AUDITIONING SIDES

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Monologue.

Christopher:

When you look at the sky at night you know you are looking at stars, which are hundreds and thousands of light years away from you. And some of the stars don't exist anymore because their light has taken so long to get to us that they are already dead, or they have exploded and collapsed into red dwarfs. And that makes you seem very small, and if you have difficult things in your life, it is nice to think that they are what is called negligible which means they are so small you don't have to take them into account when you are calculating something. I can't see any stars here. Christopher It's because of all the light pollution in London. All the light from the streetlights and car headlights and floodlights and lights in the buildings reflect off tiny particles in the atmosphere and they get in the way of light from the stars.

 

Side 1.

Christopher:  Do you know of anyone who might want to make Mrs. Shears sad?

Number 40:  Perhaps you should be talking to your father about this.

Christopher: I can't talk to my father about it because he told me to stay out of other people's business.

Number 40: Well maybe he has a point Christopher.

Christopher:  So you don't know anything that might be a clue.

Number 40: No. You be careful young man.

Christopher: I will be. Thank you for helping me with my questions. Do you know Who killed Wellington on Thursday night?

Mr. Wise: Bloody hell. Policemen really are getting younger aren't they?

Mr. Wise laughs. Christopher walks away.

Christopher:  Do you know anything about Wellington getting killed?

Mrs.  Alexander: I'm afraid you're going to have to say that again. I'm a little deaf.

Christopher: Do you know anything about Wellington getting killed?

Mrs.  Alexander: I heard about it yesterday. Dreadful. Dreadful.

Christopher: Do you know who killed him?

Mrs. Alexander: No, I don't.

Christopher: Somebody must know because the person who killed Wellington knows that they killed Wellington. Unless they were a mad person and didn't know what they were doing. Or unless they had amnesia.

Mrs. Alexander: Well I suppose you're probably right.

Christopher: Thank you for helping me with my investigation.

Mrs. Alexander: You're Christopher aren't you?

Christopher: Yes. I live at number 36.

Mrs. Alexander: We haven't talked before, have we?

Christopher: No. I don't talk to strangers. But I'm doing detective work.

Mrs. Alexander: I see you every day, going to school on your school bus. It's very nice of you to come and say hello. Even if it's only because you're doing detective work.

Christopher: Thank you.

Mrs. Alexander: I have a grandson your age.

Christopher: My age is fifteen years and three months and three days.

Mrs. Alexander: Well, almost your age. You don't have a dog, do you?

Christopher: No.

Mrs. Alexander: You'd probably like a dog wouldn't you?

Christopher: I have a rat.

Mrs. Alexander: A rat?

Christopher: He's called Toby.

Mrs. Alexander: Oh.

Christopher: Most people don't like rats because they think they carry diseases like bubonic plague. But that's only because they lived in sewers and stowed away on ships coming from foreign countries where there were strange diseases. But rats are very clean.

Mrs. Alexander: Do you want to come in for tea?

Christopher: I don't go into other people's houses.

Mrs. Alexander: Well maybe I could bring some tea out here. Do you like lemon squash?

Christopher: I only like orange squash.

Mrs. Alexander: Luckily I have some of that as well. And what about Battenberg?

Christopher: I don't know because I don't know what Battenberg is.

Mrs. Alexander: It's a kind of cake. It has marzipan icing round the edge.

Christopher: Is it a long cake with a square cross-section which is divided into equally sized, alternately coloured squares?

Mrs. Alexander: Yes I think you could probably describe it like that.

Christopher: I think I'd like the pink squares but not the yellow squares because I don't like yellow. And I don't know what marzipan is so I don't know whether I'll like that.

Mrs. Alexander: I'm afraid marzipan is yellow too. Perhaps I should bring out some biscuits instead. Do you like biscuits?

Christopher: Yes. Some sorts of biscuits.

Mrs. Alexander: I'll get a selection.

She goes into her house. He waits. Then before she gets back …

 

 Side 2.

Christopher:

I could see the Milky Way as we drove towards the town centre.

Some people think the Milky Way is a long line of stars, but it isn't. Our galaxy is a huge disc of stars of millions Of light years across and the solar system is somewhere near the outer edge of the disc.

For a long time scientists were puzzled by the fact that the sky is dark at night even though there are billions of stars in the universe and there must be stars in every direction you look, so that the sky should be full Of starlight because there is very little in the way to stop the light reaching earth.

Then they worked out that the universe was expanding, that the stars were all rushing away from one another after the Big Bang and the further the stars were away from us the faster they were moving, some of them nearly as fast as the speed of light, which was why their light never reached us.

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