‘That would be excellent, but what if you go off duty?’
‘There’ll be somebody here with a key, sir. If it isn’t me, it will be my mate. I’ll give him the tip-off as nobody ain’t to touch that prop without they can perdooce your card.’
‘Fine. I’ll leave the whole thing in your hands, then, and, of course, I’ll see you – er—’
‘Thank you very much, sir.’
‘Funny thing about that hangman’s cart,’ said Laura to Sybil and Melanie, with whom she shared a dressing-room. ‘Who would play a daft trick like taking the wheels off it?’
‘One of those beetle-brained students, of course,’ said Melanie. ‘Thought it funny, I suppose. All boys of that age have a warped sense of humour. Personally, I’m glad there are wedges under those wheels as an extra precaution. The stage slopes forward quite a lot. It would scare me silly if I was blindfolded and that cart began to move.’
‘I never could abide Blind Man’s Buff myself,’ said Sybil. ‘You feel so helpless when you can’t see.’
‘But he can see,’ said Laura. ‘I tried the hood on to find out what it was like, and I could see through it quite easily. It’s only made of thin gauze. Anyway, thank goodness we don’t have to be made up just yet.’
Laura’s make-up took some time; Sybil’s was simpler; Melanie was not to be made up until the beginning of Act Two, when, during the interval, Laura would have removed her own make-up, or most of it, and changed out of Mrs Peachum’s costume in order to take over the prompter’s stool and Sybil would have her face expertly touched-up, ready for her next appearance. Melanie, therefore, was supposed to be alone in the dressing-room, or wherever else she chose to be, for the whole of the first Act.
This was because she had rebelled against assuming the office of prompter for that Act, asserting, with vehemence, that the versatile Laura could prompt, whether she was on or off the stage and that she herself was prone to catch cold if she sat in a draught. As there was no doubt, as had been pointed out when the choice of a play was under discussion, that the wings of the town hall stage were definitely – some said fiendishly – draughty, Denbigh had given the job to Hamilton Haynings who, like Sybil, did not come on until Act Two and was well upholstered in Lockit’s heavy costume.
Hamilton, whatever his private feelings about this particular chore, performed it faithfully for two nights, but on the Saturday evening nobody prompted at all, and as it became important, later on, to establish where everybody was and what he or she was doing at the beginning of the last scene of the play on the third and last night of the performance, these were Denbigh’s arrangements for all three nights of the show.
The Player and the Beggar, that is to say one of the students and Ernest Farrow, would be on stage in front of the curtain. Behind the curtain would be Macheath, in the person of Rodney Crashaw (alias Thaddeus E. Lawrence) already mounted on the hangman’s cart. Waiting in the wings would be the highwayman’s gang, mostly students but also including two members of the society, Geoffrey Channing and Robert Eames, who had the parts of Ben Budge and Matt o’ the Mint. On the other side of the stage and also waiting in the wings, would be Polly and Lucy (Sybil Gartner and Melanie Cardew), Filch (Mrs Blaine’s son Tom), the drawer (from the inn scene), the turnkey and the second jailer (Lockit’s assistants) and also the ladies of the town who included the blonde wardrobe mistress and Stella Walker, she who combined the parts of Jenny Diver and Diana Trapes. She had decided to revert to the costume of the former when she took her curtain calls, as she thought it far more attractive than that of the disposer of stolen property. The rest of the ‘ladies’ were students who had appeared also in the third Act as the women prisoners in Newgate gaol. These, having had their trial referred to the next sessions, were to celebrate this temporary reprieve with a dance, an activity in which the men students had declined to take part.
Behind all this rabble would be Peachum, in the person of James Hunty, and Laura, as Mrs Peachum, both waiting merely for curtain calls and both loitering in a short corridor on the O.P. side to be out of the draught which whistled on to the stage from the wings. Up to the end of the previous scene Laura would have been acting as prompter except on the third and last night, when she had announced her intention of abandoning this office after changing out of her stage costume, but retaining Mrs Peachum’s rather startling make-up so that she could change back again quickly for the curtain calls. Until then she was to join Dame Beatrice, where a seat had been kept for her in the auditorium.
