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Akenaten copyright © Derek Jarman 1976
Jubilee copyright ©Derek Jarman 1977
Bob-Up-A-Down copyright © Derek Jarman and Tim Sullivan 1981
B Movie: Little England/A Time of Hope copyright © Derek Jarman and Julian Sands 1981
Neutron copyright © Derek Jarman and Lee Drysdale 1983
Sod ’Em copyright © Derek Jarman and Keith Collins 1986
Introduction copyright © Michael O’Pray 1996
Illustrations for Akenaten, Bob-Up-A-Down and Neutron copyright © Christopher Hobbs
Illustration for Jubilee copyright © Derek Jarman
First published in Great Britain by Vintage, 1996
penguin.co.uk/vintage
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Derek Jarman – painter, theatre designer and filmmaker – held his first one man show at the Lisson Gallery in 1969. He designed sets and costumes for the theatre (Jazz Calendar with Frederick Ashton and Don Giovanni at the Coliseum). He was production designer for Ken Russell’s films The Devils and Savage Messiah, during which time he worked on his own films in Super 8 before making his features: Sebastiane (1975), Jubilee (1977) and The Tempest (1979). From 1980 he returned to painting (a show at the ICA) and design (The Rake’s Progress with Ken Russell in Florence), and made the films Caravaggio (1986), The Last of England (1987), War Requiem (1988), The Garden (1990), Edward II (1991), Wittgenstein (1992) and Blue (1993). His books include: Dancing Ledge (1984), The Last of England (1987; now republished by Vintage under the title the author intended for it, Kicking the Pricks), Modern Nature (1991), At Your Own Risk (1992) and Chroma (1994). Derek Jarman died in February 1994.
Dancing Ledge
Caravaggio
Kicking The Pricks
(= The Last Of England)
War Requiem
Modern Nature
Queer Edward II
At Your Own Risk
Wittgenstein
Chroma
Derek Jarman’s Garden
Up In The Air
Up in the Air contains the major unrealised film scripts Derek Jarman wrote between 1976 and 1987, and also the script of Jubilee, which was made in 1978 but, unlike his other dialogue films, has never before been published. The failure of these brilliant scripts to reach the screen was due not only to Jarman’s reputation for making provocative films but also to the economic plight the British film industry found itself in after the late 1960s.
It is true to say that, for Jarman, scripts were never simply means to ends. They were always intensely personal writings that expressed strong beliefs and emotions. When they failed to materialise as films, they were not shelved and forgotten. They remained as projections of his inner world. They always seemed to have a life for him, to be part of himself, and I suspect it was painful for him to leave them behind. For this reason I believe, Jarman wanted them to be published. He saw it as one of his final acts. He was also a great pillager of his own work, so that images, scenes and moods found in these scripts were incorporated into his realised films. One of the fascinations of this volume is seeing this process at work.
From 1970 until his death in 1994, Jarman made scores of films. This enormous output can be divided very roughly into three broad categories. In the first are the feature films upon which his reputation rests – Sebastiane (1976); Jubilee (1978); The Tempest (1979); Caravaggio (1986); The Last of England (1987); War Requiem (1989); The Garden (1990); Edward II (1991); Wittgenstein (1992) and Blue (1993). The second includes films which were more anti-narrative in form and often not full-feature length – In the Shadow of the Sun (1974–80); Imagining October (1984) and The Angelic Conversation (1985). The third comprises the many short Super 8 films which include The Art of Mirrors (1973), Gerald’s Film (1976) but also his music videos, especially those done for Marianne Faithfull, The Smiths and the Pet Shop Boys, and other films like the sequence for Don Boyd’s portmanteau film Aria (1987), his collaborative film The Dream Machine (with Cerith Wyn Evans, John Maybury and Michael Kostiff, 1984) and the Super 8 compilation Glitterbug (1994).
Jarman’s film scripts were nearly always written with the strong literary quality we have come to know through his autobiographical writings such as Dancing Ledge and Modern Nature. He had the ability to evoke scenes through the power of language. His scene instructions are studded with ideas and references revealing how he understood a particular scene’s meaning and context. In Jubilee, for instance, he titles scene 9 ‘H.Q. Healey’s Budget Strategy in Ruins’, suggesting that the film’s depiction of social collapse had some basis in the chaos of the late 1970s when Callaghan’s Labour Government collapsed.
