What's this line from this play?

September 26, 2013 1:55 PM

I'm trying to remember a line from a play I saw performed years ago, and sadly I can't remember the title or the playwright. A woman tells her guy (boyfriend? husband? ex?) that there has to be some point of his life where she doesn't matter, otherwise their relationship is no good. Does that sound familiar to anyone at all?

I want to say it's a fairly modern play and that the guy involved is a screenwriter or something, but... yeah, I'm grasping at straws. I'd just like to be able to repeat the line properly and give it appropriate attribution.

posted by scaryblackdeath to Media & Arts (1 answer total)

Best answer: Tom Stoppard, The Real Thing.

Annie's line is: "You have to find a part of yourself where I'm not important or you won't be worth loving."

Henry's (he's a playwright) reply two scenes later is:

Henry: The trouble is, I can't find a part of myself where you're not important. I write in order to be worth your while and to finance the way I want to live with you. Not the way you want to live. The way I want to live with you. Without you I wouldn't care. I'd eat tinned spaghetti and put on yesterday's clothes. But as it is I change my socks, and make money, and tart up Brodie's unspeakable drivel into speakable drivel so he can be an author too, like me. Not that it seems to have done him much good. Perhaps the authorities saw that it was a touch meretricious. Meretrix, meretricis. Harlot.

ANNIE: You shouldn't have done it if you didn't think it was right.

HENRY: You think it's right. I can't cope with more than one moral system at a time. Mine is that what you think is right is right. What you do is right. What you want is right. There was a tribe, wasn't there, which worshipped Charlie Chaplin. It worked just as well as any other theology, apparently. They loved Charlie Chaplin. I love you.

posted by willbaude at 2:18 PM on September 26, 2013 [9 favorites]