Alex Smith

Full Gluey Woman’s Lips—Kiss#1

The Literary Prostitute is a noble entertainer, an amoral bibliophile who lives in a coastal city in Africa where books are taxed and writers inhabit a ghetto called 600. In this city more beautiful than Paradise, only the rich can afford to buy novels, and the Literary Prostitute sells her time and her body to fund a reading habit and a writing dream. By day she works as a striptease in Bar Street. At night she goes to the highest bidder and she’ll literally do anything (provided you’re reasonably clean and use a condom)—truly, her services encompass a full A-Z of sexual deviants’ fancies: autoerotic asphyxia, cabareting, exhibitionism, flagellation, frottage, masochism, piquerism, pygmalionism, voyeurism, even zoophilia.

The only thing she won’t do is kiss you. Not ever.

All day working, that is to say stripping again and again, in her glass cage at the peep show in Bar Street, the Literary Prostitute thinks about kisses, those kisses between the characters of good, great and classic books.

Kiss#1 James Joyce

It could be the moon got to me (or maybe the email telling me it’s old year’s night in Russia and minus 15 degrees), but I’m sure there can never have been a more perfect and warm evening at Maynardville than tonight, and that I have never laughed so heartily at any other Shakespeare before. Geoffrey Hyland has put together a fine As You Like it. It’s hilarious and full of good love, excellent lovesickness and a couple of outstanding fools (Mark Elderkin as Touchstone and Guy de Lancey as the melancholic traveler Jaques). In fact it’s so jolly, I’d see it every night for a month if I could afford it. Dicky Longhurst has always been one of my two most favourite costume/fashion designers in the country and his designs for this production are brilliant. As is Jay Pather’s choreography … and I’ve never heard ‘Under The Greenwood Tree’ sung like that—the music is inspired too. All in all it was so entertaining at the end I felt like kissing every actor and the bronze statue of Shakespeare in thanks for a job well done and a great show. (more…)

From The Collection
By Harold Pinter

BILL. Oh well. I’m only telling you because I’m utterly bored…The truth…is that it never happened…what you said, anyway. I didn’t know she was married. She never told me. Never said a word. But nothing of that…happened, I can assure you. All that happened was…you were right, actually, about going up in the lift…we…got out of the life, and then suddenly she was in my arms. Really wasn’t my fault, nothing was further from my mind, biggest surprise of my life, must have found me terribly attractive quite suddenly, I don’t know…but I…I didn’t refuse. Anyway, we just kissed a bit, only a few minutes, by the lift, no one about, and that was that—she went to her room. (more…)

One place to really love in Africa is the Book Lounge. At the BL birthday party on Monday, I recruited several writers and an artist to send me their ‘notes’ on love in Africa. I kept asking people hopefully, don’t you have anything among your stash of unpublished writings? Yesterday, I remembered I had something in my own stash that might do. It’s a play, called Lovebirds. It was a finalist in the 2005 PANSA Festival of Contemporary Theatre. The judges had good things to say and bad things to say about it—it is far too long and complicated among other problems; really it is no more than a brave attempt in need of much work—but I love this play because it reminds me of the great opportunities that abound in South Africa and it was a of a kind of dream-like experience. It was my first play; it was draining to write, and represented a creative end of several years of research, which began when I studied criminology honours (with Don Pinnock as one of my lecturer’s) at UCT. I posted off the play a few weeks before I left to teach in China; then I forgot about it. Some months later, an email arrived to say I was one of five finalists including Mike van Graan and Peter Krummeck. The email said:

The judges comments briefly were: that the script needs a good director as it is complex and diffcult; wonderful scenario and could be theatrically exciting; the impact is startling. Staging may become complicated, director must work on this carefully.Dark humour is wonderful.

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