by Bruce Barber
The Bloody Man
by Bevan Amberhill
(Bruce Barber & Virgil Burnett [1926-2012])
Copyright Bruce Barber 2013
The Bloody Man is a work of fiction. All characters are products of authorial imagination. Any resemblance between these characters and actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental. The City of Stratford, Ontario, and its world-renowned Shakespeare Festival are real places. Small liberties with geography have been taken, for the purpose of the story.
The authors wish to acknowledge the assistance of the Ontario Arts Council during the writing of this book.
Cover design by Ted Glaszewski
ISBN: 978-0-9917801-0-5
Originally published by The Mercury Press, edited by Beverley Daurio
This electronic reprint is dedicated to the late Virgil Burnett, without whom this book would literally not have been possible. Happy trails, old chum.
DRAMATIS PERSONAE
Jean-Claude Keyes: Former actor, now writer
Seamus O’Reilly: Grand old actor
Julia: Waitress
Bruno: Bartender
Alan Wales: Actor
Betty Beardsley: Owner BB’s Bed & Breakfast
Alessandra Edel: Actress
Hobart Porliss: Director
George Brocken: Designer
Grace Lockhardt: Dresser
Kiri (Janie) Ellison: Exotic Dancer
Frankie & Jo: Shopkeepers
Actors, Actresses, Shopkeepers, Party-goers, Swans, &c.
PROLOGUE
Toronto, Union Station
Union Station’s ever-shifting population surged and buzzed around Jean-Claude Keyes as he sat across from Gate Six, waiting for the train to Stratford.
On his lap was a stack of 8 ½ X 11 paper, and a glossy brochure. The stack was the manuscript of his work-in-progress, the pamphlet a guide to this season’s Stratford Shakespeare Festival, a season drawing rapidly to a close. Claude made a final mark in red ink on the manuscript, then gathered it up and stowed it away in his luggage. He picked up the brochure and studied the photograph on its cover: an extraordinarily beautiful woman in an equally extraordinary gown. The caption read, “Alessandra Edel as Lady Macbeth.”
Keyes sighed aloud and closed his eyes, then took a small, black hardcover notebook from the breast pocket of his jacket, and a pen. He flipped through the pages until he found oneblank, scribbled for a moment, then sighed again.
“Don’t get wound up, Claude,” he mumbled to himself, “it’s different now…”
I’m no longer an actor, he thought, and I am no longer a drunk... this time, Stratford will be different. He gave the woman on the brochure another glance. No, everything had not changed. Some things were more difficult to get over than others...
A hollow, echoing voice overhead announced the arrival of his train, first in English, then in French. Keyes stood, gathering together luggage and overcoat, and joined the boarding line-up at the gate.
Soon he was seated in a tiny smoking section on the train, staring out the window and moving toward his past.
ACT ONE
DARK ON MONDAY
I shall tell you
A pretty tale; it may be you have heard it...
Coriolanus, Act I, Scene 1
(1:1) A street corner in Stratford; the air is heavy with impending storm
FIRST WOMAN
There – across the street, waiting for the light to change... an example of exactly what I’ve been trying to explain to you.
SECOND WOMAN
You mean the one in the pink mini-skirt?
FIRST WOMAN
Yes; her legs are far too short for that skirt, and I mean, really – she jiggles standing still! That poor child isn’t a fashion statement – she’s a cry for help...
SECOND WOMAN
She doesn’t look that bad to me...
FIRST WOMAN
She would if you’d been paying attention to me at all. Her make-up belongs on a Kabuki player and her clothes on a hooker!
SECOND WOMAN
Maybe she is a hooker...
FIRST WOMAN
Then she should at least try to appear expensive.
SECOND WOMAN
She’s coming in our direction! Don’t stare –
FIRST WOMAN
Why not? Looking isn’t a crime.
THIRD WOMAN
Why don’t you take a fucking Polaroid – it’ll last longer!