The British film industry has been in massive decline over much of the past thirty years and, like many film directors in this country, Jarman had a never-ending struggle to gain financial backing. In his case this was frequently exacerbated by the often transgressive nature of his films, which frightened off many potential Wardour Street backers. Jarman’s first foray into feature film-making, with Sebastiane in 1976, happened at a time when the most talented British filmmakers like Ken Russell, John Boorman and Nicholas Roeg had already left for America in search of financing.
Against all odds, Jarman managed to raise funds from friends to make his first three feature films, which established him as a bête noir, assuming the mantle of his mentor Ken Russell. As Jarman readily admitted, he made Super 8 films and videos not only because he liked the artistic freedom they gave him, but also because he had had no choice for many years, especially between the release of The Tempest in 1979 and the making of Caravaggio in 1986, during which time he was starved of backing. It is therefore no accident that three of the scripts in this volume were written during this period. It was his anger at this situation and his producer Nicholas Ward Jackson’s prompting which in 1982 led him to write his first book, Dancing Ledge, which is not only a wonderfully irreverent and entertaining autobiography but also a deeply felt broadside at the British film industry. It is against this background that these scripts should be read.
Akenaten was one of Jarman’s first major projects, along with his scripts for Sebastiane, Dr Dee (which became Jubilee) and The Tempest. All these scripts were intended as possible feature-length films with a larger budget than the odd pounds he could afford for the Super 8 films he had been making since 1971. The final draft of Akenaten published here was probably prepared while he was working on Sebastiane, although he had already planned a project on the infamous Egyptian dynasty before he met Sebastiane’s producer, James Whaley, in January 1975.fn1 Unlike the other scripts, Akenaten ‘remained as a gilded book with beautiful watercolours’.fn2 The bloody and incest-ridden story of the Egyptian dynasty is the first of many films in which Jarman traces powerful figures – and sometimes families – as the embodiments of corruption and terrible powers. In Akenaten, he is not concerned to create an allegory for modern times as he was to be with, say, Jubilee, The Tempest, Caravaggio, Edward II, The Last of England, War Requiem and Wittgenstein, all of which have at their core varying forms of the ruling classes or elites. On the contrary, he is interested in Akenaten’s mythical proportions, its luxuriant exoticism and strong sexual themes.
While he was at work on Akenaten Jarman was still wrestling with his ambitious Super 8 film In the Shadow of the Sun which contained a sequence where ‘an Egyptian pharaoh materialises in the surf’, while the short Super 8 film, The Gardens of Luxor, may, under its original title of In the Shadow of the Sun: Akenaten and Tutankhamun, be seen as an earlier version of Akenaten. At a time when there was much interest in obscure religions and periods of history, Ancient Egypt was in any case a topic of fascination not only to Jarman, but to the general public. The hugely successful Tutankhamun exhibition had travelled to the British Museum in London in 1972, and the influential American underground film-maker Kenneth Anger had shot segments of Lucifer Rising with Marianne Faithfull in Egypt in the early 1970s.
From the script we can glean that Akenaten was to have a visual style akin to the opening sequence of Sebastiane with its bold but exotic depiction of Diocletian’s party-cum-orgy. Jarman’s notes to Akenaten reveal that he knew the budget would be low and on this basis decided to avoid narrative costumes – ‘just shaved heads’. Later he relents and says that the costumes should be ‘very simple white dresses, gold ornaments, no HOLLYWOOD RAZZMATAZZ’. This very early script clearly shows the importance that stage design and costumes had for Jarman. He would often in the future deploy a particular piece of clothing, or a physical attribute to symbolise character and narrative meaning. Jarman disliked the neurotically painstaking attempts at so-called ‘authenticity’ endemic to much British drama set in the past.
Jubilee was shot in 1977 in the hope that it would be ready for that year’s Jubilee celebrations. As it turned out, it was released the year after. A prophetic film, it also sets Jarman’s agenda – the critique of contemporary times through a vivacious merging of history with both the present and the future. Like Walter Benjamin’s angel of history, the film gazes back into the past from the standpoint of contemporary England and then proceeds to create an image of the future. A grim comedy, Jubilee was inspired by the burgeoning punk movement of 1976 to which Jarman had direct access, and by his fascination with the 16th-century Elizabethan alchemist John Dee. With its marriage of these two aspects it seemed symbolically appropriate for the Jubilee celebrations of the second Elizabethan queen.
