As one, their faces crease into appalling smiles. They're not trying to scare anybody. It's much worse than that. They are trying their decayed best to Put On A Show. One of their number whips the cloth off the easel stand to reveal the first TITLE CARD. It reads: THE ENSEMBLE ANNOUNCES ITS INTENTION. The Musicians begin to play.

VAUDEVILLIANS:

We will take you, Sir or Madam, From the sands of ancient Persia To a world of tarmacadam Where there's -- ughh! If the inertia Lets us move; these limbs are leaden, And these faces not much better -- Look, there's a girl and there's a monster And he'll do his best to get her. Woh-oh-oh-oh, Woh-oh-oh-Oh-oh-oh-oh, Woh-oh-oh-oh, Oh-oh-oh-oh-oh.

(On the phrase "there's a girl", the actor who will play Alex holds a bad/simple 'pretty girl' mask up in front of their face. On the phrase "there's a monster", the actor who will play The Djinn holds a piece-a-shit 'demon' mask up in front of theirs. On the "Woh-oh-oh"s, four of the ensemble stand forward to sing in doo-wop harmony while the others get their breath back and pull what-the-fuck-were-we-thinking faces at each other. Then, reluctantly/painfully, they get back into character to join in the second verse.)

We're not seeking to alarm you, Gonna try our best to please ya, And there's nothing here to harm you As long as -- ooh! Some anaesthesia Would be welcome -- Here's the problem: There's a killer in the theatre, And we don't know where he's sitting But we know he wants to eat ya.

(The KILLER, who has been sitting anonymously in the audience, leaps to his feet, frothing at the mouth and waving sharp kitchen utensils.)

Woh-oh-oh-oh, Oh-oh-oh-Oh-oh-oh-oh, Woh-oh-oh-oh, Oh-oh-oh-oh-oh.

(While the happy doo-wopping continues, the Killer menaces a couple of audience-members and then exits at back-of-house.)

Woh-oh-oh-oh, Oh-oh-oh-Oh-oh-oh-oh, Woh-oh-oh-oh, Oh-oh-oh-oh-oh. Woh-oh-oh-oh, Oh-oh-oh-Oh-oh-oh-oh, Woh-oh-oh-oh, Oh-oh-oh-oh-oh.

(As the doo-wopping repeats, the Vaudevillians begin to retreat and exit. One of them—who is about to play THE MC—opens the trunk and hands each of the others a prop or piece of costume from it to take with them as they exit. These should be items that the audience will recognise later when each Vaudevillian returns "in character".)

(The MC signals the Musicians to stop. He roots around in the trunk. He puts on a silly WIZARD HAT and a bad WHITE BEARD. He addresses the audience directly.)

THE MC: Listen well, O best beloved, for these are the words of the wise. Once, in a time before time, God saw three things. He saw light. He saw earth. He saw fire. And He breathed into each and to each his breath was life. And the light gave birth to Angels.

(A SPOT picks out an ANGEL—a cast-member frozen in pious tableau and clad in a billowing white SMOCK, cardboard WINGS, and maybe a shitty little paper HALO. SPOT goes out.)

THE MC: And the earth gave birth to Men.

(SPOT picks out ADAM and EVE—two cast-members completely naked except for a couple of tactful FIG-LEAVES and the APPLE in Eve's hand. SPOT goes out.)

THE MC: And the fire gave birth to the Djinn.

(SPOT picks out an OMINOUS FIGURE in a hooded cape that conceals his face completely from the audience. SPOT goes out.)

THE MC: And the children of Light were given Heaven as a home. And the Children of the Earth were given a home that is this world. Only the Children of Fire were homeless, doomed to wander between the worlds, belonging to neither and envious of each. Fear not the teeth of the leopard, O best beloved, fear not the roar of the thunder. For this world hath no perils to compare to the rage of these Orphans of God. Fear one thing only in all that is. Fear the Djinn . . ...

(He goes to the easel-stand and removes the first Title Card, revealing the next—which reads: PERSIA 1122 a.d.)

(Lights down. A beat of silence and darkness. Then a HUGE TERRIFYING SOUND COLLAGE of screams of agony, screams of terror, and the usual thunder and explosions that accompany all apocalypses. If you've got any balls, you do this "live", with voices and thunder-rollers and the like. It goes on just long enough to risk absurdity or boredom and then we hear the voice of the exiting MC shouting imperiously over the chaos.)

THE MC. Nib Shuggarath Bahim! Nib Shuggarath Bahim!!

(A final cataclysmic roar and then all sound ceases.)

(The footlights come up slowly. Maybe SMOKE is clearing. Enter MISTER SPONGE and MISTER SCROTUM. They are clad in musty and soiled versions of what every well-dressed comic double-act wore in 1909—suits, bowler hats, and walking canes. Where casting permits, it's good to have these chaps played by women in drag.)

(They look around and overhead in a check-that-the-nightmare-is-over fashion. Once convinced of their safety, they let out sighs of relief. Then, noticing the audience, they walk jauntily to the front of the stage.)