Provided that no prompting had been required during the performances on the Thursday and Friday, Denbigh had agreed to this arrangement, and it was not until the Beggar and the Player were actually on stage in front of the curtain that she needed to slip away to get back into the Mrs Peachum costume and join James Hunty in the corridor. She expected to find Hamilton Haynings with him and, as the ‘rabble’ erupted on to the stage to perform the last dance before the final curtain, Laura supposed – rightly, as it turned out – that the three of them would retreat a little further into the confines of the sheltering corridor to be out of the way of the exits through which the rabble would pour when the curtain came down on the last Act.
Denbigh’s original arrangement had been that the hangman’s cart should be only just in view on stage to leave room for the dance when the reprieve should have been called and Macheath, in the words of the Beggar, ‘be brought back to his wives in triumph’.
Crashaw, however, would have none of this arrangement. He insisted upon having the cart trundled to the centre-back of the stage. From here, before he was reprieved, he was to make the speech which belonged somewhat earlier in the Act. The duet between Polly and Lucy, ‘Would I might be hang’d – and I would so, too! – to be hang’d with you – my dear, with you’, was to precede this speech instead of coming after it – another slight alteration to the text.
‘Like his damned conceit!’ growled Hamilton Haynings when, at the unsuccessful pre-dress rehearsal, this innovation was actually staged. Hamilton had never quite got over his resentful disappointment at having been passed over for the principal rôle, any more than Marigold Tench had ceased to regret her precipitate action in walking herself out of a part when the opera was first under consideration. Marigold had attended every rehearsal (which, as a fully paid-up member of the society and its one-time leading lady, she had every right to do) in the sick hope that one of the three principal women players would either fall down on the part or give it up, but this had not happened.
She spent the actual performances behind the scenes acting as unsolicited dresser and assistant wardrobe mistress. Nobody wanted or needed Marigold’s ministrations, but all accepted them in good part, sensing the frustration and disappointment which lay behind the seemingly kind actions.
The point of all this was that, as Laura pointed out later to Dame Beatrice, when the thing actually happened Marigold had been in as good a position as anybody else to overhear what Denbigh had said about the position of the hangman’s cart on the stage.
‘Apart from leaving more space for the last dance,’ he had said, ‘there’s the safety aspect. I had not realised until Saturday—’ (groans from the company which underlined their feelings about the long-drawn-out nightmare of that fiasco) ‘—I had not remembered that there is a rake on the stage down towards the footlights. By having the cart (it’s on wheels, remember!) sideways on and almost pushed into the wings, however, the rake of the stage will hardly matter. If anything did go wrong, the wheels would only run the cart slantingly towards the prompt side, where there are plenty of people waiting in the wings.’
‘Oh, rot!’ said Melanie, looking adoringly at Crashaw. “What can go wrong? He is the chief character! It would be absurd for him to make his last speech from the side of the stage and almost stuck out in the wings. He must be centre-stage. Stick those wedges under the wheels. That should fix them.’
Denbigh reluctantly gave in, only adjuring the students who were to ac
t as stage-hands to make sure that the cart, as soon as it had been trundled up the ramp on to the stage, was securely anchored and the front wheels firmly wedged so that they could not revolve.
There was one other uncommitted person besides Marigold Tench who, at some point in the proceedings, was to be present. This was Mrs Blaine’s William Caxton. She had insisted that at each performance he was to be brought to the front of the stage by Denbigh and introduced to the audience in one of the intervals as the leader and chief protagonist in the Caxton procession which was to take place in the following week. As there were to be street collections, all the proceeds of which would be devoted to charity, Denbigh could hardly refuse to do as she wished.
CHAPTER 17
« ^ »
Broke violence, madness, fear
In most amateur productions the first night is one of nerves and misgivings.
