Peter Hammill The Mousetrap (caught In)
After all is said and done, not very much will have been either way: I'm a chronicler of action, I'm an actor in the play. I know the lines I have to speak, I know that I won't ever quit, corpse, or dry, but the performance gets so pointless and the days just drift on by. Every time that I go to turn the pages of the calendar in the third act of this twenty-ninth year of the show I'm aware of the latest leading lady and get mad at her... it's perfunctory, but why she'll never know.
When I began I had my hopes, believed that I could be a leading light of the stage, but now I've stunned myself to silence, exhausted all my inner rage, extinguished all my joy and violence, trapped all my feelings in a cage. Every time that I go to turn the pages of the calendar I can see that I'm not really going anywhere; all these years I have skirted round experience like a scavenger. Can I really feel? I wonder if I dare? At the end of the run, will there be anyone who cares? And behind the actor's pose, heaven knows if there's anyone left in there.