After the release of The Tempest in 1979 Jarman entered a long period in which he survived on making pop videos and doing design work with Ken Russell returning again to the Super 8 and beginning to use video. He also ‘embarked on Neutron, Caravaggio and Bob-Up-A-Down with a variety of young collaborators who wanted to learn film’.fn3 Bob-Up-A-Down was a collaboration with Tim Sullivan. In September 1981, he remarks that he started the ‘medieval allegory’ years before and related it to the Roman de la Rose but ‘based on Julian of Norwich and Richard Rolle’. In the same month, he travelled to Granada Television in Manchester to rework the screenplay with Sullivan.
Jarman rather unfairly calls Bob-Up-A-Down a ‘worthy’ film, belying the brilliant screenplay which reflects a raw, brutal and menacing yet poetic world of dark motives, superstition and transcendental love. Jarman’s fascination with the past, and especially with cultures in which magic and ritual play a central role, is particularly evident here. The sequences are so powerfully described that the story captures the reader’s imagination and conjures up vivid images of the intended film. Its fairytale-like quality transforms the story into an allegory of doomed love that, maybe, sums up his own feelings about being gay. In his foreword to the script, written years later, he imagines a cast – Tilda Swinton as Prophesy, Vanessa Redgrave as the Anchoress and Nigel Terry as Bob – further helping us to flesh out the images the script evokes.
Derek Jarman encountered the writings of C. G. Jung in the early 1970s. They had a great impact on him, providing him with a symbolic system which he could adapt to his own ideas. Although Bob-Up-A-Down is not straightforwardly Jungian in its conception, as is In the Shadow of the Sun, it does however seem to contain aspects of the psychoanalyst’s fascination with mythology. The figures of the Anchoress and Bob, for instance, representing a potent mix of the Christian and the primeval, while black-garbed Bob himself symbolises both a dark satanic force and a good force against the petty world of the village.
Around the same time, Jarman was also working on B Movie: Little England/A Time of Hope with the young actor Julian Sands who had appeared, albeit masked, in Jarman’s promo film for Marianne Faithfull’s Broken English, shot in September 1979. B Movie is a postscript to Jubilee. The terrain is the same as that of the earlier film, beginning with the death of Ginz who has become a modern-day Cromwell. There is, too, the odd echo of Jubilee – at one point, for instance, the border guard to Dorset (one of Jarman’s favourite counties) uses the same lines as in Jubilee. The script is, however, much funnier, with a cartoon-like energy and wit. Reading it today, it is much nearer the political bone than it was at the time. Jarman’s main plot idea of the sale of the Isle of Dogs on the open market to an aspiring pop star – Adam Ant was earmarked for the role – and his working-class ‘Rocker’ parents no longer seems like the far-fetched stuff of social satire as the present-day Tories steadily sell off Britain!
B Movie has all the helter-skelter pace and fun of a British Carry On film. Unlike its parent film Jubilee, it does not use an historical bracketing device, but is firmly set in a future Britain. The characters have a cartoon-like energy, and its often malicious violence is always tempered by humour. It is one of Jarman’s most explicit political pieces, its sympathies very much with the left and clearly embracing republicanism, and much fun is had at the expense of Jarman’s favourite targets – the Church, generals, the upper classes, the Heritage industry and television. Characteristically, he lovingly engages with the camp aspects of post-war English popular culture, encapsulated by Adam’s Teddy Boy father and Marilyn Monroe look-alike mother, Red Flag the shop-steward, and the tart-with-the golden heart Monique. It is one of the few scripts or films by Jarman that does not cast a dark shadow.
Neutron was written in 1983 with the young left–wing politico Lee Drysdale whom Jarman met when the latter was hired to guard the set of Jubilee. Drysdale’s flamboyant clothes, knowledge of film, revolutionary politics and energy obviously entranced Jarman. Their own differences – the claims on society and the responsibility of the artist and of the political activist – were absorbed into the script after the two argued, according to Jarman, for ‘much of 1980’.fn4
Neutron seems to be the only unrealised filmscript that got close to being made and one that Jarman worked on for many years. It was designed by Christopher Hobbs and cast. In September 1980, Jarman and Guy Ford travelled to Geneva to meet David Bowie who, after seeing The Tempest, agreed to do the film but only if the money could be raised without using his name. Bowie was to play the artist Aeon although, as Jarman points out in his notes to the script, the pop star wanted to play the subversive hero Topaz. For the meaner role of Topaz, Jarman wanted the playwright Steven Berkoff with whom he was collaborating in late 1981 to make a film of Berkoff’s play Decadence.