‘Do I look all right?’
‘I can’t remember my first lines!’
‘Will the press be here?’
‘Oh, doesn’t anyone know what’s happened to the box of safety pins?’
‘Who’s pinched my Number Six?’
‘Suppose they don’t laugh?’
‘I bet somebody’s brought some ghastly infant who’ll howl the place down in my first solo.’
‘How’s the house filling up?’
‘Sybil isn’t here yet. We’re not really covered by understudies, you know.’
‘I wouldn’t put it past Ma Blaine to bring in a bunch of her Guild and bust up the show. They’re all Women’s Libbers, that lot.’
‘Laura, you will give me a clear prompt if I dry up, won’t you?’
The second night is apt to find the entire cast, even the principals, feeling slightly flat, but the third and last night sees everybody keyed up to the highest pitch, chattering, excited, confident, peeping from behind the curtain to watch the audience coming in, trying to find out how many bouquets will be presented and to whom they will go (although the second and third leads among the ladies are apt to make certain that each will receive at least one bouquet because she will have ordered and paid for it herself) and altogether the atmosphere will be noisily electric. The whole cast, assured of the success of the show, will love everybody with almost excessive fervour and the actors will even praise one another’s performances, hoping, of course, for reciprocity on the lines of ‘I’ll scratch your back if you’ll scratch mine’.
No doubt all this would have been the case on the third and final night of the Chardle and District dramatic, operatic and literary society’s production of The Beggar’s Opera, but for the presence behind the scenes of a diabolus or diabola ex machina. It became, later on, the self-imposed task of Dame Beatrice to expose this cuckoo in the nest.
However, it was not until the end, or almost the end, of the last Act that the Beggar’s original thought was transformed into drastic and unrehearsed action and, as the poet says, ‘violence, madness, fear’ broke out and the opera ended in confusion.
With no suspicion, in spite of Dame Beatrice’s dire prediction that the past was in process of raking itself up, that anything more untoward than, without a prompter, somebody in the last Act was going to dry up, or that the stage manager (the meek, devoted, hardworking Ernest Farrow who, as the Beggar, had only a few lines at the beginning and end of the piece) might mislay the bottle of ratsbane or some other important prop, Laura drove herself in her own small car to the town hall in good time to assume her costume and make-up, leaving Dame Beatrice to be piloted, a little later on, by George, for whom a seat had been booked in the front row of the balcony. From where he sat he had not only an excellent view of the stage, but of his employer in her seat near the O.P. end of the front row of the stalls. Next to her was to have been the empty seat which, at this last performance, would be occupied, after the first Act, by Laura.
As she entered the austere and stone-floored vestibule of the town hall, the first person Laura met was William Caxton wearing a lounge suit and a rather striking BBC style tie.
‘Hullo,’ she said, ‘you’re early. You don’t go on stage to speak your little piece until the end of the first Act, do you?’
Denbigh, at first, had opposed the speaking of William Caxton’s little piece from the town hall stage, claiming that it was entirely out of place in the middle of an early eighteenth-century comic opera, especially as the speech had been composed by Mrs Blaine herself in what she fondly believed was the English of Caxton’s day. It ran as follows:
Hear me, ye merry gentles of good making,
And you, ye gentle ladies, with none quaking,
That here upon this stage I ye entreat
To think on them that looken well to eat.
When of your bonté ye do keepen kind,
Have Sister Charity, sweet maid, in mind,
And when Will Caxton’s pageant ye endorse,
Give of your plenty that shall not fare worse.
For Edward Fourth, the Woodvilles and crook’d Dickon
Did favour Caxton and his books y-quicken.
I say you sooth, me needeth not to fain,
To give to charity shall be your gain.
The second to last line was pinched directly from Chaucer, whether Mrs B. knew it or not, but the rest of the lines were her own and she was proud of them.
