by Edward Bond

1995 & 1996

Performed by: Bobby Colvill, Amanda Finney, Terina Talbot (voices of Soldiers, People and the Man on the Roof were played by taped voices)
Director: Geoff Gillham
Design/Stage Management: Michael Irvine
Administrator: Maria Gee
Fund Raiser: Jane Woddis

Boy: The Soldiers have guns! How will a story stop them?
Woman: It only has to stop them for a moment. So that they look down at the stones - for a moment - or look at each other.

As a means of introducing the reader to the play it will be useful to briefly outline the narrative of At the Inland Sea (ATIS). This is how Bobby Colvill the actor/teacher playing the boy describes the action of the play:

One

It is the day of the Boy’s exams (History? That was our guess.) He reads, the mother worries around him, aware of the exams’ importance - financially and socially. She works in a supermarket and knowing how little of her own time she owns, she is concerned that he doesn’t end up in a dead end job. Whilst the mum worries, the student, physically and emotionally, enters a crisis, as a baby enters a crisis in the journey from the womb to birth, so the child enters a crisis when it grows into adulthood. What is the nature of this crisis? Whilst the mother fusses, a woman appears out of the Boy's bed (out of his imagination?) she is in rags and carries a baby, wrapped in a bundle, she describes her situation, there are soldiers at the end of the street, they are going to kill her baby. The student wants to help, he offers her his tea, it spills.

The Woman has an idea that a story will save her baby.

The Mother sees the spilled tea, she tries to take the cup from the Boy, he won’t let her, the cup breaks. The Boy asks his mother to tell him a story, she thinks he is ill and phones the doctor. The soldiers come and take the woman and her baby away. The mother mops the tea up of the floor.

Two

The Boy is in bed. The Mother is fussing around him torn between the desire to look after him and the need to get to work. The boy asks her to tell him a story. She tells a half remembered story from her childhood but cannot finish, it makes her angry. She goes. The Woman appears; she is waiting outside the gas chamber. She begs the Boy for a story to save the baby. He tries to tell the Mother’s story; the Woman finishes it for him – it is the wrong one – it is called Guilt. As the soldier with the cyanide crystals approaches and the doors to the gas chamber are opened the boy finds a story to tell the Woman which seems to quieten her baby but the doors are opening and the baby stops listening. The Woman and her baby walk into the gas chamber.

Three

Months later. The Boy’s exam results arrive. They are good. The Mother is elated. At the height of their elation the Woman reappears. She has lost her baby in the crush and wants the Boy to help her find it so that they can die together. The Mother, who cannot see the Woman, does not understand what is happening, she leaves the room. The Boy enters the gas chamber. He finds the baby as the Man on the Roof starts to pour the cyanide into the chamber. The Woman begs for a story to save the child. The people around her beg for a story. The Boy takes the baby out of the chamber to save it. The people in the gas chamber are frozen in time, continually suffering forever, like something out of Dante’s comedy.

Four

The Mother is waiting for the Boy in his bedroom; she is beginning her own existential crisis. An Old Woman comes in. She carries the knowledge of all human suffering throughout History with her. The Boy returns to his bedroom. He gives the baby to his Mother and tries to tell her and the Old Woman the story of the baby. The Old Woman laughs at the suffering he describes. She makes the boy angry. She carries all of humanity’s suffering under her smock, ["underneath a dress, filthy, bloody, torn, scorched, soot-marked, foul with corruption."] she wears it next to her skin. The Old Woman helps the Mother to tell her story – it is the story of her life and her love for her son. The Boy realises that he will have to take the baby back to die. The Old Woman is not dead, she is not yet born. (I think she is humanity that cannot be born until the injustice and cruelty stop)

Five

The Boy re-enters the gas chamber where the Woman and the people are stuck in time unable to die, he explains that he wanted the baby to live. He gives the Woman the baby and time starts. The woman insists he tells the story, the boy tries to refuse: “It was a long time ago” The Man on the Roof dances. Between them the Woman and the Boy tell the story that the Woman tried to tell her baby as they were dying. The Woman dies, as she dies the baby unravels cocooning the boy, the boy finishes the story, he is born. He listens to the breathing of the dying. He describes the dead in the chamber and the guards dragging out the corpses. The Boy drags the woman out.

Six

The Boy returns to his home and his Mother. She is exhausted, a husk waiting to be shed. He tells her his story it is a story about how he will live his life, the mother interrupts just before the story ends, she won’t listen to it. He makes her some tea.
(Colvill 2004)