I just thought that was how it was. Children play at mother and father, but of course when they grow older they play at brother and sister—so as to conceal what requires concealment; they then discard their chaste desires; they play blind man's bluff till they've caught each other in some dark corner, where they're pretty sure not to be seen by anybody. But they are warned by their inner consciences that an eye sees them through the darkness. They are afraid—and in their panic the absent man begins to haunt their imagination—to assume monstrous proportions—to become metamorphosed—he becomes a nightmare who oppresses them in that love's young dream of theirs. He becomes the creditor who knocks at the door. They see his black hand thrust itself between them when their own are reaching after the dish of pottage. They hear his unwelcome voice in the stillness of the night, which is only broken by the beating of their own pulses. He doesn't prevent their belonging to each other, but he is enough to mar their happiness, and when they have felt this invisible power of his, and when at last they want to run away, and make their futile efforts to escape the memory which haunts them, the guilt which they have left behind, the public opinion which they are afraid of, and they lack the strength to bear their own guilt, then a scapegoat has to be exterminated and slaughtered. They posed as believers in Free Love, but they didn't have the pluck to go straight to him, to speak straight out to him and say, "We love each other." They were cowardly, and that's why the tyrant had to be assassinated. Am I not right?

Gustav Monologue from The Creditor

Rehearse Gustav's monologue