In and out of lessons we have been developing monologue pieces. At first I found this difficult as I don’t have any major events in my life that I could talk about, and anything I could talk about I’d rather keep to myself. However when watching Spalding Gray’s Swimming To Cambodia (1987.) I started to come up with a few ideas. The reason I found Spalding Gray so interesting was because he was speaking about countries that were completely new to me and I was interested to learn about the countries he was speaking about as well as his stories whilst being there. Therefore I decided that for my monologue I was going to speak about my holiday to Egypt. The fact that I enjoyed this holiday so much helped me put emotion into what I was saying and to develop a story line. The ‘fear of the unknown’ played a big part in my monologue as whilst I was in Egypt many things happened that I could not have anticipated at all. Following this the main focus of my monologue was the following story…

“Day 5, 45 degrees. After an hours bus journey in this weather we arrived at a small building with two men waiting outside to welcome us all. Next we were all signing a piece of paper which I thought nothing of on which we had to give all our details in case any thing happened to us. After this we all received a scarf, I wasn’t even going to pretend that I knew how to put this around my head but I knew I was already slighting scared by this point as the idea of it being 45 degrees and my head being wrapped in a scarf, and then a helmet to go over this didn’t fill me with confidence. However, I was so excited about quad biking over the desert that I went along with it anyway. Being typical Emma as soon as I got onto the quad bike I got a rush of negative thoughts such as ‘I’ve never even driven a car or a quad bike, what if I can’t do it, what if I fall off’.’ Anyway, we soon got going and to my delight is was so fun and easy. The only part I didn’t enjoy was the boiling hot air blowing from the quad bike onto my leg but I just ignored this as much as I could. After biking through a desert for 45 minutes we stopped for a break, here I went to drink some of my water which of course had gone warm by this point so I just left it. Next thing I knew the girl who was right near my had almost fainted, I saw this as a bit of an over reaction and didn’t think it was THAT hot that somebody would faint. A few minutes after saying this I suddenly started to see black and tried to grab hold of my brother as I couldn’t get my words out properly, he turned out to not be very useful and thought I was just falling over. Next thing I knew I had pretty much fallen on to him and two men quickly ran towards me and then (and I don’t remember how) I ended up by the tree near the bikes and the men threw water into my face which, being warm water, did not really help. After this I took a seat and started to feel a bit better but had to jump on the back of the mans quad bike so he could drive me to where we were going. Once I got there I had a bottle of cold water and took a seat. It was so interesting to see that in the middle of a desert was an open hut with blankets on the floor and tables and a little BBQ type thing where people made food, the fact that people lived here amazed me. Here we all took a seat and after everyone asking me if I was okay we finally all got some food and some form of Egyptian tea. After hearing stories of what Egyptian family life was like it was time to go on a camel ride. A few people decided they weren’t going to do this, much to everyone’s surprise I could not wait! I had only ever ridden on a camel once and that was the first day of my holiday where we had been told to sit on the camel for a photo and then before we knew it the men had the camel up and were talking us for a walk on it down the beach, after this they demanded money off us even though we had not asked them for a camel ride. This all happened on the beach where we were staying, it’s safe to say we avoiding going here for the rest of the holiday as we did not pay them. Anyway, when we all got to the camels I was excited knowing that these people would not try and get money out of us afterwards. I of course had to get the naughty camel of the group that would just not behave itself, and not stand up. Once half the group were already a quarter of the way across the desert my camel finally decided to stand up and we got going.  Of course it wasn’t very far until the camel decided it was going to stop and kick around, meaning I had to hold on very tight. After the camel ride had finished we all got off. Just as I got off the camel in front of me that was still standing decided it was going to sit right where I was stood and budge me out of the way. Despite all this I had had a really fun day. The quad bike ride back was a little scary as I did not want the same thing to happen, however this was avoided by only taking a 15 minute route. One thing I learnt from this was to keep my mouth shut when I think people are over reacting as you end up looking stupid when it happens to you too!”

This type of monologue theatre is something I don’t really always enjoy watching and certainly do not enjoy performing myself. I understand it is called ‘solo’ performance but I think this type of performance demands a lot of attention and you need to be really good to keep the attention of the audience for the whole piece.

Posted on – 8th February 2013

Works Cited:

Gray, Spalding (1987) Swimming to Cambodia, New York.