SCROTUM: Well, that was a close one, Mr Sponge.

SPONGE: Close one indeed, Mr Scrotum. And yet …

SCROTUM: Insight, Mr Sponge?

SPONGE: Observation, Mr S. There was—dare I say it?—a certain poetry to those aspects of the atrocity which one might reasonably describe as …

SCROTUM: "Novel", Mr Sponge?

SPONGE: "Novel" is good. "Novel" is good. "Inventive", certainly. I was particularly fond, for example, of The Boy Turned Inside Out—offering as it did a somewhat-seamless simultaneity of the bowel-churningly horrific and the frankly educational.

SCROTUM: Never knew there was so many colours inside us, Mr. Sponge.

SPONGE: Nor I, Mr. S, nor I. And the Lady With Flower-bearing Pudenda I found both metaphorically apposite and—I mean it naturally in the aesthetic sense—profoundly stimulating. Not, I grant you, entirely appropriate for the eyes of the pre-pubescent but . . ...

SCROTUM: …but most of the kids was busy wondering why their hands had turned into frogs' heads anyway.

SPONGE: Quite right, Mr. S. Quite right.

SCROTUM: For my part, I found myself fascinated by The Portly Gentleman Hung By His Own Innards. Seeing that intestine wrap round his throat and then shoot upwards to seek purchase on the Portico was quite the sight.

SPONGE: It certainly was, Mr. Scrotum. Indeed, its undulations put me in mind of nothing so much as of some terrible snake woken from slumber by the sound of the Charmer's pipe.

SCROTUM: Nicely put, Sir.

SPONGE: Of course, one is left to ponder—after the critical judgements that one might apply to the various individual felicities of invention that constituted that parade of terrors and wonders—what the devil the thing as a whole was all about.

SCROTUM: Oh. Well, you know what, Mr. Sponge? I would say—if one were forced to hypothesise, mind—that it was probably something like this:

(Scrotum steps forward to pump out the following exposition as rapid-fire patter, as if this was the heart of their "act". Memorising and Repetition. Not perhaps the finest Speciality ever to come out of Vaudeville but probably better than twenty minutes of fucking bird-calls.)

(Sponge may choose to pantomime certain key images or elements from his partner's speech. Alternatively, he may "police" the audience from his vantage-point on stage, jabbing his cane at a customer or two to make sure they're paying attention.)

SCROTUM: A Persian Monarch, wisdom befuddled by Power and temperance unmanned by Wealth, consorted unwisely with an ethereal creature of the upper atmospheres and, despite the warnings of his Court Sorcerer that no good could come of it, rushed in eager as a young lad on his first visit to the Harem and, having made the first of his promised three wishes and received the pot of gold, the egg of the Phoenix, or whatever other bauble he'd requested, proceeded to utter a doubtless well-intentioned but unfortunately poorly-expressed second wish resulting in a Palace-wide chaos of transmutating flesh, appallingly inappropriate skeletal structures, and what could only be described in fairness as utterly buggered-up physiognomies. On …

SPONGE: (shivering in horror) The eye-blisters.

SCROTUM: The eye-blisters was bad, Mr S, the eye-blisters was bad. Do you mind … ?

(Sponge makes an apologetic gesture. Scrotum resumes his spiel.)

SCROTUM: On seeing the grievous devastations of the flesh that his carelessly-stated second wish had brought down upon his people, the Monarch was understandably eager to phrase the third in such a way as to restore decorum to the Court. The Sorcerer, though, knowing that the granting of a third wish to He Who Woke Him allows a Djinn to open the gateway between the worlds and unleash upon the Earth all his demonic kindred, intervened in a timely fashion and, chanting a spell in the forgotten words of a language that was old before Atlantis drowned, managed to entrap the Djinn within the crimson confines of a magnificent Fire Opal. And there the matter . . ... (pauses and turns to Mister Sponge) Course, it's possible that the Monarch's third wish might have been so well-expressed that things could have been drawn to an acceptable conclusion without the necessity of Wizardly intervention but …

SPONGE: But what're the odds?

SCROTUM: Precisely. (turns back to the audience) And there the matter rests.

(They take elaborate bows, Sponge giving a valediction to the audience.)

SPONGE: Sponge and Scrotum, Ladies and Gentlemen. Two who should never be strangers. Sponge and Scrotum. A smile, a song, a merry quip. And a handy yet subtle reminder that personal hygiene is not only polite but is an effective preventative against necrosis of the testicles.

(Towards the end of Sponge's valediction, his partner hooks his arm with the curved end of his cane to drag him away and Messrs. Sponge and Scrotum exit. The MC enters, leading applause for them. He removes the Title-Card from the easel stand, revealing the next: AMERICA. TODAY.)

(The MC does a double-take at the card and hastily pulls off his beard and whips off his Wizard's hat to reveal a BASEBALL CAP. He opens the trunk and removes two TENNIS RACQUETS …