Act 1, Scene 1
(Enter from upstage right) Madge into a small, pokey upper flat room. It’s perfectly square, lacking real decoration, the walls a base beige, the carpet a dulling, foxed, sun-stained brown. No furniture or homely decoration, just a bare light bulb dangling from the ceiling.It’s mid-day, but the light is switched on. The door, the one entrance to the room, a common whitewashed thing, is locked. From the inside it is striped with heavy chains, thick garden padlocks holding them in place. There are a variety of keys taped roughly to the cracked ceiling and wooden shards of a broken step ladder slung into the far corner, amongst other things. There are a few empty tobacco pouches and smoking paper packets, a couple of coffee cups and a handful of boxes of wholesale packaged food. slowly dragging her feet almost falling, to a stop( at center stage) she sits on the floor , slightly off centre. She looks across the room at the shattered photo of her missing parents, the picture is a window into the past. Reminding her of the life she once had. Everything before the orphanage, before she ran away and before she became stuck in this life where the only escape is death, which she doesn't have the will to do such a thing. For a moment she forgets the world is a disaster and that everybody is forced to be the same. The only people allowed to express themselves are the rich. Madge is ripped out her memory and kicked back into reality. Today is her eighteenth birthday, the day she becomes an "adult". The radio blares the same sentence over and over again. The authorities are looking for a wanted women that fits Madge's description. She tries to remember what has happened, why she is in this room. All she can remember is today is her birthday, she once had parents that loved her, and that she ran away from an orphanage, not able to remember the reasons. She sits completely naked and there are little patches of dried blood on her arms and fingerprints of...