From the notebook of Jean-Claude Keyes:
It’s funny – during the two hours of the train trip between Toronto and Stratford, not once did I think about the Thomas Wolfe ramifications of this journey... (Come on, Keyes – Stratford, the theatre... they were never “home.” They were just places you worked once. Worked... fell in love... fell down occasionally – maybe it was home, after all.) But, for the first few minutes after getting off the train, I saw the town through younger eyes, the eyes of a fledgling actor, full of ambition, of theory and dream... full of gold-plated horseshit, O’Reilly would say.
I find, somewhat to my surprise, that I am glad to be back in Stratford, with its parks and restaurants and eager-to-please shopkeepers whose mission in life is to sell me those wonderful souvenirs without which the Stratford experience is incomplete.
Stratford, and the Shakespearean Festival: to some (young actors, for example), it is the place where listless bank accounts may be raised up and made hale again, to fuel the rest of the year, when normally, to work in the arts in Canada is to live in a poverty that makes church-mice seem affluent.
Stratford... gold... The story of King Midas never mentions if he ever turned shit into gold, but that alchemy is often attempted in Stratford’s theatres, and, often, the thaumaturgy fails. But when it succeeds, when the gold flows, when the lights fade and wonder really does return to the world for three hours or so, then the misfires and bombs are worth it, redeemed by gold. That promise is what brought me here once before, as participant, and I guess it’s the same promise
that’s partially responsible for my returning as a civilian – to find that perfect theatrical moment.
I have high hopes for that moment’s occurrence in this week’s offerings, especially in The Tempest. Most of the elements are right: the casting, the support staff... and the few elements that are wrong – the smirking gargoyles who slip through the net, ready to repaint the cathedral into a K-Mart – are not insoluble problems; two sticks of dynamite or a couple of well-placed silver bullets should do the trick. Or maybe just leave the villains standing out in the November rain, to shrivel up like the Wicked Witch of the West. A storm started as my train pulled out of Toronto, and it looks like it might rain all week...
Among the many things I find unchanged is the pub I loved so much in the old days; it’s bigger, and has had a fresh coat of paint, but my favourite table is still here – the table that always had only one chair, which discouraged company during those times when I needed to be alone to run my lines or nurse my hangovers. There is still only one chair.
I feel as if I am in a revival of some play I toured with once.
And, Sandra is somewhere in Stratford, again –
(1:2) The Jester’s Bells, a pub in Stratford, Ontario
The Jester’s Bells, or “The Balls” as it was frequently called by its regulars, was a dismal place in the afternoon if there were matinee performances in the theatres. The tourists, indeed theatre-goers of all sorts, were doing what they were meant to be doing – they were theatre-going. Similarly, the actors were acting, the stage-crews crewing, the dressers dressing, the managers managing.
The pub was almost empty. A man lazily wiped down the bar’s dark wood with a damp white cloth. A scullion in the kitchen was ordering the chaos left there by
luncheon. A waitress named Julia dreamed over coffee about next season’s casting and the fine role she would have at last – one of the Three Sisters, she thought, or something contemporary. Shakespearean diction was not her strong suit, even if Elizabethan costumes, with their tight bodices, were.
Jean-Claude Keyes, plain “Claude” to most of his Anglo-Canadian friends, was in the process of deciding whether to imbue Julia with dubious immortality by describing her spiky brown hair and perfect ankles in his notebook, when he heard his name called from the other end of the room, which was a considerable distance. The Bells was a vast space, divided into two discrete areas by the bar itself; one side was primarily for dining, the other for drinking and carousing. Keyes was in the latter.
“Jon-Clod, you bastard!” howled a deep and commanding voice from the outer reaches of the pub, and Seamus O’Reilly was upon Keyes before he could find refuge. Keyes smiled – the big old Irish son of a bitch was carrying his own chair! So much for cleverness and subterfuge...
Had it been anyone else, Keyes would most probably have ignored him or her at least long enough to finish making his notebook entry, but you did not ignore Seamus O’Reilly any more than you ignored earthquake, fire, flood, or famine; in any case, Keyes thought, ignoring the subject of the biography he was writing was probably unwise.
O’Reilly was neither so deep as a well nor so wide as a church door, but he was enough, and served no one but himself. The red hair was greying, but tufts of flame remained to caution the unwary, and his six-foot-three bulk showed no signs of