by Diana Norman
‘They make advances, too,’ Mrs Jordan said. ‘I won’t tell you where one of them grabbed me in The Beaux Stratagem but it was certainly strategic.’
‘Remember when one of ’em climbed out and tried to throttle Garrick in Macbeth? Didn’t like him killing Duncan?’
‘They pay top price,’ Makepeace said.
Murrough advanced on her, a finger wagging at her nose. ‘I don’t care if they pay their hearts’ blood, I need the space. You can do what hell you like out front, but on stage I’m governor. Now, madam, will you kindly leave us in peace?’
She’d lost and she knew it. She made one last feint. ‘Well, who are all these people?’ The Green Room was crowded.
Murrough expired. ‘They’re the rest of the cast.’ He picked up his script and waved it at her. ‘See here. Thirteen characters. Didn’t ye read the Dramatis Personae?’
Actually, she hadn’t. She looked around at the newcomers, one or two bowed, a woman curtseyed, the rest waved and smiled. ‘I wasn’t consulted about hiring them.’
‘No, you weren’t. It’s not your business. Did ye think we were putting the thing on with six? What do you want us to do, double up?’
Her chagrin directed itself at Luchet, who’d been standing behind Ninon’s chair, trying to make himself thinner. ‘What’s he doing here?’
Murrough looked round. ‘What are you doing here?’
Luchet regarded Ninon adoringly. ‘I prompt?’
‘Get out,’ Murrough told him, and turned back to Makepeace. ‘You, too.’
The rules were established; she was the practicality, he the artistry—which would have sufficed perhaps anywhere else, but in a playhouse the two mysteries overlapped and frequently conflicted.
That first day set the tone for the rest. Each saw the other as a hurdle deliberately set in his/her path to be tumbled over. Common decency went to the wall. Shouting rose to screams. Murrough’s plastic face hardened, as if wind had blown away desert sand to reveal the rock beneath. The piggy eyes lost indolence and gleamed with the ferocity of an attacking boar. Makepeace’s curled fists held an invisible, prodding spear.
‘I want lamps on stage.’
‘You’ll have to do with rushlight; I’m keeping candles for when we open.’
‘We can’t see what we’re doing. Dizzy can’t read his words.’
‘Tell him to learn his lines.’
‘I’ll decide when he must learn his lines. And if Your High and Miserliness would oblige, I want those bloody curtains up. They’ve got to draw back at just the right moment—Jack’s going to work on it.’
‘We’re not having curtains, only false ones. We’re having a drop. It’s cheaper.’
‘In hell we will. I get curtains or I go. A drop.’ The stage shook as he stamped around it appealing to the gods. ‘I’ve met some cheese-paring, miserly lickpennies in my day but this one ...’
‘Let me remind you, Mr Spendthrift, I’m the goose laying this golden egg, it’s my cash you’re lavishing on all this fiddle-faddle ...’
‘Fiddle-faddle? God save me from barbarians. It’s vandals like you sacked Rome.’
‘And a good job, too, if it had decadent bastards like you in it.’
The theater would fall quiet to listen to the two of them, but neither noticed. Jacques got upset at first, though the calm of the cast reassured him that this was normal chit-chat between manager and directing actor. The workmen cocked their heads with admiration, the émigrés with lifted eyebrows that suggested nothing less was to be expected of the vulgar.
Only Ninon and the Marquis de Barigoule, experienced in other passions, gave each other a sentimental wink. Makepeace, intercepting it, became the more angry. It isn’t true.
In any case, the quarrel always ended in compromise. It had to; they might threaten, but neither would abandon the play now. He got his curtains, she retained her candles.
Their vituperation only flourished in company. The moment Sanders drove the coach to the stage door of an evening and they and Jacques entered it, an awkwardness fell, along with silence. With their ears burning from the punishment inflicted on them, and with Jacques regarding them nervously, the hellhag reverted to dear madam, the spendthrift to Mr Murrough. Not a word was spoken concerning the theater, and very few about anything else, though they occasionally touched stiffly on the weather.
