Sicken and So Die

by Simon Brett

  Gavin’s medical monologue ensured that Charles had no problem staying an hour; indeed the promised time was almost up before he managed to shoehorn in the other questions he’d taken the trip to ask. And the only way he finally succeeded was by interrupting an account of catheterisation with the words: ‘Vasile Bogdan!’

  The surprise was sufficient for Gavin Scholes to stop in his tracks and say, ‘What?’

  ‘I wanted to ask you something about Vasile Bogdan.’

  ‘Oh. Why?’

  ‘I just wondered how he came to be in the company.’

  ‘Well, he’s a good actor, isn’t he?’

  ‘Yes, but you hadn’t worked with him before, had you?’

  ‘No. I don’t only work with people I’ve worked with before, you know, Charles.’ Gavin sounded aggrieved, though the implied criticism had been justified. He only employed actors he had worked with before or actors recommended by actors he had worked with before.

  Which was why Charles next asked, ‘So who recommended Vasile to you?’

  ‘He auditioned for me,’ Gavin replied, still a bit huffy at having his casting methods questioned.

  ‘But someone must’ve suggested his name for you to audition him.’

  ‘I’d heard good reports of him. I looked him up in Spotlight, thought he had an interesting face, so I asked him to come along for an interview.’

  ‘But who –?’

  ‘It’s not as if he was completely unknown, Charles. He’d got quite a track record for good work. Even West End . . . Well, that is to say, the Old Vic.’

  ‘What’d he done at the Old Vic?’

  ‘Oh, nothing very big, but apparently he was good.’

  ‘You didn’t see him?’

  ‘No.’ A defensive look came into Gavin’s eyes. ‘When you’re busy directing, it’s difficult to get to see every show that opens, you know.’

  ‘Sure.’ The director was notorious for never going to see any productions other than his own. ‘So what was the play Vasile was in?’

  ‘She Stoops to Conquer. Just played one of Tony Lumpkin’s drinking cronies, I think, but, as I said, supposed to be very good.’

  ‘That was the production Alexandru Radulescu did, wasn’t it? Another of his “revisualisation” jobs.’

  Gavin shrugged. ‘Don’t know. As I said, I didn’t see it.’

  ‘So who was it who recommended you should audition Vasile? Was it someone who you’d already cast in Twelfth Night?’

  ‘Yes. And I thought he sounded an interesting actor, so I saw him. I’m always on the lookout for new talent,’ Gavin lied.

  Charles patiently repeated his question yet again. ‘So who was it who first mentioned Vasile’s name to you?’

  ‘Russ Lavery,’ the director replied. ‘You know, Russ told me he’d once been taken ill with abdominal pains. Only an appendix in his case, obviously not as serious as what I’ve got. In fact, my consultant was just saying to me a couple of days ago, “If only we were dealing with something as straightforward as an appendix, we’d know where we stood. As it is, Mr Scholes, your case has got me completely baffled. I wouldn’t be surprised if you get written up in The Lancet, you know. You have an extraordinarily interesting . . .’

  And Gavin Scholes was back on track. Charles extricated himself with difficulty once the new wife had returned. And as he left, he felt more than a little sympathy for the look of resigned panic he saw in her eyes

  Chapter Fourteen

  THE GREAT WENSHAM Festival had been started ten years previously, on a great wave of local enthusiasm. Like many such enterprises, it had been the brainchild of one determined and charismatic individual, a local woman, who, having brought up a family, was looking for something different to consume her inexhaustible energy. The complexity of setting up an arts festival was exactly the sort of challenge she relished. By a mixture of charm, bullying, cajolery and sheer bloody-mindedness, she set up the whole thing from a standing start within a year.

