How far do you agree with the view that this dialogue is the key to the audience's understanding of Waters' character?

        At this point in Price’s speech, Waters begins to pack up his belongings in order to leave, but then Price says something so hard hitting that Waters sits back down ‘heavily’ at the desk, overcome by pain. Price says, ‘Challenor reckons you could have been great…he said you just stopped wanting it.’ Waters then goes on to tell Price what it was that changed him from the ‘Lancashire Lad’, to how he is now. The stage directions tell us that by this time, Waters is ‘Fierce’. I believe that this is because he feels that Price is patronising him when he doesn’t know what it was that changed him. I think this because Waters goes on to say, ‘Before you were born, I was touring with E.N.S.A.,’ He then goes on to tell the story of what happened when he went on tour of East Germany, and how they were taken to see a concentration camp, and in the concentration camp there was a punishment block. He then says, ‘It was a world like any other. It was the logic of our world…extended…’ Griffith’s describes this as, ‘…the deep involvement phase of the story.’ I think that what Waters means by this is that this concentration camp is just like our society in the way that even in such a horrible, disgusting place, we can still find something even more disgusting within it. Waters then goes on to describe the event that followed, one of the comedians on the tour with him tells a Jewish joke to a crowd, the whole crowd laughed except for Waters. This shows us that it was this experience of the concentration camp that changed Waters. His new belief being that it was no longer funny to make jokes about people/races that were suffering.

        Waters then goes on to say, ‘And I discovered…there were no jokes left. Every joke was a little pellet, a…final solution.’ The pellets that Waters is talking about are cyanide pellets, the same as he saw in the camp. I think by this he meant that all jokes hurt someone, maybe even that jokes are a weak form of torture. Waters says to Price, ‘We’ve gotta get deeper than hate. Hate’s no help.’ By this Waters means that hating something isn’t going to change it. You have to understand something before you begin to change it, like the Nazis for example, hating the Nazis won’t change what they did. This view of Waters translates into his view on comedy. He said that he didn’t like Price’s act because it was full of hate. This relates back to what Price was saying earlier, ‘Maybe you lost your hate, Mr Waters.’ As this was exactly what had happened to Waters in Germany, I think that is why Waters turned fierce when he started speaking to Price about what happened to him.

        I agree with the view that this dialogue is the key to the audience’s understanding of Waters’ character as before this dialogue, Waters was a mystery. We knew that he used to perform and that he was good, but we didn’t know why he quit, and we didn’t know why he never told jokes anymore or why he held the view that comedy should mean something, rather than just to get laughs. This dialogue answers all those questions and creates a full picture of Waters’ character.