Linked below are a series of short stories and performance texts Abigail has written over the years. Early-access chapters from the book she is currently writing as part of her ongoing long-term creative research project, Nancy//the World, will also eventually be featured here.
A few of the stories linked here are accompanied by brief passages offering background information on the relevant text, in certain cases alongside insight into the processes through which those manuscripts designed for theatrical or cabaret performance were produced and staged.
THE SCRREW MANIFESTO
First performed during Nuclear Armageddon Ain’t Nothin’ But Foreplay: Runt Of The Litter Transgender Awareness Week Takeover, November 2023
Image credit Tom Coates, from a performance during Hey Mum 3, May 2024
“NANCY MOTHERFUCKING ARCHER
the seven-foot slut with the seven-figure IQ,
the genius giantess who made nature her absolute bitch,
whom god himself calls mommy,
invites you to join
SCRREW
or the
SISTERHOOD FOR THE CHEMICAL AND RADIOACTIVE RADICAL ENLARGEMENT OF WOMEN
and annihilate this horrifying, hyper masculine, hyper capitalist, -conformist, -consumerist, hyper-heteropatriarchal hellscape we call ‘american civilisation’ once and for all.
Are you in?
Yeah you fucking are.
So let’s cut to the fucking chase...”
ANGUISH OF THE FIFTY-FOOT WOMAN
First performed during a solo exhibition of the same name, held at the ArtWorks Project Space, London, August 2021.
Third revision originally performed at Raw Eggs, Matchstick Piehouse, London in May 2023.
“They’ll start you on their Growth-Stunting treatment if the doctor thinks you’ll be taller than five foot nine by the time you’re a grown adult. According to the National Organisation of Medics Against Amazonian Masterhood, that’s the absolute biggest a woman should have any right to be. Well, if they think a girl of five foot nine’s a perversion of the natural order, God knows what they’d make of one who’s nearly five foot twenty-four. A woman who makes mere perversions of nature look positively petite. A sublime, sky-scraping she-demon of sexual inversion and insanity, hell-bent on annihilating American society in all its carefully crafted heterosexual perfection: emasculating its men, eviscerating the nuclear family, converting all the girls to gays, castrating all the boys... A horrific, humongous, unholy B-Movie abomination ready to be rendered in blood-soaked celluloid. ‘Upstanding citizens of America, run for your lives! The Seven Foot Woman’s on the rampage, and Hell hath no fury!’”
Nineteen-sixty-one. A long, arrow-straight highway lances its way through the Mojave Desert toward a distant singularity, a razor-thin needle of grey piercing though endless acres of sweltering orange sand and a sunset sky swirling cerulean, scarlet red and uncanny emerald green like an alien drug trip. We see Nancy Archer, a young woman wearing an irritatingly short laboratory coat, sporting glossy black hair, crimson painted lips, and dark green eyes glaring nonchalantly into the infinite, barren landscape beyond her windshield, piloting a convertible in dusty, washed-out pink.
A commercial crackles from the car’s radio, with the following to say:
(RADIO ADVERTISEMENT)
Is your daughter growing like a gangly weed? Starting to tower over all the boys?
Monstrous, big and brutish, your darling little girl should rightly be terrified of turning into a towering Amazon. No man will want her. No child will dare come near her. Do you want your daughter to grow up to be a giant, grotesque spinster only fit to work in a travelling show? Of course you don’t - and luckily for you, we here at the National Organisation of Medics Against Amazonian Masterhood have got just the thing you need to stop her craning to the clouds and keep her cute and charming…
NANCY//THE WORLD: PROLOGUE
First performed during ASSEMBLE Fest, Streatham Space Project, London in May 2024
The following is a 15-minute monologue written for and performed during ASSEMBLE Fest, a festival of new fringe theatre and scratch performances held by Streatham Space Project, London, in May 2024. This monologue was designed to test several of the textual themes that will feature in The Giantess Speaks, a full hour-long one-woman theatre show inspired by Abigail’s creative research project of the same name, set to debut in 2025, in front of an audience. As the full show develops, both work-in-progress and finished full scripts will be posted here alongside this early scratch script.