  And local people still talked back to the first Great Wensham Festival. There had been a raw excitement about it, the novelty of multifarious plays, concerts and exhibitions all being crammed into one week, a sense of danger. For seven days Great Wensham had ceased to be another boring little Hertfordshire town and had come to life. Local people were caught up in the communal fervour. Many volunteered to help make the festival happen; many more flocked to the scattered venues, and almost all of the artistic events were sold out.

  Buoyed up by that success, the second year’s festival was even more exciting. The one week was extended to two. The programme was larger and more varied; more local buildings were commandeered as venues; the recruitment of volunteers grew ever wider. Famous names were engaged to appear; national reviewers came to write about the shows. The town filled with cultural tourists; business boomed. The summer festival became established as a high spot in the Great Wensham social calendar.

  That was in the early eighties, when the idea of a local arts festival was original. But over the years every tinpot town in the country started to develop its own comparable event. Artistes and agents grew cannier; the network of festivals became just another booking circuit. As it had been in the days of music hall, the same performers took the same performances round the country, often unaware that their appearance was as part of a ‘festival’. It all became predictable and not a little dull.

  For Great Wensham, the rot set in when the prime mover behind the early successes left the area. Her marriage broke up – due in no small measure to the pressures of running the festival – and she moved away. Recognising that the initial thrill of that kind of festival had gone forever, she developed a new and successful career as a concert agent.

  Without her dynamism, the Great Wensham Festival might have been expected to shrivel away to nothing. But by then the committees had taken over. The Great Wensham Festival Society had been born, representing the great and the good of the area. They rather liked the idea of their town continuing to host a nice, safe, contained, one-week festival. The shopkeepers were particularly keen.

  By this time a new breed had appeared in the Arts world – the professional festival administrator – and it was to one of these that the Great Wensham Festival Society turned in their hour of need. Julian Roxborough-Smith was already running the Barmington Festival with apparent success; inviting him to take over Great Wensham was a logical step.

  And so, with Moira Handley at his side to do all the actual work, Julian Roxborough-Smith started his familiar routine of juggling artistes between the two events. Since he also acted as agent for quite a few of the performers involved, he did rather well out of the arrangement.

  The Great Wensham Festival continued to happen every summer. But the excitement, the energy, the danger had gone.

  The Twelfth Night tech run at Chailey Ferrars had been scheduled to start at eleven on the Monday morning. The obvious objection that the effects of the lights could not be judged in daylight was supposed to have been countered by a light-plotting session – without the cast – on the Sunday evening.

  Gradations of lighting for an open-air production are always pivotal. During the first half of Twelfth Night, scheduled to start in daylight, the levels would be slowly built up, so that when the interval came almost all the illumination was artificial. And by the start of the second half, night would have fallen. All these subtleties of shading were due to be plotted in the Sunday evening session.

  The theory was that during the dress rehearsal, scheduled as per performance for seven-fifteen on the Monday, levels could be tweaked, spots repositioned and the lighting plot generally adjusted. Recognising that this might be inadequate provision, the cast, after consultation with their Equity representative, had been asked to hold themselves in readiness for a couple of hours of fine-tuning on the lights after the dress rehearsal ended, which should be around ten-thirty.

  The Asphodel production of Twelfth Night did not actually run three and a quartet hours. The
playing time was just over two and a half, but a forty-five minute interval was mandatory at Great Wensham, so that the locals could enjoy what they all referred to as ‘a Glyndbourne-style picnic’.

  Alexandru Radulescu had stamped his little foot a lot when he heard this demand, insisting that ‘my productions are about ensemble work and my cast cannot be expected to keep their concentration with a three-quarters of an hour gap in the middle of the play.’

  But to no avail. Going to see the Great Wensham Festival Shakespeare was a social rather than an artistic event for the local audience. In fact, most of them would have preferred to watch a brass band and fireworks, but if they couldn’t have that, Shakespeare’d have to do. Whatever the entertainment offered, the demands of their picnics took unquestioned priority.

  They made a big deal of the occasion. Some parties would arrive hours before the performance started, weighed down with folding tables, chairs, hampers, linen, cut glass and even, in a few cases, candelabras.

