DOTTY: Darling!…
CROUCH: It’s Crouch, Madam.
CROUCH continues and exits to kitchen. DOTTY sits down on the bed, the corpse slumped over her knees. She glances at the TV. She turns up the volume.)
TV VOICE: —in a tight spot. And so in the crippled space capsule, Captain Scott is on his way back to earth, the first Englishman to reach the moon, but his triumph will be overshadowed by the memory of Astronaut Oates, a tiny receding figure waving forlornly from the featureless wastes of the lunar landscape.
(DOTTY changes the channel. On the SCREEN: a big Procession in the streets of London, military in tone (brass band music) but celebratory: for five seconds. DOTTY changes the channel. A commercial: for three seconds. DOTTY changes the channel. The Moon Programme again.) —which followed the discovery that the damage on impact had severely reduced the thrust of the rockets that are fired for take-off. Millions of viewers saw the two astronauts struggling at the foot of the ladder until Oates was knocked to the ground by his commanding officer…. Captain Scott has maintained radio silence since pulling up the ladder and closing the hatch with the remark, ‘I am going up now. I may be gone for some time.’ (DOTTY changes channel. The Procession on Screen. Military music. She looks gloomily, helplessly at the corpse. She notes the blood on her dress. She takes the dress off. CROUCH enters from the Kitchen, carrying a bin of rubbish and several empty champagne bottles. DOTTY hears the kitchen door. She turns the TV sound down low.)
DOTTY: What time is it, Crouch?
CROUCH: Nearly nine o’clock, Madam.
(CROUCH leaves by the Front Door as the SECRETARY enters. The SECRETARY hurries in, in the act of taking off her overcoat and hat. CROUCH lets himself out, closing the Front Door. The SECRETARY enters the Study, closes the door behind her, hangs up her hat and coat on a hook on the downstage side of the wardrobe, sits down at her desk, and arranges her notebook and pencil. GEORGE has continued to write without looking up.)
DOTTY (very quietly): Help! (Slightly louder.) Help! (GEORGE looks up and stares thoughtfully at the audience (into the mirror). He looks down again and continues to write. The Bedroom BLACKS OUT. GEORGE stops writing, gets to his feet. His system—for preparing lectures—is to scrawl them over many pieces of paper, which he then dictates to the SECRETARY who will type them out. In dictating, GEORGE prefers to address the large mirror in the fourth wall. He does not take much notice of the SECRETARY. GEORGE now collects the pages into a tidy sheaf, takes a pace back from the mirror, assumes a suitable stance, and takes it from the top….)
GEORGE: Secondly!…
(He has ambushed himself. He looks around and retrieves the missing sheet from behind his desk.)
DOTTY (off): Help! (GEORGE takes up his stance anew.)
GEORGE: To begin at the beginning——
DOTTY (off. Panic): Help! Murder! (GEORGE throws his manuscript on to the desk and marches angrily to the door.) (Off.) Oh, horror, horror, horror! Confusion now hath made its masterpiece… most sacriligious murder!——(Different voice.) Woe, alas! What, in our house? (GEORGE, with his hand on the door handle, pauses. He returns to his desk and picks up his papers.)
GEORGE: To begin at the beginning: is God? (Pause.) I prefer to put the question in this form because to ask, ‘Does God exist?’ appears to presuppose the existence of a God who may not, and I do not propose this late evening to follow my friend Russell, this evening to follow my late friend Russell, to follow my good friend the late Lord Russell, necrophiliac rubbish!, to begin at the beginning: is God? (He ponders a moment.) To ask, ‘Is God?’ appears to presuppose a Being who perhaps isn’t… and thus is open to the same objection as the question, ‘Does God exist?’… but until the difficulty is pointed out it does not have the same propensity to confuse language with meaning and to conjure up a God who may have any number of predicates including omniscience, perfection and four-wheel-drive but not, as it happens, existence. This confusion, which indicates only that language is an approximation of meaning and not a logical symbolism for it, began with Plato and was not ended by Bertrand Russell’s theory that existence could only be asserted of descriptions and not of individuals, but I do not propose this evening to follow into the Theory of Descriptions my very old friend—now dead, of course—ach!—to follow into the Theory of Descriptions, the late Lord Russell——! —if I may so refer to an old friend for whom punctuality was no less a predicate than existence, and a good deal more so, he would have had us believe, though why we should believe that existence could be asserted of the author of ‘Principia Mathematica’ but not of Bertrand Russell, he never had time, despite his punctuality, not to mention his existence, to explain, very good, keep to the point, to begin at the beginning: is God? (To SECRETARY.) Leave a space. Secondly! A small number of men, by the exercise of their intellects and by the study of the works both of nature and of other intellects before them, have been able to argue coherently against the existence of God. A much larger number of men, by the exercise of their emotional and psychological states, have affirmed that this is the correct view. This view derives partly from what is known as common sense, whose virtue, uniquely among virtues, is that everybody has it, and partly from the mounting implausibility of a technological age as having divine origins—for while a man might believe that the providence of sheep’s wool was made in heaven, he finds it harder to believe the same of Terylene mixture. (He leans into the mirror intently.) Well, the tide is running his way, and it is a tide which has turned only once in human history…. There is presumably a calendar date—a moment—when the onus of proof passed from the atheist to the believer, when, quite suddenly, secretly, the noes had it. (And squeezes a blackhead in the imaginary mirror. Then he straightens up and is the lecturer again.) It is now nearly fifty years since Professor Ramsay described theology and ethics as two subjects without an object, and yet, as though to defy reason, as though to flaunt a divine indestructibility, the question will not go away: is God?
DOTTY (off): Rape!
GEORGE: And then again, I sometimes wonder whether the question ought not to be, ‘Are God?’ Because it is to account for two quite unconnected mysteries that the human mind looks beyond humanity and it is two of him that philosophy obligingly provides. There is, first, the God of Creation to account for existence, and, second, the God of Goodness to account for moral values. I say they are unconnected because there is no logical reason why the fountainhead of goodness in the universe should have necessarily created the universe in the first place; nor is it necessary, on the other hand, that a Creator should care tuppence about the behaviour of his creations. Still, at least in the Judaeo-Christian tradition, nothing is heard either of a God who created the universe and then washed his hands of it, or, alternatively, a God who merely took a comparatively recent interest in the chance product of universal gases. In practice, people admit a Creator to give authority to moral values, and admit moral values to give point to the Creation. But when we place the existence of God within the discipline of a philosophical inquiry, we find these two independent mysteries: the how and the why of the overwhelming question: ——
DOTTY (off): Is anybody there?
GEORGE (pause): Perhaps all mystical experience is a form of coincidence. Or vice versa, of course. (DOTTY screams. It sounds in earnest. Of course, nothing can be seen.) (Murmurs.) Wolf….
DOTTY (off): Wolves!—Look out! (GEORGE throws his manuscript down furiously.) (Off.) Murder—Rape—Wolves! (GEORGE opens his door and shouts at the enclosed Bedroom door.)
GEORGE: Dorothy,
