The Last Row — Scene 2: The Proposition

SETTING:
The stage of the fringe theatre. The working lights are up — a cold, functional wash. The set is sparse: six chairs facing upstage, away from the audience, as if watching an invisible performance on the back wall. A scrim hangs at the rear. Cables snake across the floor. A ghost light stands centre stage.

TIME:
Seventy minutes before curtain.

AT RISE:
JAMAL, early twenties, sits in the front row of the audience seating, a laptop open beside him. He wears a headset and a hoodie with the theatre's logo. He's running light cues, but his attention keeps drifting to the stage. LEO, also early twenties, sits on the edge of the stage, legs dangling, holding a script that's been highlighted to within an inch of its life. He mouths lines silently, occasionally gesturing with one hand as if summoning the right emotion.

KEIRA enters from the wings, clipboard still in hand. She's been running — not physically, but emotionally, the kind of sprint that comes from managing a crisis.

---

KEIRA
Jamal, hold the cues for now. We're not running anything until I say so.

JAMAL (looking up)
Is it true? The whole cast?

KEIRA
The whole cast. Except Leo.

JAMAL glances at LEO, who is still mouthing lines, oblivious or pretending to be. JAMAL lowers his voice.

JAMAL
What are we going to do?

KEIRA
I'm working on it.

MARTIN enters from the wings, opposite side. He's carrying his script but holding it differently now — less like a reference, more like a lifeline. He stops at the edge of the light, hesitant, as if the stage itself might reject him.

JAMAL (noticing him)
Oh. Wow. Martin Vale. I mean — I knew you were here. I've seen you. Obviously. But we haven't — I'm Jamal. Lights and sound. I've read all your —

MARTIN
Not now, Jamal.

JAMAL
Right. Yeah. Not now. Totally.

JAMAL shrinks back into his seat, mortified. LEO finally looks up from his script.

LEO
Martin. Hi. I'm Leo. I play — I was going to play — the second understudy for the Stranger. But I know all the lines. I mean, I know most of them. I know the shape of them. The feeling.

MARTIN (dry)
The feeling.

LEO
Yeah. The — (he gestures vaguely) — the hauntedness. The way he talks around what he means instead of saying it. I've been practising in my flat. My flatmate thinks I've joined a cult.

MARTIN stares at LEO. There's something disarming about his earnestness — a quality Martin has spent decades dismissing in reviews as "untrained enthusiasm." But tonight, it's the only thing holding the room together.

KEIRA (to Martin)
You wanted to see Leo. Here he is.

MARTIN
I didn't say I wanted to see him. I asked where he was.

KEIRA
Same thing.

She gestures to the stage — a sweeping motion that takes in the chairs, the scrim, the ghost light, the whole impossible situation.

KEIRA
Go on. Talk to him.

MARTIN hesitates, then steps fully onto the stage. The working lights seem to find him, isolate him. He looks uncomfortable in his own posture.

MARTIN (to Leo)
How much of the play do you actually know?

LEO (brightening)
All of it. Well — Act I, solid. Act II, maybe seventy percent. There's a monologue about the basement that I keep tripping on because the syntax is really —

MARTIN
The syntax is deliberate. It's meant to convey a fractured mental state.

LEO
Right! That's what I thought. But then I wondered if maybe it was just — (he falters) — you know. Hard to say out loud.

MARTIN blinks. No one has ever described his writing as "hard to say out loud" to his face.

MARTIN
It's meant to be performed, not recited.

LEO
I know. I just — I'm trying to find the music in it. Your language has music. It's like a jazz piece where the time signature keeps changing but it all holds together if you trust it.

JAMAL nods vigorously from the front row, then stops when he realises he's visible.

MARTIN (after a beat)
That's not an inaccurate observation.

LEO (grinning)
Thank you.

KEIRA steps forward, drawing their attention.

KEIRA
Martin, we need to make a decision. We have house seats sold. We have reviewers in the audience —

MARTIN (sharply)
Reviewers? Who?

KEIRA
Harriet Dunn from the Standard. Possibly someone from the Stage. They're not going to wait while we negotiate with ourselves.

MARTIN turns away. He walks to the row of chairs facing upstage and stares at them — the backs of the chairs, the implied audience. The image of theatre turned inside out.

MARTIN (quietly)
Harriet Dunn once called a production I directed — the only one I ever directed, twenty years ago — "competent but cowardly." She wrote that I "seemed afraid of my own material." That review followed me for a decade.

KEIRA
So prove her wrong.

MARTIN (turning)
By going on stage with one understudy, no rehearsal, and an audience full of people who would love to watch me fail? That's not proving her wrong. That's handing her the headline.

LEO (standing, stepping toward Martin)
What if it's not about proving anything?

MARTIN looks at him.

LEO
I mean — I'm just the understudy. I don't have a career to lose. But I read your play, and it made me feel something I don't have a word for. It's about a man who builds a theatre for himself because the real one won't have him. That's — (he falters, then pushes through) — that's how I feel every time I audition. Like I'm building a little theatre in my head that no one will ever see.

Silence. JAMAL has stopped breathing.

MARTIN (softly)
You're twenty-two.

LEO
Twenty-three. Last month.

MARTIN
When I was twenty-three, I watched a play from the back row that changed my life. I thought, "I want to be part of this." And then I spent thirty years making sure I never had to be.

He walks to centre stage. The ghost light glows beside him. He looks out at the empty seats — the seats that will soon be full.

MARTIN (to the empty auditorium)
If we do this — if I do this — it won't be good. It won't be polished. It may be the worst thing any of those people have ever seen.

KEIRA (firmly)
It will be alive. That's more than most theatre manages.

MARTIN looks at her. Then at LEO. Then at JAMAL, who gives a tiny, terrified thumbs‑up. MARTIN takes a breath — the kind that actors take before a difficult line, though he wouldn't recognise it as such.

MARTIN
I need ten minutes.

KEIRA
You had ten minutes in the dressing room.

MARTIN
I need ten more.

He walks offstage, into the wings. He doesn't look back. LEO watches him go, then turns to KEIRA.

LEO
Is that a yes?

KEIRA (watching the space where Martin disappeared)
It's not a no.

JAMAL turns back to his laptop, scrolling through light cues with trembling hands. The ghost light glows. The chairs face the back wall. The theatre waits.