  The timing of their actual eating varied from group to group. Some tucked into a three-course dinner immediately on arrival. Others took pre-prandial drinks and maybe their starters before the play began, then ate the bulk of their meal during the interval. Yet others munched and swilled throughout the entire performance.

  The three-quarters of an hour interval was incorporated into the proposed schedule of technical and dress rehearsals for Twelfth Night ‘to give us a bit of a time buffer.’ However – and it seems there’s always a ‘however’ in the theatre where tech runs are concerned – everything got hopelessly behind.

  The fault lay not with Asphodel. Their backstage team was compact and highly efficient. The production company knew the pressures of touring and accordingly hired the best staff available. They all arrived at the agreed time on the Sunday afternoon, ready to erect Twelfth Night’s cunningly minimalist set on to the stage, and to adjust the lights in the towers and gantries which surrounded it.

  But when they got to Chailey Ferrars, there was no stage on which to erect the set. The scaffolding towers and gantries were in place. So was the metal load-bearing shell which covered the natural grassy mound; but the acting area, the boarding which should have been fixed on to this structure, was absent.

  The problem was one of demarcation. Though the scaffolding was supplied and erected by outside contractors, construction of the staging was the responsibility of the festival volunteers. In previous years this group had been organised and co-ordinated by Moira Handley, whose judicious mix of bullying and flattery had built up a dedicated band of recidivists. Every year when re-approached about helping with the festival, they all began by saying, ‘No way, never again.’ Every year they relented, and by the final event had built up a tightly knit community with its own jargon and camaraderie. Many of them, in spite of the mandatory grumbles, took their annual holiday over the festival period and regarded its two weeks as the high-spot of their year.

  However – another ‘however’ – during the run-up to the current festival, Julian Roxborough-Smith had piled yet another duty he should have undertaken himself on to the long-suffering shoulders of Moira Handley. He asked her to organise the guest list for one of the final festival events, the all-important Sponsors Dinner and Chamber Concert, and Moira, in a rare moment of complaint, had objected that she really had far too much on her plate to take on anything else.

  In a fit of pique at this unexpected resistance, Julian Roxborough-Smith had responded, ‘What’ve you got on your plate then?’

  ‘Organising the festival volunteers, for a start.’

  ‘Oh, for heaven’s sake, Moira. You do make heavy weather of everything.’ Which was possibly the most unjust criticism ever levelled.

  ‘Julian, you’ve no idea how much time it takes – how many phone calls, chatting them all up, keeping them sweet, working out their rotas. You should try it some time.’

  Stung by her tone, the festival director had responded, ‘All right, I will. I will organise the volunteers this year. Then we’ll see what you’re making so much fuss about.’

  And indeed they did see what she was making so much fuss about. Within a week Julian Roxborough-Smith had alienated the local roofing contractor who co-ordinated all the heavy-work volunteers. Then, by an injudicious display of temper, he’d reduced to tears the little old lady from the tobacconist who masterminded the box office. Incapable of admitting he was in the wrong, he reported to Moira that both of these essential supports to the festival had resigned in fits of temperament.

  He’d then issued invitations to virtually everyone he met to take over various festival functions which already had incumbents jealous of their precious little areas of responsibility. So more noses were put out of joint.

  Finally, as the festival approached, he produced a volunteers’ rota so inflexible that it made Masonic ritual look impromptu. And, all the time, whenever Moira enquired about how the volunteer organisation was going, Julian Roxborough-Smith brushed her off with a dismissive, ‘Oh, for heaven’s sake, woman, it’s all in hand.’

  As a result, it was only the weekend before the festival opened that Moira realised exactly how out of hand the whole organisation was. The lack of staging at Chailey Ferrars was symptomatic of total chaos at all the festival venues.