It was Aaron who became the vessel into which each poured complaint about the other, privatim et seriatim.
‘It’s not going to work, Aaron. The man will bankrupt us ...’
‘Far be it from me to denigrate your sister, old friend, but she has no idea ...’
And Aaron, who had occupied both pairs of shoes, declared that things must be going splendidly.
‘Incidentally,’ he said to Makepeace. ‘Your neighbor the Reverend Deedes paid me a visit this morning.’
‘What did he want?’ She was tired.
‘Not to be neighborly, I can tell you that. Came to persuade you to give up the play. I suppose the word has spread. Preached at me instead. Said it was his duty to save our souls from the perdition of the playhouse—it means whorehouse to him, apparently. I sent him away with a flea in his ear.’
‘Oh dear.’ Fleas in the Reverend Deedes’s ears tended to transmute into a hornet’s nest for the giver. ‘You pointed out that I’m doing it for the benefit of the Abolition Society?’
‘I did.’ Aaron’s mouth screwed into a purse. ‘ “I think you will find the Society unwilling to accept charity from such a source.” He’s going to appeal to Caesar in the shape of Stephen Heilbron and the Lord Chamberlain. Don’t worry about it. Nobody’ll pay attention to a provincial little fart like that.’
Makepeace wasn’t so sure and, had she been less occupied, she might indeed have worried about it but when she woke next morning, her head was filled only with what faced her at The Duke’s.
To her, entering the theater was a plunge into a sea, the hoots of its denizens booming in her ears like a loud deafness. She couldn’t strike out for an objective without being diverted by reefs and distracting schools of complaining fish. Every day brought some new difficulty threatening to drown her along with the entire enterprise. When she shouted at malcontents and idlers it seemed to her that her mouth must be moving soundlessly under water, like a guppy’s, having no effect.
The seamstresses sent her mad. They had contempt for what they were doing. And they were slow.
‘But we cannot sew this, it is criard . . . tawdry. See, it split under the needle.’
‘Don’t stitch it so fine, then. It’ll look rich on stage, it’s shiny.’
Though both controlled themselves vocally, Madame de la Pole’s sneer said it would not have done for the Queen; Makepeace’s grinding teeth said that Marie Antoinette was dead and good riddance.
‘And sew faster.’ She wished now she’d hired all the costumes as Aaron had told her to, but the financial point of no return had been passed.
Those who did their job and did it well became beautiful to her, like firm sand under her feet. Joseph was her rock, he patched the ceiling, widened the stage, mended the auditorium boxes—and cleaned up after each job, a deed for which she could have wept in gratitude. She was even able to put his ladder-holding master to work when it became apparent that Joseph, not trusting him, had lodged the ladder’s feet securely anyway.
‘I see you can still draw, Count.’ She held up a scrap of paper she’d found pinned on the wall of the Green Room—a cartoon showing her and Murrough at loggerheads; him as a bull, herself as a yapping terrier.
The Comte de Penthémont, unabashed, lowered the copy of the Courrier de Londres he’d been reading while leaning against the ladder rungs. ‘I was not unknown for my watercolors.’
‘Good, then you can whitewash the scenery.’
It cost her an extra halfpenny an hour but it was worth it.
The Chevalier Saint Joly was another on whom she relied and it was a blow when, after a week, he told her h
e had found other employment.
‘I hope it’s more worthy of you,’ she said, ‘but I’m sorry to lose you.’
‘Better paid perhaps,’ he said, kissing her hand—they’d got on well. ‘How worthy I do not know but it comes with a little house so my wife and children and I can be together. I am to be butler to Lord Blakeney. He is a good man, I think.’
‘So I hear. Good luck to you.’
He was to work out the rest of the day so she left their good-byes until later but that afternoon the leader of the theater’s émigrés, the Comte d’Antrais, asked her if they might use the Green Room for a meeting for an hour. It was their social center in the evenings after work. Makepeace allowed it because all of them had lodgings too small and too sparsely furnished for gatherings, whereas the Green Room was large, shabby but comfortable, with plenty of chairs, and they could invite other exiles and bemoan the old days. To use it in daytime, however, was unusual.