“...THE END IS COMING. CLIMAX GUSHING. RIVERS RUSHING. PLEASURE POURING FROM THIS MONUMENTAL MOUNTAINOUS FEMME, STRADDLING THIS SEVEN-MILE-LONG SHAFT FROM THE PUBIC BRONX TO THE TENDER TIP OF BATTERY PARK.______________CLIMAX OF WOMAN. CLIMAX OF MAN. CLIMAX OF MANHATTAN. CLIMAX OF HUBRIS. HISTORY. HUMANITY. THE ARTIFICE OF POWER. DOMINATION. OPPRESSION. THE FINANCIAL SYSTEM. GOVERNMENT. NATIONS UNITED AND DISUNITED. BORDERS. BOUNDARIES. BINARIES. CLIMAX OF EARTH AND HER LOVER.______________THE GIANTESS BODY. AFTER MONIQUE WITTIG, 1974.______________END OF THE WORLD AS RADICAL QUEER NEO-FLUXUS PERFORMANCE. ABJECT BODY AS DOOMSDAY DEVICE. SEX AS WEAPON. EROTIC IMAGINATION AS EMOTIONAL RELEASE...”
DO YOU LIKE THEM?______________YEAH, I KNOW. IT’S HARD TO WALK IN A PAIR OF 1,250-FOOT HIGH HEELS WHEN YOU’RE ACTUALLY WEARING BOTH OF THEM AT ONCE LIKE SOME NOT-INSANE GIANT QUEER HARBINGER OF DOOM, BUT, Y’KNOW______________WELL, DON’T YOU THINK IT LOOKS COOL? STANDING THERE, TOWERING OVER THE DEVASTATION IT’S WROUGHT IN ITS WAKE. LIKE A SLICK, GLISTENING, SEXY, SUBLIME CRIMSON MONOLITH OF FEMININE FURY LOOMING LARGE OVER THE HETERONORMATIVE, HYPERMASCULINE, HYPERCAPITALIST AMERICAN MEGALOPOLIS?…
A SESSION WITH DR CUSHING
First performed during Buoyed, Bermondsey Project Space, London in February 2023.
“You wouldn’t believe it, would you. That there’s a woman bigger than most houses roaming the streets of one of the world’s great cities, yet no-one even knows she exists. She’s completely invisible, inaudible, imperceptible, as anonymous as any city dweller could ever ask to be, and you gotta ask yourself: how the hell is that even possible? Wouldn’t her footsteps thump and cause tremors like the T-Rex in Jurassic Park? Wouldn’t you hear the crunching metal of cars crushed underfoot as she sauntered down the street? Wouldn’t you see her eyes, her scarlet lips sailing above the rooftops, see the blood-soaked seismic cracks and craters in the asphalt trailing in her wake?”
It is, isn’t it. Unconventional.
I’m happy too. Really happy you trust me enough to let me to bring you up here, Doctor Cushing. And so early in the morning, too. I mean, unless this is just something you just secretly do as... as just, you know, like a standard part of the service, like ”Trauma Never Sleeps, so Why Should Doctor Theodora Cushing: Neurosis Neutraliser of the Night”... Doctor, have you ever given any other client a session at four a.m. before?
Well, just, thank you. For being so willing. To... you know... to do this for me.
I know, Doctor, and it’s been such an unbelievable blessing for me that you do have that attitude towards your patients. I felt that before the... you know... before... the growth — and I’m even more thankful for it now. Your psychotherapeutic perseverance, your innate willingness and drive to fix people’s brains, no matter what it might take, how long you might have to spend hacking away through the thick, throttling jungles of the human mind until you’ve finally found the cranial crevasse where the psycho-emotional torment has concealed itself, and put it to the sword. Told it to “Scram! Stop torturing poor Ms Archer or I’ll spill your guts all over her medulla oblongata!”