  With superhuman energy – and at a time when all the other bubbling crises of the festival were reaching boiling point – Moira threw herself into rebuilding the volunteer network. Some would never be reclaimed. The roofing contractor and the little old lady from the tobacconist had been alienated for good. Other reliable standbys, when not asked to participate, had either used up all their outstanding leave entitlement or had actually gone away on holiday over the festival period.

  But Moira’s skills of persuasion were exceptional and by the Monday morning, the day before the opening of the whole event, she had in place a workable infrastructure of volunteers.

  Typically, Julian Roxborough-Smith did not thank her. In fact, if the subject of the chaos came up, he implied that it had been an error in Moira’s organisation rather than his own.

  The result of all this for the Asphodel Twelfth Night was that by the time the stage was in place, it was late Monday afternoon. With no time available for preparatory work on the lighting plot, the tech run began at six forty-five.

  And it had been raining in Great Wensham since the Saturday morning.

  ‘What’s a drunken man like, fool?’ Olivia demanded.

  ‘Like a drowned man, a fool, and a madman,’ the Clown replied. ‘One draught above heat makes him a fool, the second mads him, and a third drowns him.’

  ‘Go thou and seek the crowner, and let him sit o’ my coz, for he’s in the third degree of drink – he’s drowned.’

  Olivia’s words could not have been more apt. The ‘coz’ in question, Sir Toby Belch, was drowned indeed. He would have given anything to be ‘in the third degree of drink’ too, but Charles Paris hadn’t touched a drop all day.

  The rain had by now soaked through the thick charcoal velvet on his shoulders and was trickling down his back, between his stomach and its padding, everywhere. His tights felt as though they had been recently painted on to his legs. Water still dripped incessantly off the brim of Sir Toby Belch’s hat, from which the light-grey feather dangled like a dead fledgling.

  The canvas awning under which he stood offered no protection; it was as porous as a sieve. The allocated wing space was very cramped and suddenly pitch-black after the brightness of the lights on-stage. The trees surrounding the stage area were thought more important by the Chailey Ferrars Trustees than the comfort of mere actors, whose entrances and exits had to be fitted around them. A kind of hessian tunnel led off from the stage towards the caravans which served as dressing rooms. Because of the trees and limited sight-lines, the tunnel was very narrow and actors had to press themselves against the walls to get off stage. Needless to say, the hessian was also wet.

  On-stage it was even wetter. Olivia blinked to
keep the water out of her eyes. It dribbled off the ends of her straggled hair, sending little rivulets into her ample décolletage. The bell-tipped horns of the sitar-playing Feste’s head-dress drooped limply down around his ears.

  Still, Charles had actually exited. Unless there was a sudden summons back, he would be free to go off and find some shelter. And a drink. He’d been very good all day, but now, hell, he needed one for medicinal purposes if nothing else.

  ‘Hold it there for a moment, can we?’ Alexandru Radulescu immediately dashed his hopes. The Director’s voice came out of the darkness, beyond the lights which illuminated the crosshatching of rain as it fell relentlessly on to the stage.

  Charles peered out into the auditorium – though ‘field’ might have been a better word to describe what he was looking at. Julian Roxborough-Smith’s cock-up over the volunteers meant that the raked audience seating had not yet been delivered. The Director, assistant director and lighting designer huddled round a camping table in the middle of a space which would have served well as a location for a movie set in World War One trenches. A single sheet of polythene covered the three of them.

  ‘Can we just go back to before Toby’s exit . . .’

  Shit.

  ‘Positions for “Lechery! I defy lechery . . .”’ Charles shambled soggily back on-stage. ‘And can you just hold that tableau while we adjust a couple of the parcans . . .?’ Alexandru’s voice continued.

  Oh God. Moving the lights took forever. Someone would have to climb up one of the scaffolding towers and fiddle about with the angle of the beam until the lighting designer was satisfied. And unfortunately Asphodel’s lighting designer was a perfectionist.