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The Watchmaker's Ninth Second
On a Wednesday morning in London, independent horologist Ilse Varga receives a box of nine pocket watches from Ruth Prendergast.
- ~44 min (estimated)
- 9692 words
- 18 scenes
- 7 branch points
- 4 endings
- Wednesday 27 May to Sunday 7 June 2026; second floor, 41 Abbot Street, London E2, a church square off the Roman road, a
19 recorded plays (one per visitor per day)
No cover art yet · listing metadata: listing.json · counts: authored
About
Ruth Prendergast brings nine pocket watches to an independent watchmaker in the days before a family Sunday lunch. Eight were made by her father between 1962 and 1968 and are struck EP inside the case back; the ninth is heavier, plain, unmarked by punch, and marked instead by an eleven-millimetre file line in the one place nobody looks. Ilse Varga establishes from the movements themselves that the other eight came from Lintott's of Clerkenwell, November 1961, a lot of forty marked with a small crown, and that the ninth does not carry that lot mark but a second die underneath it: A. Steiger, Le Locle, 1968. The ninth is the best-timed watch in the box at minus one second a day, and it has held that rate for fifty-eight years because its back has never seated: the file line stands eight hundredths of a millimetre proud, and fifty-eight years of the back closing on it have polished a wear crescent into the plate. Four siblings want four watches. A 2019 letter and a deliberately blank page in the job book show that the ninth was bought with money taken from a brother who was never told. The whole question of the story is what may be removed from a thing, by whom, and with whose agreement.
Content notice3 topics · tap to review
- a family estrangement since 2011, unmentioned throughout and only ever inferred
- a fall down stairs in 1971 that permanently damaged a watch, referred to as a permanent result rather than an injury
- a woman of eighty-four who has known a fact for fifty-seven years and has never been asked about it
Cast
- I Ilse Varga no portrait yet
- S Samuel Achebe no portrait yet
- R Ruth Prendergast no portrait yet
- T Tomas Prendergast no portrait yet
- D Delia Obi no portrait yet
- F Fintan Prendergast no portrait yet
- C Constance Prendergast no portrait yet
- E Emmett Prendergast no portrait yet