by Bruce Barber
contact and the stifled cry of pain and outrage; she came bounding up the stairs to see what had been broken.
“Oh,” she said, quickly assessing the situation. “I see you found Mr. Shakespeare. He came in a box of junk I bought this morning at the auction – I was after a half-dozen old prints, but had to take the whole selection. Hideous, isn’t it?”
“Hideous is a very small word for what that thing is,” the victim replied, massaging his toe while hopping about on one foot like a great blue heron.
“Don’t sue,” said Betty. “I can’t afford it.”
“I’d like to sue whoever made that thing!”
“Don’t worry about it – I’m sure there’s a special circle of Hell for people who commit bad art...”
Keyes grinned an evil grin. “You’d better hope not!”
“Your rent for this week just doubled,” Betty announced as she exited, pursued by laughter.
Keyes stretched out on the bed for a nap before dinner. He had an eight o’clock performance of Julius Caesar to attend. With Hermes Ziemski-Trapp directing, Keyes knew the play had every chance of being a long and tedious haul. He needed a brief lie-down beforehand, perhaps a decent erotic dream or two.
He got neither. Rather, he tossed and turned the whole time, and dreamed he was back carrying a spear in one of the Henrys. In the dream, he had forgotten to put on his costume and was standing shivering onstage, totally naked. Moreover, it was Keyes as he was now, thin and gone to seed rather than the well-muscled young actor he had been. The audience was filled with his fellow actors, as well as directors and designers, pages, attendants…
In the front row was the ghost of Banquo, laughing his ectoplasmic head off. Keyes wanted to tell the spirit that it was in the wrong play, but found that, besides being naked, he had forgotten his only line.
From the notebook of Jean-Claude Keyes:
Poor Betty... for all I torment her, I know she considers me a small curse compared to some who have passed through her Bed & Breakfast. Her first tourist guests, she once told me, were a pair of gay midgets – they had been far from boring, but hadn’t paid their bill either. At least I do that much... and sometimes I’m nor boring, either. Certainly my time here should be at least marginally exciting – not only am I here to visit and haunt old friends, but also to work on my book.
The theatrical career of my oldest friend, Seamus, has always seemed to me to be the stuff of modern legend, or at the very least, of modest biography, and my agent has convinced a publisher of the same. O’Reilly was very young in 1953, when he shared the stage, however briefly, with Alec Guinness in the opening season of this theatre. Since then – well, it will all be in my book, next year, by the grace of the gods and with the co-operation of Seamus O’Reilly. Most of my optimism rides on the former.
One of the most interesting things about O’Reilly is that he hates audiences; if a way could be found to run a theatre without them, he would dance with obscene joy. This was his main reason for once – unsuccessfully – attempting to work in American films. Certainly, the money had attracted him, as it had Lorne Greene, William Shatner, Kate Nelligan, and other Canadian actors, but more than anything it was the chance to do his job without dealing with the warm bodies in the front row – it made no difference to O’Reilly whether they loved or hated him; it was their presence alone he objected to.
Hollywood had been humiliating for him on so many levels that he refused even to go to movies any more. Just four years ago, Aubrey Barber had sought him out expressly to play the lead in a new film.
“You had your chance!” the great Canadian expatriate director had been told. “Now fuck off and leave me alone!” Garbo would have been proud.
And yet few suspected this of the man who had given them so many bravura Lears and Hamlets and even Romeos; audiences assumed he loved them as much as they loved him, that his purpose on the stages of the world was to delight them, to give them their money’s worth. Both of these he did, but not by design. I believe he would play Othello in an empty barn to an audience of field mice – except that field mice don’t buy the tickets which generate the salary that pays his bar tabs.
I asked him once why he was an actor, and he quoted John Wayne, “A man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do,” which told me absolutely nothing.
Although the expression perhaps did explain my own situation, an intrinsically weird and potentially bloody one, to be sure. I had left the Festival company and the acting profession in an atmosphere of bitterness and hamstrung dreams. To return to it now, as biographer of one of its
favourite sons and so by association of the Festival itself, is a somewhat delicate matter. The temperaments and the politics of the theatre business are as complex and dramatic as the plays themselves; my long and bumpy relationship with O’Reilly is no less complicated.
