The Artful Dole Bludger: the Play

Dramatis personae

Martha, a woman of late middle age in a pink floral housecoat
Arthur, a man of the same lineage in paint-spattered blue overalls
Narrator, just off-stage, dressed in Armani suit and Pierre Cardin tie

Narrator: Martha and Arthur are two personalities trapped in one androgynous body. We encounter them sitting at a grubby table in their dilapidated and beer-bottle strewn dole bludger kitchen in Canberra’s Santa Monica, Queanbeyan, bemoaning their unemployed status and Centrelink’s onerous expectations of ‘mutual’ obligation.

Martha: (hankering for respectability) Arthur, I must get a job or apply for the dole. Any job! So don’t keep repeating “we’re broke”.
Arthur: (derisorily, putting down his cutthroat razor after shaving in front of a cracked mirror) Huh! You’d still have a job if you hadn’t booby-trapped the library Rolodex. And with your ancient qualifications the only thing you’d get would be downwardly mobile — like cleaning birdshit off a cathedral roof. Maybe your sole purpose in life is simply to serve as a warning to others.
Martha: (ignoring the rude remark) That’s an upwardly mobile job you fool.
Arthur: Not for long. Have you forgotten I’m terrified of heights? No, go for editor of the Guinness Book of Records. You’ve been out of work long enough to qualify as an entry.
Martha: (wearily) I’m too old.
Arthur: Rubbish. Though you do make Methuselah look like an American child beauty queen. You’re older than Krapp’s Last Tape, or even his first one.
Martha: (bridling) You think you’re so smart, but not smart enough to wait for Godot. Which is what I’ll do if I have to.
Arthur: (eyes raised to heaven) Well if you really want to become a wage-slave you’ll have to stop bursting into tears every time someone asks for your personal references.
Martha: (bursting into tears) I can’t help it! Times are tough.
Arthur: Artificially tough, you mean.
Martha: I beg your pardon?
Arthur: You’re pardoned, but for God’s sake don’t beg for it. I’m talking about aggregate wealth! Billionaires! They’re richer than they’ve ever been.
Martha: Well, we’re not.
Arthur: Precisely. Anyway, an antediluvian scarecrow like you’ll never get a job.
Martha: (primly) I will! But I must refine my job-seeking strategy and try to identify growth industries. Otherwise how can growth trickle down to people like us?
Arthur: (snorts of laughter) Trickle down? It gushes up like a geyser!
Martha: Why don’t you get a job?
Arthur: How can I when my c.v.’s so self-incriminating? Besides the address of the uni where I got my degree is a post-office box in Tallahassee.
Martha: Oh shut up. Where’s that newspaper?
Arthur: The Queanbeyan Times? It’s thinner than Pravda. Yet it’s full of adverts!
Martha: Where is it? Not in the loo again. I’d like to read it before you tear it up for toilet paper.
Arthur: I haven’t! Because of your constipation, we’re still using last week’s. Perhaps it’s been nationalised, the paper I mean.
Martha: Governments don’t nationalise any more.
Arthur: (swigging another beer) They ought to nationalise the government.
Martha: Oh, there it is! (dragging it from beneath him and almost sending him toppling to the dirty floor) You’re sitting on it. And now it’s covered in paint from your overalls. Look, a perfect rendition of your bum.
Arthur: It’s an improvement on their colour printing.
Martha: (squinting at the jobs section) How can I apply for ten jobs a fortnight at this rate?
Arthur: (peering myopically over her shoulder) Who wants an ageing art teacher or librarian wasting their time? Let alone a bloody painter.
Martha: (exasperated) If I could read the employment page, I would know if I match the selection criteria.
Arthur: You! I’m sure you’d measure up to something. Maybe you could be employed in a funeral parlour.
Martha: (hopeful) Oh really? As what?
Arthur: (guffawing) A corpse.
Martha: (stiffly) That is not a life-affirming remark.
Arthur: (cheerily) Looks like rigor mortis has already set in.