‘Naturally, we forgo our wage for that hour,’ the Count said; he was a very correct little man.
Something was obviously up. She noticed that Joseph was left behind as the nobility trooped off. ‘What are they at?’ she asked Ninon.
‘Something to do with the Chevalier, but what I do not know.’
An hour later, to the minute, the émigrés were back at work—the Chevalier had gone very white. Makepeace saw Ninon talking to him and waited.
‘What was it about?’
‘It was a court martial,’ Ninon said. ‘The Chevalier is not to be of their company. He has been stripped of the Order of Saint Louis.’
‘For Lord’s sake, why?’
‘He is disgraced. He has taken work as a menial. He is to be a servant. ’
They watched the Chevalier as he took off his apron and packed his tool bag. Makepeace thought of the dignity assumed by and shown to butlers she had known in the big houses. ‘God damn them,’ she said.
‘He has already, has he not?’
Another rock, unexpected but as firm as any, was the elderly actress, Bracey. She was playing the rich and man-mad Widow Lackitt, a leading role in Oroonoko’s comic sub-plot but possessing fewer lines than most, and in her spare time she put herself at Makepeace’s disposal as overseer to the costume-makers and general adviser.
Makepeace found her sympathetic and less of a show-off than the rest. It was Bracey who found a solution when Makepeace bewailed the potentially horrific cost of plastering the patched ceiling of the auditorium and of finding a modern-day Michaelangelo to paint it with scenes from the classics, as was done in other theaters.
‘Cover it with material,’ Bracey said. ‘Cheaper.’
‘It’ll look so plain.’
‘Not if you stud it with all those cherubs we found under the stage.’
The effect, when done, was impressive—plain but smart. ‘Modern, ’ Bracey said. ‘ ’Course you’ll need a lot of chandeliers. You’ve got to light the place.’
‘Why?’
‘The audience has to find its seats. Can’t do that in the dark.’
‘Yes, but after they’re seated . . .’ The cost of candles, of which drama seemed to use an inordinate amount, was becoming an excessive burden on the budget. ‘The stage is lit anyway and there’s all those oil lights along its foot ...’
‘The floaters.’
‘Them . . . So why’d you need a lit auditorium? The audience ought to be looking at the play, not each other.’
Bracey was sent to put the idea to Murrough—Makepeace decided to avoid what would be their third quarrel of the day—and came back surprised at his acquiescence. ‘He says even Garrick didn’t think of that.’
At the chandelier shop in Bishopsgate they found a massive candelabra, going cheap because its size had frightened off everybody else, and Joseph hung it securely over the center of the stalls on a chain. Just before the play began it was to be lowered and its candles put out until the interval.
Not only was it a saving but it was one less fire hazard in a world that seemed determined to burn itself down. Makepeace had drawn up rules about the use of naked flame but had to spend time and energy seeing them enforced. The cast were fairly cautious—most of the theaters in which they’d performed had been destroyed by fire at one time or another—but the émigrés, used to committing their care into the hands of others, might have been intent on auto-da-fé.
That evening, Murrough congratulated her. ‘An innovation, madam,’ he said and, to Jacques’s relief, they were able to discuss it and theater business all the way home without so much as a hard look.
Jacques’s inclusion in the production had been decided on the grounds that the risk of him blowing himself up with one of his experiments if he were left at home in Reach House was more immediate than the possibility of his father’s identity being discovered by the émigrés. Makepeace was under no illusion, though, that, if it became known to aristocrats that she was harboring the son of one of their enemies, the prime minister’s attention would be drawn to the fact within the hour. Jacques would be sent back to France.
As a precaution, she enspanned Marie Joséphine onto the theater team, putting her in charge of the costume-makers and asking her to keep her ears open for any mention concerning Jacques.
The sewing ladies rebelled. ‘We do not work with peasants,’ Madame de la Pole declared.
‘Her name’s Mme Mellot,’ Makepeace told her. ‘And you don’t have to work with her—you can go.’
