Stage School — and who these days ever refers to that project
or even remembers it? — during the actual week, indeed, of
the letters to The Times - King John opened at the Nonesuch.
The raddled old theatre, which had seen so many glorious
and disastrous nights, and where a Victorian manager had
once cut his throat in Box A, unnoticed until the blood
dripped down into the orchestra pit, pulled itself together as
it had done time and again, to turn its gilded and painted
face towards one more audience.
The publicity manager had decided to refer to Ed Voysey
as ‘dedicated’. What other word would be safe to describe a
director who, at the last minute, had changed the lighting
plot? Being at a delicate stage of over-rehearsal, where the
slightest impulse was enough to drive him off course, and
having been most unfortunately shown some Sickert
drawings of the Old Bedford Music Hall, Ed was over-
whelmed by a quite new way of seeing; he’d give the true
Edwardian note, yes, truly Edwardian, this, by introducing
real footlights. None of the cast, of course, had ever worked
with them and the younger ones had never even seen any.
Urgent signals were sent out without result until Voysey, his
wits crazed to unnatural clarity, remembered having seen a
set crammed into a storeroom under the stage at the Pier
Theatre, Eastbourne. Retrieved and repaired, they had to
be connected with the nearest gas supply; this was in a kind
of cubbyhole, where the wig mistress sometimes boiled up
kettles. E . -
Franks, the chief electrician at the Nonesuch, had his own
ideas about the whole improvised apparatus and about the
dedication of Voysey. All his own lights would have to be
lowered, so as not to kill the gaslight from the front. It was
the first time, he pointed out, that he had been asked to take
responsibility for a show which would be almost entirely
invisible. His relish for disaster was only intensified by the
director's enthusiasm. ‘But it will be soft, Frankie, soft
glowing reflections from the flesh, deep shadows below the
chin and the eyebags, as in the old prints and photographs,
the old photos, Frankie, the lost magic . . . with a gesture of
total despair he advances down to the footlights . . . it’s going to
take them back sixty years as soon as the house lights go
down.’ On the whole, however, the innovation was a good
thing because Ed became obsessed with the problems of
raising and dimming the gas and this prevented him from
rehearsing the whole show into the ground.
Meanwhile the small part actors were suffering from
nerves, but they had also begun to act the part of actors
having nerves, and the delicious falseness drew them
together more than the last run-throughs had managed to
do. William Beardless also trembled. ‘You’ll carry me in Act
3, won’t you,’ he implored Boney. ‘I’m not usually like this.
God yes I’m always like this.’ But after the final rehearsal for
light cues he had handed out even more notes than usual to
the rest of the cast, and in particular one to Boney himself,
not referring in any way to his performance but giving him a
number of useful tips on Cutting Down; today, have your first
drink ten minutes later than usual, tomorrow, twenty minutes later,
and so on. Every day will be a little easier. Boney, hoarse and
beery at this stage as a down-the-bill comic, had folded the
note into a very small paper pellet.
‘He just flicked it, Miss Wentworth,’ Mattie brightly
reported to Freddie. ‘I don’t know whether he meant to hit
me or not.’
‘I daresay you’re a fairly good judge of that,’ Freddie
replied. ‘Now come on, try it just once again.’
She meant the line This ship-boy’s semblance hath disguised me
quite, which had given Mattie, in common with everyone else
who has ever had to speak it, a great deal of trouble.
‘Thisshipboyshemblance,’ Mattie began confidently.‘Mr
Voysey told me to practise it quietly by myself.’
‘Ship boy’s, dear. Pause after “ship”.’
‘They gave me a pause after “semblance” yesterday,’ said
Mattie, with his bright leer.
‘Try it again.’
‘Thishibboyshemblance . . . ’
‘Keep it clean, dear.’
‘It's not my fault, Miss Wentworth. Shakespeare bug-
gered it up.’
It was too late for anything but Fate’s protection, and
Freddie kissed him and wished him luck. The Temple
children all dreaded this embrace, the odour of Mothaks,
unmade beds, sandalwood and old woman that issued
cloudily from blouse and cardigan, and with it often the
painful scrape of the great brooches - and Freddie knew
very well what they felt — but not one of them would have
wanted to open in a new show without it. _
More....
hurrying off from work, bolting their macaroni cheese
(Freddie’s heart was always with the cheaper seats) and
braving the struggle back into the city, to concentrate on
what was said and done in a lighted frame, which, when it
went dark, would make them cry to dream again. They were
ors in their own right, each performance coming to
if it ever did, between the actors and the audience, and
that lost for eternity. The extravagance of that loss was
its charm.
At the school itself, most of the children were in autumn
work. They had calls for suburban pantomimes. Dombey and
Son continued to run, and it was given out that King] ohn was
coming on at the Nonesuch. This play Freddie considered,
in justice, to be her own property. The faded and flaking
NAUGHT SHALL MAKE US RUE on the office wall
seemed to give her a hereditary right to it. The part she
coveted was that of little Prince Arthur. With a tear-raising
scene begging mercy from his gaoler, who has orders to
blind him with red hot irons, and, in Act 4, a spectacular
death on stage, Arthur must be one of the most nauseatingly
sentimental and theatrically effective parts that Shake-
speare ever wrote. Considering how much he seems to have
disliked children, it does him great credit. And really he
might have been pleased to see the ferocity with which
Freddie chased the part, to make sure of it for her own.
and...
If I’d been able to choose my sin, Hannah,’ he said, ‘I
wouldn’t have chosen jealousy.’
She watched the kettle, anxious that it shouldn’t start
whistling when he was speaking seriously.
‘Well, I don’t know if our seven deadly sins are the same as
yours, but I don’t think jealousy was one of them.’
‘They call it envy, but it’s all the same.’
‘And you wouldn’t have chosen it?’
"No "
‘Which one, then?’
‘I think sloth. I have an elder brother who still lives at
home with my mother and stays in bed every day till noon.
‘What does he do for a living?’
‘just that, but he enjoys it. He lies there wrapped in his
blankets dinner is brought up to him with the newspaper,
and as I say he evidently enjoys himself. The jealous are
wretched. The slothful are happy. And I'm not sure that my
brother is sinning in any case. He once told me a saying of
James Joyce’ that the most reprehensible moment of,
human delight, in as much as it has given pleasure to a
human being, is good in the sight of God. Now, jealousy
gives pleasure to no one.’
She remembered that James
Joyce had been a lazy fellow apart from the writing, and was
supposed to have declared that every room should have a
bed in it.
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