Honestly, I actually do worry about you sometimes. About how intense a toll it must take on your own body and soul to be this dedicated to resolving the mental anguish of others. Particularly tonight. Given where we are right now. Given the ordeal I’ve just put you through to get us both up here…
SHOW ME YOUR GENITALS, BABY!
First performed during the February 2020 edition of Front Room Spectacular, Matchstick Piehouse, London.
“YOU KNOW, ALL I SAID IS THAT I WANTED TO RAISE MY CHILD GENDER NEUTRAL. I DIDN’T THINK THAT WAS SUCH A BIG ASK. DON’T DROWN MY BABY IN AN OVERWHELMING OCEAN OF ODIOUS PINK PROJECTILE VOMIT, JUST BECAUSE SOME QUACK AT THE ULTRASOUND CLINIC’S PICKED OUT THE PUNIEST TRACES OF A PRE-NATAL PUSSY IN AMONGST THE LUMPEN EMBRYONIC SLUDGE OF RANDOM BODY-PARTS SPLASHING ALL AROUND MUMMY’S UTERUS. AND YOU KNOW WHAT? DON’T LET’S HAVE EVERYONE IN THE WHOLE WORLD MAKE OUT THAT MY LITERAL FUCKING BABY’S FLIRTING OR BEING A LADIES’ MAN THE SECOND HE TODDLES ANYWHERE IN THE VAGUE PROXIMITY OF A FEMALE CHILD AT NURSERY, AS THOUGH THEY MIGHT ALL ACTUALLY WELCOME IT TRANSFORMING INTO SOME SEXIST, SHAG-ANYTHING, BAR-CRAWLING CREEP THE SECOND ITS SODDING BOLLOCKS DROP. BUT OH, FUCKING NO, YOU COULDN’T HAVE THAT NOW, COULD YOU...”
The leviathan advanced. The whole house shook.
Motionless, we held our mutual breath. Air and breath and blood alike, time and space and Life itself were frozen in suspense; as were our petrified souls. Our crystallising veins. Our seizing voices.
A venomous yellow glow emanated from the dining room window, just beyond the hall.
I ventured to investigate. Slipped silently through the door. In deathly silence, I tiptoed right around the dining room’s perimeter, spine and heels and head adhered to the wall, and concealed myself behind the window’s curtain. As I observed the scene without, I could feel my blood turning ice cold. My face curdling white.
“Get downstairs,” I stammered back towards the lounge, voice wavering. “Downstairs — now! Everybody get into the cellar. Keep the bloody lights off and don’t make a sound…”
A MONSTER ON HER OWN TERMS
First performed during Anguish of the Fifty-Foot Woman, ArtWorks Project Space, London in August 2021
“I remember the sign above the entrance to the caravan. ‘The Most Mesmeric Collection of Freaks in All the Netherlands.’
I remember watching the silhouette of my father scribble his signature upon the contract through the caravan’s lace curtain, as I stood without. Watched him shake a menacing, meaty hand from across the desk.
I remember my mother’s melancholy lip quivering as she stepped outside, struggling to keep herself from crumbling into pools of tears – my father pale as a sheet, weak, trying his hardest to keep a stiff upper lip as the man from the freak show followed the two of them out, a slick, wicked grin unravelled the full breadth of his face. They did not know if they could ever reconcile themselves with what they’d done...”
I stood on my plinth, blinded by the spotlight, encompassed by the void.
