Blitz

In Blitz, part of the Pendragon cycle, Andrew McDuffy Rose, a 42-year-old actor, speaks to the audience from a table in a New York bar in 1975.  He tells us how, as a child during the Blitz in London, he and his brother and sister decided to tell their parents that they refused to be sent to a safer place in the country.  He speaks of actors running impromptu line rehearsals of Shakespeare in air raid shelters as bombs were exploding, and he remembers one of the very best performances they ever gave to an audience of three.  Nothing since, he says, has ever seemed so real to him as that time and place.  He thinks that somehow the stage performances touched a strange, deep, archetypal truth.  He says his brother Duncan is a competent, intelligent actor but doesn’t have the fire that audiences are drawn to.  When, at night in a strange city, he hears sirens, he remembers how they told their parents that they felt it was their duty to remain and play their parts, and how their parents allowed them to stay.  He wants to feel again that moment when his father was so proud of him.