Martha: Look, smarty-overalls, I’ve been on an interview panel myself! I know selection criteria can be manipulated. I have 20 years of obsolete experience which ended ten years ago but that counts for less than ten years which ended six months ago or five years which ended last night! That process can go on and on and on, while the interviewers try to figure out how many angels can dance on the head of a pin.
Arthur: (dumbfounded) With experience like that you should get a job as a neoclassical economist.
Martha: I’ve tried that and they said I was overqualified.
Arthur: Rationalism triumphant! The average corpse is a less rigid theorist. (fist in the air) Let’s expropriate the means of deduction, comrade.
Martha: Excuse me! (then perplexed) Eh? Um, I may wear a floral housecoat till mid-day and eat nuts straight off the supermarket shelf — but I’m not stupid.
Arthur: (slicing a dole bludger toenail so it springs majestically into his weet-bix) Have you been ‘grazing’ again? They wouldn’t need to.
Martha: Who wouldn’t need to?
Arthur: The idle rich of course.
Martha: They have no taste.
Arthur: They have no shame. Though their teeth are probably better than yours.
Martha: Mine might be false but at least I look respectable.
Arthur: (begins absent-mindedly to chew the paper, being racked with starvation) I know — you could open a knocking-shop.
Martha: Knocking what?
Arthur: You mean knocking who.
Martha: (ignoring his grammatical solecism but with gritted plates) Do I?
Arthur: You wouldn’t do that.
Martha: What on earth are you on about?
Arthur: Knocking. Fornicating. Bonking. Shagging. Screwing. For money!
Martha: (scandalised) And you have a go at me for grazing!
Arthur: Hail to the thief! (picking newsprint out of his teeth) This is quite delicious when you get used to it. Now, if you’re resolved to take any job why not set up your own library.
Martha: (brightening) That’s an idea.
Arthur: Yes, this government would be impressed by such enterprise. What’s the Dewey decimal number for porn?
Martha: I beg … What do you want to know for?
Arthur: I’m serious! Charge 50¢ a loan, you’d streetwalk all the way to the bank. Just don’t use yourself as a model.
Martha: Twit, they can get it off the internet for nothing.
Arthur: (fixing her with a stare) How would you know? Have you been surfing again? I thought my toes were getting wrinkled. But you’re right, that’s the dilemma.
Martha: Exactly, every time I go for a job, a computer beats me to it.
Arthur: Martha, be positive, even if it is a Mac Plus! You need to set up the — let me see — the Any Job Employment Centre. A combined library, knocking-shop and sideshow! Unicycles, dwarf-throwing, tattooed ladies, clowns in baggy pants on the slack wire, strolling minstrels, sword-swallowers, book-swallowers, human monkeys, a juggler bonking on a rola-bola and best of all, the half-man half-woman. You could go in for the NEIS scheme. Then branch out, conduct eco-tours of the Queanbeyan Sewage works, search for secret weapons of mass destruction in this nuclear free city of ours … any job!
Martha: (despairingly) Any job! There aren’t any jobs! Not for me.
Arthur: Well, you’ll soon be old enough to retire.
Martha: I don’t want to retire! I still have heaps to offer society.
Arthur: (snickering) Heaps of what?
Martha: Talent! Skill! Potential! And if that all fails, I’m sitting on a gold mine.
Arthur: (shrieking) Speak for youself! (then derisorily) You can’t expect to be paid for being creative. The better your contribution, the more it threatens the clowns who run the show.
Martha: Nonsense. By the way, your toupee would appear more chic if you wore it on the inside.
Arthur: (laughing) Get stuffed! It’s your toupee too. Martha, why not just go the whole hog and put a sack over your head? I told you to get a face-lift, your teeth capped and your hair dyed. Who’s going to employ you? One look at you and they’ll call the Salvation Army.
Martha: They’ve got me on their books already. They’re my Job Network providers.
Arthur: Oh please. Major Martha, sling me a tambourine.
