by Bruce Barber
turned up their undersides.
They’re like the silver bellies of dead fish, Brocken thought with the designer’s side of his mind.
Looking still farther away to the south, he saw that clouds were building on the horizon. He was calmer when he spoke again, and so was Porliss.
“There’ll be a storm tonight,” he said.
Porliss too looked at the clouds. “Possible. We’ve had lots of rain this summer. I’m glad we’re not playing in a tent.”
“Are you? I don’t know. There are fewer technical problems in a theatre, I suppose, but bad weather can add to the drama. Real thunder has a quality that canned effects can never match.”
“What a romantic you are, George! Real thunder!” He chuckled, then let the chuckle grow to laughter, the grand overstated laughter of a fat actor. Porliss was a man who believed in “canned effects.” Even his bad productions were often praised for their “effects.”
“I brought you a present, Hobie.” Brocken rummaged in the shopping bag he was carrying, a large fuchsia reticule with “Printemps-Paris” lavishly inscribed on either side of it. He always carried a shopping bag, and it was usually a bag from some distant place. Like most theatre designers, he was often in distant places.
“A present? For me?” Porliss was delighted. He loved being brought things, especially good things to eat, which is what people usually brought him; he was a notorious gourmand.
“I got it yesterday in Stuttgart,” Brocken said, as he pulled a smaller bag from the larger. It was fouled in Burano lace – another gift, but for a favourite cutter, not for Porliss. Finally he liberated the small bag and held it out to the director. The bag was black and was decorated with a caricature of a face.
“Who’s that?” Porliss asked. “Mozart again?”
“Goethe. I got it in a bookstore.”
Porliss accepted the offering. It was heavy, much heavier than he had expected. He fumbled the black bundle, then clutched it to his belly.
“Jesus, George! This thing’s heavy.”
“It’s cast iron,” Brocken explained blandly. “Cast iron is generally rather heavy.”
Porliss stripped away the black plastic and revealed a squat bust of a bearded man. The director looked puzzled.
“Thanks awfully,” he said, “but why me?”
Brocken grinned wickedly. “Don’t you recognize him?”
“Should I?”
“It’s Shakespeare, or at least, it’s some central European’s version of Shakespeare. A dealer in Wittenberg is turning them out like hotcakes.”
“The Hamlet connection, I suppose.”
“Probably. Anyway, they’re everywhere in Europe. I picked up several of them. I thought you’d be amused.”
“Oh I am, dear boy. I am. It’ll make a splendid... a splendid...”
“Hat stand?” Brocken supplied.
“Or maybe I could turn it upside down and use it for an ashtray...” Porliss suggested doubtfully.
The fanfare sounded on the other side of the theatre.
“Rats!” Brocken muttered. “l was going to have a drink before the ordeal.”
“There’s still time,” Porliss said. He looked uncomfortably at his gift, then set it down on the edge of the well. He peered at the bust as if it were the solution to some great puzzle. Back in the days when he was acting more than directing, he had been known for his tendency to overplay
his scenes. He leaned back, peered again. Very slowly he walked in a circle around the well, his gaze remaining on the bust of Shakespeare.
“You run along,” Porliss said at last. “I’ll stay here a moment longer to contemplate the beauty of this... thing.”
Brocken exited toward the bar, laughing unpleasantly, which was his way of laughing.
(2:2) The dressing room of Seamus O’Reilly
Seamus O’Reilly was getting into character. He was already in full make-up, including the shaggy, overbeetling eyebrows and bristling beard he had been given for his portrayal of Duncan. He already had the complexion for the part, the weathered forehead and cheeks, the purplish bloom on the nose.
He was also in costume, or in most of it. He delayed putting on the great fur cloak he was obliged to wear in his early scenes. O’Reilly loved the cloak, treated it with the affection that most men would reserve for a favourite dog, but it was too hot for the dressing room. It was too hot for the stage as well, but out there heat didn’t matter. Nothing mattered then but the play, or rather, nothing mattered but the performance, his performance, which wasn’t always in perfect agreement with the play.
Even in his ordinary clothes – not that he had any “ordinary” clothes, really – O’Reilly had the knack of making himself look many of the parts that Shakespeare had written for mature players.
“Shakespeare must have known a lot of old actors,” O’Reilly had been heard to say more than once, “and he must have liked them better than he liked old actresses.”
But character... that was a serious matter.
He ran over his opening lines, rumbling through them rapidly to set them even more firmly in his memory.
“What bloody man is that...” he mumbled, rushing along without interpretation or volume, a “spaghetti run” as the method was sometimes known.
O’Reilly had trouble with his lines nowadays. He rarely left a line out, and he never lost the metre, but did have a tendency to jumble phrases, to put them in the wrong order. This trifling fault, as he thought of it, bothered his colleagues more than it did him, as it frequently confounded their cues and brought then into a scene where they didn’t belong and where they weren’t wanted.
“Every word was there,” O’Reilly would boom when challenged on this matter. “Every blessed word.”