As the money collected in the streets was to go towards the town council’s Old People’s Holiday Fund, Denbigh, as stated, had given in. He stipulated, however, that Caxton was to appear alone, thus placing an embargo not only on ‘Edward Fourth, the Woodvilles and crook’d Dickon’, but upon the Duke of Clarence (judicially killed before Caxton printed the second edition of the book on chess originally dedicated to him) and also upon that arch-economist, Henry Tudor. All of these were to have appeared on stage and in costume, and for each of them Clarice had composed what she called ‘a little poem of gentle pleading for alms’. However, Denbigh had stood firm about all these ‘extras’.
The first interval had been selected for Caxton’s speech, this for more than one reason. For one thing, in Denbigh’s production, the changing of the scenery from Peachum’s house to the tavern near Newgate took longer than any other of the scenic changes for which the students had opted; for another, also, because the scene took some time to change, there was a more permissible break in the action at this point than at any other.
‘Oh,’ said Caxton, in reply to Laura, ‘I’m to go on first tonight. Lord Denbigh’s orders. He refuses to have a break in his show on the last night. I don’t blame him.’
‘Will you be in the audience after that?’
‘No. I haven’t a seat.’
‘You can have mine for Act One, because I’m on, if that’s any good. After that I shall want it for myself. I’m not prompting this evening. It’s a good seat, front row, next to Dame Beatrice, but you’ll have to hop out of it at the first interval because, as I say, it’s earmarked for me and I want it.’
‘Fair enough, and thanks awfully. So far, I’ve only been able to get a few glimpses of you from the wings. It will be nice to be out in front and have a proper view. The only trouble about your performance, you know, is that it must make the rest of the show fall rather flat.’
‘You’ve got the offer of my fauteuil, so this tribute is unnecessary, although appreciated. Be seeing you.’ She went to the dressing-room she shared with Sybil and Melanie and she thought no more about Caxton-Caret until the end of the first Act, when she slipped into the auditorium to claim her front-row stall.
‘You were a riot,’ he said, standing up as she approached. ‘Many congratulations.’
‘How did your speech go?’ Laura asked.
‘I received polite sporadic applause.’
‘I believe, if you scouted round, you know, you could find an empty seat somewhere if you want to see the rest of the show.’
‘Thanks. I might just do that. There’s no bar here, so people don’t seem to have moved about much.’ He removed himsel
f and Laura seated herself next to Dame Beatrice.
‘There may not be a bar for the audience,’ she said, ‘but there’s plenty of the right stuff flowing freely backstage. I could have topped myself up like a tanker at full load if I’d wanted to. Sybil is laying off, but Melanie, who’s had the dressing-room all to herself until now, is what I should call in mellow mood and as I passed the door of the men’s dressing-room it seemed to me that it was full of the joys of spring. I just hope the silly asses won’t go and overdo it, that’s all. There’s quite enough last-performance joie de vivre about and around without adding any liquid sunshine.’
The second Act of The Beggar’s Opera opens with dialogue. Macheath’s gang reminisce and encourage one another. To them enters Macheath and later he is joined by the ladies of the town. Laura watched him closely, but decided that either, behind the scenes, discretion had proved the better part, or else that he carried his drinks well. The scene, which was lively and tuneful, went even better than on the previous nights. The dance met with spontaneous applause and there was a good deal of laughter at Sukey Tawdrey’s speech: ‘Indeed, madam, if I had not been a fool, I might have liv’d very handsomely with my last friend. But upon his missing five guineas, he turn’d me off. Now I never suspected he had counted them.’
After that, the business of Jenny Diver, Sukey Tawdrey, the pistols and the arrest of Macheath by Peachum and the constables brought the scene to a dramatic end, and the audience settled down to its boxes of rustling chocolates and its appreciative conversation while the scene was changed to Newgate gaol.
The first indication that there were to be certain departures from what had been rehearsed came with the entrance of Melanie as Lucy Lockit. There was no doubt that Melanie had not only looked upon the wine when it was red, but upon a fair measure of gin also.
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