qualification was probably so far from the nearest civilised  theatre that you’d get jet lag every time you wanted to catch the latest asinine retread of some dour ‘aren’t we middle classes awful’ piece or another fucking re-imagining of the Merchant of Venice as a Nazi fable . Ovid,” he said, “Your letter was right about one thing. It’s tedious being told how marvellous my work is by kids who wouldn’t know good work if it gave them a two-hour oral. You wouldn’t know good work because you’re either too lazy or too poor to have seen any. You’re fresh, you’re innocent; and I can tell from your letter that you’re frighteningly naïve. And I’m planning a piece of work that needs all of those things; it will be a declaration or war against the cynical, the prudish, against two-thousand years of monotheistic piffle, shame and murder. And, yes, this is the scene where the big-shot director peers down at the unfeasibly gauche ingénue and says ‘you’re a washout kid, but I like you. You’ve got five minutes to show me what you’ve got’. Because if you can listen, and write, and if you’re any good, I might have work for you. Might.”
            “Just tell me what to do,” Ovid said, “and I’ll do my best,” he climbed three steps, abandoning his hand within Julian’s giant paw.
            “I think the kettle should be boiled by now,” he said, then turned to Cleo, “I believe you’ve met my wife, Susan,” he gestured, the name Cleo evaporating with the others. Susan smiled.
            “Lovely to see you again, Ovid,” she said.
            “And you,” Ovid replied. He was grinning and, although he was perhaps the only aspiring playwright in London who did not recognise Julian and Susan Donder, acclaimed director and feared producer respectively, he already felt this was his lucky day.