Title: Boxes
Fandom: Slings & Arrows
Length: 400
Content notes: choose not to warn
Rating: G
Characters: Geoffrey Tennant, mentions of others
Author note: pre-series, possibly part of something longer; thanks to![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
theicescholar for suggestions about containers ♥
Summary: Geoffrey sits and stares at the boxes on the floor of his childhood bedroom. Maybe there are words for this, but right now he can't think what they are.
"God knows why your mother kept all this," Geoffrey's father says. "You want to take it now, or – "
Still on his best funeral behaviour, then. Probably thinking of the church and golf club crowd downstairs, clutching their plates of miniature sausage rolls and crustless triangular sandwiches.
Geoffrey sits and stares at the boxes on the floor of his childhood bedroom. Maybe there are words for this, but right now he can't think what they are.
Stencilled theatre programmes from the 1970s. Arac's helmet from Princess Ida, the last G&S they'd done before he went away to university. Flyers for student shows - Measure for Measure, Macbeth, Godspell. A plague doctor's mask covered in glitter, from Darren's second-year Duchess of Malfi. Clippings from the campus newspaper and the local press.
The old President's Choice shortbread tin that used to be her sewing-box is full of theatre tickets, some of them stubs but more of them unused. All those years when Geoffrey would send them tickets for every show he did, his father never came to watch him. His mother came when she could, which wasn't that often. She'd promised to come to Hamlet, though she couldn't make it to opening night: a clash with parents' evening at her school. She'd been planning to come the first weekend, but by then Geoffrey was in the hospital.
"Don't come here," he told her when she rang the ward. "I don't want you to see this place."
She'd protested, asked if he was sure, and he'd tried not to hear the note of relief in her voice, faint but clear. An hour's drive away, but she might as well have been on the other side of the world.
"Are you OK? No, I know. I mean. Are you going to be OK?"
"I don't know," he said. "I guess."
It wasn't what she wanted to hear, but the truth would have been worse.
He wishes now he'd kept the letters she wrote him while he was in there. He'd torn some of them up unread, thrown away the rest. She didn't understand, but at least she'd tried to keep the lines open between them, which was more than anyone else had done, back then.
"Yes, well," his father says, turning away abruptly. "I'll leave you to it."
Geoffrey doesn't answer. He leans back against the bed and goes on staring blankly at the boxes.
Fandom: Slings & Arrows
Length: 400
Content notes: choose not to warn
Rating: G
Characters: Geoffrey Tennant, mentions of others
Author note: pre-series, possibly part of something longer; thanks to
theicescholar for suggestions about containers ♥Summary: Geoffrey sits and stares at the boxes on the floor of his childhood bedroom. Maybe there are words for this, but right now he can't think what they are.
"God knows why your mother kept all this," Geoffrey's father says. "You want to take it now, or – "
Still on his best funeral behaviour, then. Probably thinking of the church and golf club crowd downstairs, clutching their plates of miniature sausage rolls and crustless triangular sandwiches.
Geoffrey sits and stares at the boxes on the floor of his childhood bedroom. Maybe there are words for this, but right now he can't think what they are.
Stencilled theatre programmes from the 1970s. Arac's helmet from Princess Ida, the last G&S they'd done before he went away to university. Flyers for student shows - Measure for Measure, Macbeth, Godspell. A plague doctor's mask covered in glitter, from Darren's second-year Duchess of Malfi. Clippings from the campus newspaper and the local press.
The old President's Choice shortbread tin that used to be her sewing-box is full of theatre tickets, some of them stubs but more of them unused. All those years when Geoffrey would send them tickets for every show he did, his father never came to watch him. His mother came when she could, which wasn't that often. She'd promised to come to Hamlet, though she couldn't make it to opening night: a clash with parents' evening at her school. She'd been planning to come the first weekend, but by then Geoffrey was in the hospital.
"Don't come here," he told her when she rang the ward. "I don't want you to see this place."
She'd protested, asked if he was sure, and he'd tried not to hear the note of relief in her voice, faint but clear. An hour's drive away, but she might as well have been on the other side of the world.
"Are you OK? No, I know. I mean. Are you going to be OK?"
"I don't know," he said. "I guess."
It wasn't what she wanted to hear, but the truth would have been worse.
He wishes now he'd kept the letters she wrote him while he was in there. He'd torn some of them up unread, thrown away the rest. She didn't understand, but at least she'd tried to keep the lines open between them, which was more than anyone else had done, back then.
"Yes, well," his father says, turning away abruptly. "I'll leave you to it."
Geoffrey doesn't answer. He leans back against the bed and goes on staring blankly at the boxes.
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Comments
But it's been a while since I've re-watched.
What's your take?
Edited 2020-01-11 01:57 pm (UTC)
He must have lodgings in Season 1, and I would guess he's not in a group living situation with the less-established actors (which seems to be a thing for them in Season 3). Maybe, like Jack, he's renting some local's attic room.
a local's attic room would be a possibility for lodgings in s1 *nods*
And speaking of that telephone...I think of S&A as "fairly recently made," although the internet says 2003-2006 so I wonder why I thought 2009? But anyway. It's distinctly pre-cellphone, in the sense that almost no one in the show has one. I'm pretty sure Holly does, but she may be the only one. Does Jack, for example? You'd think he would but I'm not convinced he does. Oh, wait, Darren has one, doesn't he? He makes a phone call from a car. Does Richard (the other person who seems most likely to do so)? In any case, the point is, the show is full of people using land phones in their offices, in their bedrooms, Oliver makes that call from a *payphone* for Pete's sake!
The internet tells me that this is also the period of the first iPhones coming out, so I'd believe that in real life, it was the period where cellphones were becoming more common but were not yet ubiquitous. (I was a late adopter and got my first cellphone in 2010, at which time not everyone I knew had one but my grad school cohort were acting on the assumption that everyone did.)
I've never really thought about this, because of course when I watched it for the first time was not that long after it aired, and that was still what my real world looked like. And because my mental model of how the world works, particularly in fiction, was firmly formed pre-cellphone and has been slow to evolve.
Darren has one - he's on his mobile walking into the theatre the first time we see him. Richard calls Anna from his to find out if there's been a fax from FrogHammer. Kate has a conversation with Claire on hers, on her way to the Corny Smacks audition. I'm pretty sure there are others I can't remember off the top of my head - not sure if Ellen has one in her dressing room at the TV station when Geoffrey wants her to call Barbara, or whether it's a small landline phone. but yes, a lot of landlines in use, and indeed the payphone!