There was a hasty conference in which the three aristocrats had to decide between indignity and their tuppence an hour, not to mention the plentiful food Makepeace brought in for everybody at midday from the pie shop next door. Food and money won. Harsh exchanges of French could be frequently heard coming from the sewing room but under Marie Joséphine’s eye the rate of work improved and Makepeace was comforted by the thought that any gossip about Jacques would be passed on to her.
Luchet, who might have performed that service, was a broken reed; either he was languishing at Ninon’s feet or he was writing poetry.
‘Leave him alone,’ Murrough told her when she would have spurred the tutor into activity by kicking his backside. ‘The man has a gift for words, he’s writing us a prologue.’
‘He’s got a gift for doing damn all,’ Makepeace said, but she was forced to suffer the sight of Luchet lolling in the stalls, his eyes on Ninon, occasionally jotting down some well-considered word on his slate.
The hatred nursed by the exiles towards those who had brought them down was, to a large extent, what kept them alive; they could not, would not, believe their golden world had gone for ever. At one point, when Polly Armitage was overheard mentioning an incident as having happened ‘. . . about the time of the French king’s death,’ the Comte d’Antrais stepped forward. ‘Pardon me, m’sieur, but the king of France is not dead. He lives.’
The sacred flame of kingship had left the headless body of Louis XVI to lodge itself in the breast of his nine-year-old son suffering God knew what God knew where. And if he was dead, then it now rested in the Comte de Provence, the child’s paternal uncle and self-declared Regent, still trying to rally the reluctant courts of Europe to the royal cause.
Makepeace had introduced Jacques to them as Jack Watt, her orphaned ward, the son of an English friend who’d married a Frenchwoman and had spent time in France. It was a story the émigrés accepted without interest. She thought they treated him more superciliously than they would an ordinary English boy but, since Jacques was too bound up in what he was doing to notice, she let it be. In any case, along with everybody else, they were soon showing him the amused indulgence given to enthusiastic children and mad inventors.
Once he’d been persuaded that drama didn’t run on steam and that ropes and pulleys were quieter and more effective than engines when it came to operating the traps, the boy devoted himself to creating effects for the play that would startle audiences with their novelty.
Some proved impractical, like his idea for waf
ting the scent of a rainforest—the action of the play took place in Surinam—into the auditorium by warming a combination of grasses and spices on strategically-placed hot plates. The principle was good, the execution was not. As Murrough said, coughing and wiping his eyes, ‘It’s usual to try and keep the audience breathing until the finale, my son.’
But Jacques got the traps to work silently and at different speeds so that an actor could apparently spring out of the ground or gradually materialize, like a ghost in a graveyard.
He had even acquired the much-desired cannonballs for the play’s thunderstorm. An appeal and a promise of free tickets to a captain of the Honorable Artillery Company in nearby Moorfields had produced two that were damaged and four that had come warped off the production line. He and Joseph had trundled them back on a trolley and constructed a wooden chute backstage down which to roll them.
Their first trial brought work to a standstill. The noise was tremendous. The usual method of depicting thunder—shaking an undulating piece of tin—was outranked in reverberation like a penny whistle by a full orchestra. Makepeace had to cover her ears. Murrough said, ‘That’s God in a temper, sure enough.’
Jacques shook his head. ‘The sound is good but it does not come from the right place. It is an earthquake, not a storm. The chute must go up. We have to suspend it above the stage.’
The cast’s eyes flickered to Murrough. The idea of six seventeen pound spheres of iron descending on their heads had occurred to all of them. Purist, however, had appealed to purist. ‘Up it goes, then,’ Murrough said.
Jacques’s greatest success was with the lighting. He invented a switch that could be operated by wires leading from the lanterns hanging over and around the stage, changing the glass panels in their sides so that they emitted different colors. At a touch, a brightly lit comic scene could be darkened with purple shadows at the entrance of the villain, or give the effect of the sun rising or setting.
Murrough promised that ‘See the Dawn rise over Surinam’ would be included in the playbills.