Preservation of both skin and integrity could turn out to be a highly intricate dance in which I will not even be allowed to lead, much less call the tune. And to think that I asked for this!
Perhaps my life would have been simpler had I settled for merely walking around the woods at the height of the hunting season wearing a deer suit... or if I had gone on CBC radio and insisted that the Prime Minister liked to put on his wife’s underthings at Sunday dinner. But no, not me – instead I come, perhaps with band-aid in hand, to shake, if not to kiss, the bitten hand which once fondled me.
But, it’s too late for any of this – I’ve set my stage, now I have to play on it. “You rip a’ dese, you men a’ dese!” as my old Classics prof used to say – she was a daffy old soul, for all of her genius.
(1:4) The Festival Theatre, balcony
Keyes was restless, uncomfortable, and just plain Bard-weary. In his time, he had seen more drama and depth in Walt Disney cartoons than in the Julius Caesar being dragged out on the thrust-stage below. For some reason unfathomable to Keyes, the action was set in a combination of modern-day America and Imperial Rome – the wondrous subtlety of symbolism, he supposed. Caesar seemed to be a kind of JFK figure in Roman drag. The senators wore togas, but carried briefcases (which in turn contained daggers), and sported mirror-style sunglasses as well. Various statues of Roman deities littered the stage, and the statues’ faces were rough approximations of Nixon, Reagan, and one of them, he was sure, was Mikhail Gorbachev. What in the name of poetic licence was an audience to make of all that? And who cared? It was all too, too tedious.
In an effort to reduce at least his physical discomfort, Keyes stretched his long legs as far as the seating would allow, and was rewarded by a loud crack from his aching joints – not so loud as a gunshot, but loud enough; a quick glance assured him that no one had been disturbed by his knees’ indiscretion. Perhaps everyone else in the audience was asleep – he certainly wished he was.
Keyes returned his attention with a great exercise of will to the so-called drama. He had not escaped unnoticed after all: Brutus himself was glaring in Keyes’ direction.
The next scene was such a masterpiece of stagecraft that Keyes committed his second faux pas of the evening.
He yawned. Completely unintentionally to be sure, but his voice-projection was as good as it had ever been. There was a suppressed ripple of giggles from his immediate neighbours (the heartiest from others in the business), from two ushers, and from some poor soul onstage who would no doubt soon be looking for work at the Shaw Festival. That’s it, Keyes thought, and under cover of a convenient blackout slipped from his aisle seat and headed for the nearest exit. When he was more entertaining than a multi-thousand dollar production, it was time to go. Anyway, he knew how the play ended. There was no sense subjecting himself to any more just to find out how many metaphors for “bomb” he could come up with. Oh, brave new world, that has such turkeys in it, he thought as he escaped, followed by a chorus of smirks and mimed applause.
Now he had an unplanned evening to kill, but luckily he also had a list of old friends and acquaintances yet to be blessed with the triumphant return o
f Jean-Claude Keyes to Stratford. Armed with notebook and quarters, he stalked and trapped the nearest pay-phone.
But his luck was running poorly. Those he called were either out working, drunk, or had prior engagements. He did however, manage to arrange a tea-time assignation for the following day with the leading lady of his cast of old friends, and of this year’s Festival company as well. His face was lined with a curious blend of smile and frown as he hung up the phone.
(1:5) The apartment of Alessandra Edel
Alessandra Edel lived in one of the fine old Victorian houses which have survived in Stratford. Her apartment was on its top floor, close beneath a steep mansard roof.
“My garret,” she was in the habit of saying at the drop of almost anybody’s hat. This she would usually qualify with something like, “It’s a shabby old place but I love it. It has the atmosphere I require for my work...”
Keyes got there at sundown. Sandra had given him instructions about finding his way through the house and up to her flat, instructions that were not at all clear.
“If you get lost,” she said, “knock on a door and ask somebody. You speak the language of the natives.”
After climbing a couple of stairways and groping his way along several gloomy corridors, Keyes did get lost. Behind one of the