Martha: I’ll shove one down your throat in a minute. Oh look, here’s a position for a trainee chicken-sexer.
Arthur: You can’t see well enough to find the chicken, let alone peer up its c—
Martha: Arthur!
Arthur: Cloaca. But I can imagine the selection criteria. ‘Kentucky Fried experience essential’ — yes, with a bit of sunbaking on the roof and a gallon of coconut oil you might pass muster as one of those ethnic pre-teens who serve behind the counter.
Martha: (flouncing) You just don’t take work seriously. You’re just so positively — negative.
Arthur: (grabbing the paper) Hmm, ‘wanted, a fence sitter, must be undecided, some discomfort entailed, phone a higher authority and don’t get off your arse in case the fence falls down.’
Martha: (squinting at it again) Oh my God, does it actually say that?
Arthur: No, you fool. Hmmm. Why not write resumés for a living? These idiots do and they’re probably on $1000 a minute. Sounds like a window of opportunity.
Martha: So hand me a bloody jemmy and I’ll prise it open. And why do you always exaggerate? They wouldn’t get a $1000 per minute, $500 maybe. (takes back paper) Hey! here’s a job running the Green Left Weekly! Reckon I might get it?
Arthur: You are a spunky little trier, but not well-known as a revolutionary. When you applied to be Fidel’s geriatric minder, you got nowhere. Try Margaret Thatcher, she could do with one. Or the morgue.
Martha: I am smitten by a man in uniform, but you know I don’t like dead people.
Arthur: Why not? There’s nothing wrong with dead people. You’re a bigot.
Martha: (shuddering) Any job, Arthur? It’s too awful to contemplate.
Arthur: (breezing on) I don’t think they want you to contemplate. ‘Any job’ could be as moronic as you wish, like revising the McClure report, or translating the Bible into pidgin Strine, or conducting a campaign to privatise Federal Parliament and make Lawrence Mead Minister for Forced Labour …
Martha: (touching up her lipstick) Um! I will ignore that last one — now, let me see, leaving aside gun-running, people-smuggling and the human organ trade — maybe I could become the commandant of a refugee camp.
Arthur: At Woomera? Put the reffos on a rocket and fire them into the sun.
Martha: (fed up with Arthur’s increasingly black humour) Leave me alone so that I can go over the jobs column again. You never know what you might find if you read between the lines, especially the fine print, you know that 6 point type which encodes the essential criteria for being employable, you know, the fine print they don’t warn you about when you go for an interview, because you can’t see up a chicken’s c—
Arthur: Martha! Stop blathering and be seen to be ACTIVELY SEEKING EMPLOYMENT! Otherwise they’ll stick us on a work-for-the-dole scheme, first Indian ambassador to Kashmir perhaps …
Martha: It is Ramadan, but we’re not even Indian.
Arthur: (finishing off his beer and belching) Outsourcing. It’s much safer.
Martha: (reads in silence for a while)
Arthur: Oh come on, Martha, isn’t there anything there?
Martha: (cheekily) Yes — ‘demonstration corpse in a funeral parlour.’ No heavy lifting and carrying, nothing to be learned and heaps to be earned. Best of all, you can’t be sacked for lying down on the job.
Arthur: (also cheekily, amidst girlish giggles) Go for it! — you practically meet the selection criteria already. Now, I’d like the paper back as it nicely covers up that embarrassing tear in my —
Martha: (whipping up his cutthroat razor and holding the gleaming blade against her wrist)
Arthur: (leaping from his chair and trying to grab the razor’s handle) — Martha, what are you doing? If you kill yourself I’ll never speak to you again!
Martha: (pulling away) No, you won’t stop me! We can both be as downwardly-mobile as we like! Passively doing ‘any job’ beats actively trying to find one. Of course, there aren’t any jobs for either of us — but once we’re dead we won’t care, nor will anybody else, not even the Recording Angel.
Arthur: B-b-but but but …
Martha: (smiling sweetly) Besides, how else can we qualify as a demonstration corpse in a funeral parlour?

(curtains)