In the blackness, the breath of the Beast grew hotter and heavier with every passing moment, drifting through the still like deathly spectres, sickening tendrils of silver vapour slipping beneath my skirts, kissing the skin of my bare legs, slowly, sordidly trickling ever further skywards, tracing the shape of my thighs, fingering mile upon freezing cold mile of petrified flesh that could not move, could not shake the sick sensation off by pain of death. Spiralling an imprisoning helix up my stomach and my spine that bound me like a piece of slaughtered game, feeling their way up the length of my waist to my plane-flat chest, seeking signs of womanhood wherever womanhood might at some terrifying juncture in time rear its head. Tiptoeing up my trembling crane of a neck until its sweltering wisps were spreading dendrites up my cheeks, penetrating the air I could not breathe, penetrating quivering lips that could not cry out I’d been born into the bounds of Hell, advancing like creeping, stalking spiders upon glistening little eyes that yearned to let their dams break and weep and wail until all of Holland was drowned, returned to the clutches of the great North Sea.
I could feel them. I could sense them. Salivating. Drooling like dogs.
They came in their thousands every single day.
They were waiting to possess me…
SWAN & EDGAR
First performed during the November 2019 edition of Front Room Spectacular, Matchstick Piehouse, London.
“‘Sir,’ the assistant would say, firmly, but with a proper smirk on his face, anticipating his inevitable red-faced reaction, ‘Are you actually looking to buy something today, or are you just taking the piss?’
The American poseur would glance up from the table. Suddenly all nervous, sweaty, shaky, constrained in his clothes, trying his hardest not to let this big-shot, mister moneybags persona of his falter, he’d start to stutter out the phrase with which he’d excuse himself. You would think each of them would at least be able to come up with a new, imaginative, individual excuse every time the assistants cornered them and clobbered them for messing up our showrooms, just to satisfy their need to feel a titan for once in their sorry little lives; but peculiarly enough, whenever they did challenge one of these pretenders to cough up the money to actually purchase one of their bespoke garments, they always, without exception, choked out the self-same phrase as they backed themselves towards the exit, ready to run as hard as they could from Savile Row and never come back as soon as the door shut behind them.
’Listen, sir - my wife’s just in Swan and Edgar...’”
My grandfather once worked as a fabric cutter down on Savile Row. He was fourteen years old when he left school to take up his apprenticeship. The year was nineteen sixty-three, and my old Granddad Norman was out there working in the cellars of Anderson & Sheppard, slicing and dicing the sharkskin, gabardine, herringbone and tweed the great and the good and the filthy, stinking bleeding rich demanded for their bespoke formalwear — finely tailored to flatter their frames no matter how grotesquely Reubenesque the lap of luxury had left their decadent selves — just as the Sixties were beginning to gain their swing. A teenage boy from lowly Maryland Point, deep in the dark, dishevelled, desolate depths of the post-war East End, thrust into the epicentre of an imminent cultural earthquake that would soon enough conquer the entire bloody world: the West End of London, where Judy Garland died, John, Paul, George and Ringo thrived, where the Who? became The Who, The Stones went rock and rolling and The Kinks found Paradise. Where the Mods rode glistening pearly white Lambrettas into war with leather-armoured Rockers charging astride throaty, thunderous, triumphant black steeds of British steel and burning rubber; where the Skinheads moon-stomped fascists to the dirt with the syncopated rhythm of a Trojan Records tune; and Mary Quant’s miniskirt became the icon of a Girls’ Own Revolution. Where the jet-set were the in-thing, Fame and Fortune carried on the wing of a Pan-Am plane from LA to Monte Carlo, and the International Playboy was king…
THE ETERNAL CHRISTMAS
“A decent amount of time has passed since i made that wish upon that godforsaken christmas star. And, now, with every single millisecond of time that’s passed since that midnight hour of begging on my knees beneath the tree, it’s become exponentially more evident how much my innocent childhood naivete — to think it could ever possibly work to celebrate Christmas every single day of every single year — has utterly FUCKED us! FUCKED the country! FUCKED the entire fucking globe from corner to fucking corner!”
NOTE: I am currently giving this story a heavy edit. I have therefore temporarily taken it offline in order to do so. Don’t worry, though — it’ll be back soon!