The script has all the makings of a mainstream feature film in the genre of Scott Ridley’s Bladerunner except that it has more political insight than that film and is much darker. Jarman seems to recognise this when he admits that Drysdale ‘brought a darker cinematic side’ to the collaboration. It is set in a post-nuclear apocalyptic future in which society is run by a repressive police state run on fanatical religious lines, using the words of the apocalyptic prophet John the Divine. Much of the derelict urban landscape is inhabited by mutant children who, feral-like, haunt the shadows. The emotional centre of the story is the couple – Aeon and Sophie – who are thrown out of their successful, affluent lives, a garden of Eden, into a post-nuclear explosion nightmare. In some ways, they are precursors of the heterosexual lovers (Swinton and Spencer Leigh) in The Last of England who are similarly torn apart and then swallowed up by an apocalyptic scenario. In both films, the couple’s relationship is represented through reveries and memories, and in both, one of them is executed (the man in The Last of England, the woman in Neutron). The two films also contain images of refugees being systematically persecuted; they both use mock Last Supper scenes. The mood of horror, despair and, ultimately, impotence is shared by both films, although Neutron is scripted in a more orthodox way with dialogue and straight narrative as opposed to the experimental and more schematic The Last of England. Jarman confessed later that he thought that ‘much of the atmosphere of The Last of England would have been realised in Neutron.’fn5
Neutron is based on C. G. Jung’s Aion (the Greek rendering of Aeon) which explores the phenomenology of the self with reference to alchemy, Nostradamus and Christian mythology. The religious aspect of Neutron is embodied in ever-present PA systems emitting sayings from the Bible’s final and most eccentric text, the Book of Revelation. The script’s apocalyptic vision expresses Jarman’s feelings about modern society within a mythological structure. Unlike Jubilee it has only two characters who represent opposing ideas, attitudes and sensibilities – the poet Aeon and the politico Topaz – Eros and Thanatos, Yin and Yang, Christ and Antichrist. The woman Sophie exists largely as a memory and represents a lost utopia. In its use of mythology, it is in some ways a precursor of The Garden which uses the Christian story as an organising element. However, Neutron does not have the personal subjective sensibility of the later film. Its tight structure, powerful visuals and post-apocalyptic theme would have made it perfectly apt for the early 1980s when Bladerunner (1982) and Brazil (1985) successfully occupied the same terrain.
After finding out that he was HIV positive, just days before Christmas in 1986, the mood of Jarman’s films swung between a bitter anger and a calm stoicism, at times leavened by a strong sense of love and reparation. Sod ’Em is an example of his work where the negative feeling seems to dominate. An early version of Marlowe’s Edward II, which he made in a more orthodox way later in 1991, Sod ’Em shows Jarman focusing intensely on the pantheon of famous gays – Wilde, Shakespeare, Newton, Marlowe. Once again the film is set in a near future of state repression specifically aimed at gays due to the homophobia stirred by AIDS. He obviously has the model of The Last of England in mind, especially Simon Turner’s innovative soundtrack of music, voice-over, found-sounds and poetry. Sod ’Em indicates a dramatic shift in Jarman’s sympathies: the ‘straight’ world is now included in the ranks of the enemy. His feeling is one of belonging to a beleaguered minority no longer with any real allies in sub-cultures, like punks or Teddy Boys, or in left-wing figures like Red Flag. Sexuality divides Jarman’s world. In Marlowe’s play, Jarman finds a fitting tale of utter isolation, persecution and love destroyed. In the first scene, Jarman dissolves from Edward in his medieval cell to a bird’s-eye view of contemporary Britain bathed in a burning orange light. Like The Last of England it pillages real images from the Sun’s front pages, to Jarman in his father’s home movies and the Reichstag in flames. Its critique of Thatcher’s Britain is much more confrontational and less sieved through allegory or satire, with attacks on the Welfare State, the power of the Secret Services and their activities against lawfully elected government in the 1970s, unemployment and so forth.
The language is a mix of modern-day reportage and the Elizabethan poetics of Marlowe, including occasional extracts from the original play but also phrases from T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets in a spoof sequence on the House of Lords. Another Last Supper scene appears, only this time in form of the Reaper’s Cabinet meeting which Jarman used in his later film of Edward II with Isabelle, Thatcher-like, presiding. As Edward runs through the sewers from the police, the intercoms, like those in Neutron, quote the Book of Revelation. The doomed heterosexual couple of Neutron is replaced by a gay one. In Neutron the priest in the lift is asked to raise a voice on behalf of the suffering and he responds ‘Fuck the lot of you’. In Sod ’Em the Queen responds ‘Fuck it!’ when her husband asks her to defend the Faith.
