[Scene: a closet. There are two characters, Roderigo and Sebastian. Roderigo is inconsequential, since he has nothing to do but listen to Sebastian and then explain – and again explain – what Sebastian has said or done, why he has said it or done it, and wherein so doing it – or saying it – he was wrong. On the other hand Sebastian is the hero of the piece. This may be indicated by hanging a large sign on his chest which says HERO. He should do nothing but talk. I will not have him waving his arms, pacing up and down before the footlights and embracing (or defying) Roderigo. In the first place he simply dislikes Roderigo. In the second place there should be no footlights.]

мой перевод пролога, на большее я не рискну

Roderigo

Say that he has these thing: a war, a book,
Stickers all over his trunk;
Shoes on his feet, fish on his hook,
Paper, pen and ink.
Say that he has these things, and say his time
Has been fairly ridden with blessings for a professed
Purveyor of Life -- Life, Life, Life ready for Rhyme
Or Reason, real, raw, earnest, manifest.
For all this he`s not ready
For what he was readied for, but merely
A babe in his woods as the old phrase goes, and still
Wet behind the well-wrought juvenile

Say that these things take time. Not in a day
Was Rome, or Uncle Tom`s Cabin, or Babel built.
Milton`s eyes, Keats` lungs and Miss Millay
Were necessary loss, so much milk split
Before the rarest blossoms in their woods
Emerged that now his haste would nip in the bud.

But say he knows all this, having read the abuse
His questing forebears fumbling all their cues
Suffered from dragons and devils by the gross
Before their fleeces nestled in their mews;
And knows too that no covers in his wood
Will shelter him from Circes others heed.
Old know-it-all, he has already taken
The best advice the best advisers give,
And like the king of kings is cruelly shaken
By the absence of new troubles to conceive.

What does one say, then? Things work out?
It is so hard to deal with a clever man.
Let there be light and there is light --
He, one finds out later, switched it on.
And yet, for all this, all the facts disclose
A wanting of his wisdom when his woods are really his.

Sebastian

A cup each flour and milk, and yoke of egg.
Two parts gin to one part ice. Add mustard.
Three before breakfast, one after meals. Let leg
Soak in tub until custard.

Unroll rug and beat it.
Roll up towel and squeeze.
Gather garbage and heat it
In deep deep freeze.

[Continuing after a dramatic pause