Scene 4:

Marie Antoinette – The Last Night on Earth

The Ringmaster returns. The ghostly figures remain. The Ringmaster tells us of the Queen’s subsequent plight. Bereft and hated, she is imprisoned with her son. We see her in [bad word] of the boy, treating him with courtly deference, as if he were King. This, so the Ringmaster informs us, naturally reminds her enemies of the threat of succession. The boy is therefore taken away. The Queen now appears to be utterly lost, shorn of everything. In a trance, she ‘dances’ with the ghostly specters. The light changes, the dance ends. jailer brings her writing materials. In the freshly changed scene, the window, and the oak tree from the garden in Act 1, Scene 1 [bad word] apparent. Reading aloud as she writes a final letter to her sister-in-law, the Queen now movingly expresses the pain she feels at having to abandon her children. It is her consuming regret. God, how she misses them! she is unaware of the Priest who has been attentively listening. This is the same Priest who was in the garden with her when they were both children, the same Priest who tried to remind her of that occasion in Act 2, Scene 1. Now he tries to remind her again. when she hears his voice, the Queen freezes as if startled. Yet she still doesn’t turn to face him. In an echo from the past her mother seems to be calling her in. With her back to the Priest, the Queen protests that she knows him not. The Priest gently persists, urging her to remember the oak and the peach tree, and her mother calling. Quite suddenly the Queen begins to remember. In shock, she clutches at her throat. Taking his cue, the Priest continues a silent appeal. Finally, the Queen turns to him, and, in a moment of fleeting recognition, clasps his outstretched hands. He pulls her to his breast in a desperate embrace. Having recognized in him her childhood friend, she [bad word] him, but as a man rather than a Priest. The Priest kneels, closing his eyes in supplication. Unknown to him whilst he prays clowns lead her to a waiting tumbrel, and she is drawn away. When he eventually opens his eyes and sees her leaving, he tries to follow, but is prevented from doing so by one of the clowns. The Priest and Marie Antoinette then raise their arms to one another, but the Queen slowly and relentlessly departs on her final journey.

RINGMASTER
The window now bereft, abhorred
Counts numbered days the summer long
In Temple Prison with her spawn
On pretext of ‘unnatural acts’
With jests and jibes and guile and facts
The ‘sans culottes’ [bad word] the tree
Now a sister to the dispossessed
The halt, the maimed and all the rest
Like a leaf on a pitiless sea
Shorn of family and rank
Humbled in the dank air
She mingles with the dancers macabre
And the ghostly dancers twirl

In the dread minuet
And beggar the illusions of that little Austrian Girl