The film’s collage style and mood, switching between anger and restorative calm resembles those of The Garden, made a few years later, except that the use in the later film of the Passion of Christ lends it a more distanced quality. There is also vivid autobiographical material in Sod ’Em – as in the sequence ‘Just the Two of Us’ when Edward talks to Johnny, describing his restless nights and renewed love of life.
Another sequence has an image of two men making love which gives way to a blank screen on which a caption informs the audience that ‘for a society that cannot face the reality of love I have plunged this screen into pornographic darkness’ – this blank screen is a forerunner of that used in his last film Blue.
It is significant that, in B Movie and Sod ’Em, and to some extent in the character of Topaz in Neutron, Jarman espouses a militant stand against the repressive powers. We are reminded that he was extremely fond of William Burroughs’ writings, in which he propounded the ‘wild boys’ gay militancy to which Jarman was not unsympathetic.
Up in the Air must puncture the myth that Jarman was an intuitive, even naïve, film director in comparison to his contemporaries. On the contrary, in Neutron and Bob-Up-A-Down, for instance, the characterisation, dialogue, mise-en-scène and overall narrative structure are rigorously worked out. All the films collected here are complete in every detail and those acquainted with his work can almost see them unfold in their mind’s eye as they read. For those of us who feel deprived of the films he would have made but for his tragic death, these unrealised scripts are some kind of recompense. With their bold, vivid style, mischievous wit, unflinching ambition and great energy, they provide a fascinating and stimulating addition to his body of work – the paintings, designs, writings, garden and, of course, films.
Why did I develop a passion for Ancient Egypt? Some desktop Howard Carter cursed with curiosity, a dream of immortality, the Mummy’s Curse.
In the early seventies I spent hours tracking down books in second-hand bookshops until I had over a hundred, from Victorian travel books to an obscure little pamphlet on the construction of a wig. I started to learn the hieroglyphs, but gave up, though I incorporated them into the little slate paintings I was making.
Out of my readings the story of the monotheistic sun-worshipping heretic stood out. Its side characters Nefretiti and Tutankhamun almost alive in funerary mask and statue – an attempt to murder the old gods, the hacking away of the name from tomb and temple, and Akenaten himself shaped like a queen bee – so strange.
I wrote the script deep in the Leyden Papyrus, and the Old Testament. This would be no Cleopatra. It was to be as simple as butter muslin with fine white limestone walls, sand and perhaps a gold bracelet or a scarlet ribbon. It was to be low budget. Very low. I had managed £30,000 for Sebastiane, but my casting ambitions were high – Bowie as the Pharaoh, maybe Lindsay Kemp as Amenhotep – but the project suddenly lost my interest. I had read myself into and out of the story. It was put on the shelf, though later Philip Glass made his opera.
I think if I made it now it would have no real necessity and would be merely decorative – perhaps not. It is strange to be a film director, for work unmade is lost. If these had been plays, and I a playwright they would be considered if not performed.
Well, Akenaten was quite a success. It got good reviews and looked stunning. David Bowie’s performance was enigmatic and it managed to eschew bombast. The dialogue, though rather poetic somehow fitted the subject, it never grew stilted. It was a good first film, controlled, unlike Sebastiane which wandered off and made itself.
The film takes place in Egypt, about 1400 BC.
Amenhotep, the richest and most powerful Pharaoh, rules Egypt, at the zenith of its power. The whole known world pays him tribute.
One day, Akenaten, the son he has banished since childhood, returns from the desert and the destruction of Egypt’s greatest dynasty begins.
This is the story of Akenaten, his mother Tiye, his wife Nefretiti and his two sons by Tiye, Smenkhare and Tutankhamun.
The SPHINX at Giza stares into the sun. Tourists pass by taking a photo or two. The voice of the SPHINX is used as a narrator through the film.
