There is always a moment - it comes to all of us, irrespective of race, class, religion and all the other what-nots - when you take someone aside and point out everything - everything that has gone wrong. And there is always so much of it, and it takes hours, days, of patient recitation, probably from a book, because it is far too long and involved - like a twisty rope, left out too long in the rain, behind the house, you know it, you have seen it with your own eyes - to commit to memory, even for an old hand such as myself. You completely and utterly exhaust yourself in the doing, you end up speechless, breathless, spent. I do anyway. One cannot walk away from one's nature.

In this monologue of a mind's slow dying, an actor, man of abundant words, faces his final audience: of himself. It is a face that he barely recognises through the mist of his own tragic decline...