The Esoteric Drama Club 2

In time, and more or less on time, he trudges wearily to the room where the class is to be held. It is located through a series of secret doors and obtuse turnings, all painted in cheap white paint and constructed badly. The room itself is large and is connected to a smaller ante-room, beyond which is a corridor down which the participants stroll. Everything here is brightly, glaringly lit, the walls of the corridor are white, the big drama room itself is shockingly piss-yellow with faded, peeling 1970's wallpaper of the most tasteless kind.

This is the setting for the Esoteric Drama Club. These two rooms are already filled with shrieking, excitable people of the most bizarre kind. They all tend to like gesticulation and debate, sometimes heated argument. Some are dressed in white sheets like the devotees of some strange religion. Others are dressed very plainly and simply indeed, almost puritanically. Some sport pantomime horse's heads and absurd grinning masks, others are festooned with props purloined from drama departments. Girls and boys are there, all of them compelled to be there but all of them secretly loving it, small dark girls who rarely speak, as well as the old men who are in the class, with their screwed-up faces and balding heads shining in the light, draped in white sheets.

A howling, mad drama exercise soon begins. Nailed to the far wall are three gaudy, yellow, sickly mattresses, with stuffing falling out, covered in a blue-glazed pattern. On these three students sit, M, and a couple of the old men. M is particular confidante with one of these old fellows, who sits on the edge of the mattress, digging his nails in, grey locks of hair bobbing on his balding head. The three on the mattress are to enact the part of great exploitative tyrants, so they growl and harangue their subjects, curse them, abuse them, rattle money-cups at those who grovel below them. Chaos ensues. The participants chime in from all parts of the room, all debating dramatic points, whether or not this or that hand gesture, or a particular nuance of speech was effective. (M has enjoyed thoroughly his part of the evil emperor, the oppressor, perching on the mattress although almost slipping off, raging like the old men around him.)