Or alternatively, where the desert meets the sea, a group of gypsies have stopped. People gather round to watch, including our cameraman, who records the event as if he has just stumbled across it. Various figures are changing into costume, but in the foreground one dressed as the SPHINX announces:
SPHINX: [Voice over] I am the Sphinx. I’ve watched the centuries pass and know their secrets. All history is mirrored in my eyes. The great Pharaohs have prayed before my oracle, but none more terrible has stared me in the eyes than Akenaten, the son of Amenhotep. Like the perfume of myrrh which drifts on a windy day over the waters I remember Amenhotep, richest of all the Pharaohs. He reigned for many years with his wife Tiye, daughter of the charioteer Yu Ya. He built great pylons in the temple of the Sun God Amonra at Thebes, inlaid with lapis, gold and precious stones with flag-poles of electrum gleaming against the sky. He built a lake of pleasure for Tiye which he filled with golden fish. My story begins on that lake with the Pharaoh’s dream of the sun disc Aten, one afternoon among the blue lotus blooms. That day Akenaten, the king’s son, was born. A star appeared blood-red in the summer night. The waters of the Nile failed and a great famine fell on Egypt. The Pharaoh consulted Hapu, the oracle of the Sun God Amonra. He prayed to the God, but there was no answer. In the sanctuary, the Nile water in the silver divination bowl curdled. Hapu prostrated himself before Amenhotep and his Queen with all the people of Egypt, and the Pharaoh, seeing the harvest was destroyed by the birth of his son made an offering of the child to the desert sands. On that day the blood-red star vanished and the Nile rose, so the people gathered a great harvest.
The SPHINX slowly fades out and is replaced by an image of the baby AKENATEN crying in the desert sand.
SPHINX: [voice over] So the years passed in peace. The Nile rose and fell and the Great God Amon protected his people. The Pharaoh grew old and sick and retired to his southern palace to await his death.
The camera slowly zooms into the globe of the rising sun to a single tentative and expectant note on a harp. This dissolves into steps in the bank of the Nile where the beautiful princess NEFRETITI is drawing water to put in the silver bowl for the morning offering.
NEFRETITI: Come forth O Sun
Come and look at me
Come and look at me
The days are long, the nights are peaceful
Time spins a golden diadem
For Nefretiti
My life is spent in laughter
Awake Egypt. Awake sleepers of Thebes.
See the fish which lies beautiful on my
Fingers in the dawn light.
Ceremony of the rising of the sun. A gong sounds, bells ring. To a long-drawn-out chant a group of priests whirl like dervishes in front of the statue of Amon. The oracle HAPU consecrates the water in the silver bowl before the god.
HAPU: Awake in peace great Amonra. Awake in peace in the eastern desert. There is no God greater. Awake in peace, upper Egypt. Awake in Peace, lower Egypt. Praise to Amonra, Lord of Thebes, the Master of mankind. [HAPU hands the silver bowl to a young boy who kneels in front of him.]
BOY: In peace I receive this bowl.
The camera pans across the king’s bedchamber. A fine white plastered room. In the centre, a large golden bed supported by leopards. On it Queen TIYE is sleeping, guarded by a panther. In the corner, the Pharaoh AMENHOTEP is seated listening to a songbird in a cage. He is sick, covered with make-up and jewels to hide the ravages of time. TIYE, who is in early middle age, still retains her great beauty. The camera describes the whole scene slowly to the bird’s song. The young BOY enters the room with the silver bowl and prostrates himself, AMENHOTEP beckons him over. He kisses the Pharaoh’s feet. AMENHOTEP kisses him on the lips. The BOY seats himself in front of him and gazes intently into the water.
AMENHOTEP: What is the time?
BOY: The sun is rising.
[AMENHOTEP dips his hand in the water.]
AMENHOTEP: Shadows of the dead come before me.
[He pricks his finger with a golden pin. A drop of blood forms which falls in the bowl.]
AMENHOTEP: Let the boy see the light.
Let the spirit who I have
commanded come in. Let him
answer everything I ask truthfully.
[The BOY closes his eyes.]
BOY: A shadow falls across the sun.
A black storm howling in the desert.
In the storm rides a warrior, like a hawk,
Wearing the skins of wild panthers.
AMENHOTEP: Preserve me. Make my vessel prosper.
BOY: I see a writhing serpent with honey on its lips, crawling from the desert, the royal diadem on its head. The people fly before it. It swallows the Nile and crushes the land with its silent fury. Egypt is on fire. The great pyramids are burning. The Sphinx speaks the name of the serpent. It is Akenaten.
[At the name of AKENATEN AMENHOTEP seizes the bowl of divination with a cry, spilling its contents. The young BOY drops to his knees. Queen TIYE wakes with a start, the panther snarls. The songbird ceases to sing.]
BOY: I have spoken the name of the dead.
AMENHOTEP: Akenaten is coming. He is alive.
BOY: Do not strike me.
[The BOY attempts to crawl out of the PHARAOH’s sight.]
HAPU, , .