Composers and their stage works 


RAFTS AND DREAMS

Robert Holman

(1990)

Hetty is a nervous compulsive - she has to wash whenever she touches anything and was the things she has touched. In the bathroom of her flat her husband Leo and next door neighbour, Neil, try to help her. Neil is training to be a doctor and he finally persuades her to touch the cistern by getting her to focus on a nice dream.

Some time later Neil is sun bathing on the roof-space and Leo joins him and later Hetty too as she is becoming braver. Neil tells them of how as a teenager he ran away from home and drifted in to making gay porn films. One day the men making one of the films decided to turn it into a snuff movie and they tried to kill Neil. One of the men was traced, arrested and imprisoned.

Leo gets Neil to help him remove a tree stump from the garden. As they succeed in doing this water starts bubbling up into the hole. There seems to be no way of stopping it. Soon London and the Home Counties are under water. Leo managed to detach the living room of his flat and using it as a raft the three of them float away.

They pick up Jo who turns out to be the wife of the man imprisoned for making the snuff movie. She had been trying to get in touch with Neil to make amends as she had had no idea what her husband had been up to.

They drift on. Europe is now under water. They see what appears to be part of an iceberg. Neil and Jo row over to it and they find Alex a teenage boy. Jo wants to stay behind but is persuaded to come back and the three of them row of to the raft. They discover what seems to be an island but it is high ground somewhere in Africa and had been a leper colony. Leo and Hetty decide to stay with the one survivor from the colony.

Neil, Alex and Jo drift on they come to a much larger "island". They discover a mobile field hospital equipped to perform cataract operations and in the distance they can see lots of people they presume are patients. Alex tries to repair the engine. Neil goes on ahead but shoots himself.