by Bruce Barber
provided for them. A newspaper had been dropped, and a text of the Scottish Play, and a lace handkerchief. Someone had left an umbrella leaning against a concrete pillar. Someone else had forgotten a straw hat on a retaining wall.
Hobart Porliss had forgotten, or pretended to forget, the bust of Shakespeare which he had just acquired from George Brocken. It balanced unsteadily where he had left it, staring across the yawn of the well-hole.
Like the abandoned umbrella and the straw hat, this squat iron effigy of the Bard, which had been made to seem almost barbarous by the clumsiness, or perhaps the Expressionismus, of its distant creator, was entirely impervious to the trumpets’ blast. Not even with a glance did it acknowledge the entertainment that the horns had announced. Instead, the black iron eyes concentrated on something in the distance, something far beyond the terrace, beyond the deserted cricket field. The eyes stared at the river and at a drifting swan – a thing of grace, of delicacy, and of impeccable whiteness.
At eight o’clock, the traditional cannon was discharged to signal the beginning of the evening’s performance; the echoing boom set the deck to vibrating for a moment. The bust wobbled on the lip of the well, then tumbled with a loud, hollow ring to the pavement below.
(2:7) The Festival Theatre, intermission
Keyes waited for the intermission in Macbeth with an anticipation he usually reserved for sex or fine liquor; despite Sandra’s assurance that “Porliss knows what he’s doing,” it was Keyes’ opinion that Porliss did not know what he was doing, not quite.
Porliss had managed, however, to use to the fullest the excellence of most of his actors. Damian Pace’s Macbeth was sound, and certainly Seamus O’Reilly knew what he was about. If anything, O’Reilly’s Duncan was too strong; it threatened to overshadow the title role even with many fewer lines and scenes. Sandra’s Lady Macbeth was fine, rich and complicated. The rest of the actors were performing with the solid competence for which the company was so well-known.
What, then? Keyes asked himself. What’s wrong with the thing?
For a while he was convinced it was the set. George Brocken’s designs were commendable – indeed they drew applause from the audience when the lights first went up – but they did not wear well. With his wrought-iron structures and the stark shadow patterns that they cast across the stage, Brocken was trying to represent primitive architectural forms, but also to suggest cages, the traps that were slowly closing around the Thane of Glamis and Cawdor. But by the time Duncan was murdered, removing O’Reilly from the play, the once-elegant decors were beginning to remind Keyes of scrap iron and junkyards, which was not, he suspected, the artist’s intention.
“Less would have been more,” Keyes muttered, which caused the serious young school teacher sitting beside him to glare and put her finger to her mouth.
Hobart Porliss’ penchant for special effects and elaborate make-up was also getting in the way. Keyes came to the theatre for Shakespeare’s language more than anything else. So far as he was concerned, anything that got in the way of the poetry was a mistake, almost a criminal mistake. Here there were many such errors; important blocks of text were missing or relocated, and lines were spoken that Keyes was certain he had never heard or read before.
Both O’Reilly and Sandra had excellent diction and superb control of their voices, and in their scenes the poetry (or what remained of it after Porliss’ editing) not only survived, it soared. In other scenes, however, the lines were too mired in gore to have much meaning. Watching these scenes Keyes found himself wondering about the harried crew member whose job it was to apply stage-blood to the cast.
“Must be spraying it on with a garden hose,” he grumbled.
“Shh!” hissed the teacher.
“Sorry,” Keyes apologized. As he did, he looked at the woman carefully for the first time. He had noticed her pretty mouth earlier. Now he saw that the rest of her was pretty. She was pretty enough to make him feel sorry that he had disturbed her concentration on the play.
He slumped into his seat and closed his eyes.
“O horror, horror, horror...” someone bellowed from the far side of the stage.
Strangely, the words took Keyes entirely away from the play and out of the theatre. “Horror” made him remember another scene, the one he had witnessed between Alan Wales and his girlfriend. Something about it had been truly horrible, and more fraught with terrible possibility than what he had paid so many dollars to watch on the stage.
When the intermission came (in a totally inappropriate place, probably arranged so that the stage could be mopped), Keyes was still thinking about Wales and his friend. Instead of rushing to the bar as he usually did at interval time, he went outside. The storm that had threatened all day had come and gone during the early scenes of the play. Large puddles of rain-water stood on the pavement in front of the theatre. The flowers in their concrete planters leaned groggily this way and that after the beating they had taken from the downpour. The lawns were sodden.
Keyes lit a cigarette, and wandered, not quite aimlessly, toward the river side of the theatre. He reached the Marquee deck near the well-hole where George Brocken and Hobart Porliss had recently discussed storms. Then, continuing his long flirtation with lung cancer, he lit another cigarette, leaning slightly over the well to shield flame from wind.
For a moment the flare of his cigarette lighter blinded him. As his eyes were recovering, he saw a sharp, intense flicker of some other light from below. Perhaps because he had spent part of the evening watching witches, he sensed something infernal in the light, something wickedly faerie.
“Too late in the year for fireflies,” he said to no one in particular, or perhaps to the after-image of the flicker itself, commanding it to explain its presence.
He squinted down into the shadows. The light from the theatre’s shop windows was dim and bled on the scene from an angle, but Keyes could see something huddled on the ground. It was vaguely manlike, a sprawling form. Someone must have slipped on the wet grass, or perhaps even fallen through the well-hole, Keyes supposed. He squinted again, then headed for the stairs to see if he could help whoever it was.
A moment later he stood looking down on the prone figure of one of Macbeth’s bleeding sergeants.
Keyes shook his head in amused disgust: Alan Wales seemed to be imitating certain eccentricities of Seamus O’Reilly, whom Keyes had once come upon dead-drunk and passed out in full costume, much like this; except, to O’Reilly’s credit, the curtain had already come down for the evening.
Beside Wales’ head, inexplicably, was another head: that of William Shakespeare, cast in iron. Keyes bent down to give Wales a shake, only to be shaken himself when he realized that the thick liquid leaking onto his hand from the corner of the actor’s mouth was warm – it was not part of the bloody man’s stage make-up, but real blood. Keyes quickly placed his fingers against Wales’ neck. There was no pulse.
Jean-Claude Keyes had died the thousand deaths on the boards, had read the daily deaths in the newspapers, had seen slow-motion deaths on-screen, but this was his first encounter with the real thing. Turning aside, he lost his breakfast, lunch, dinner, and what little naïveté remained in his heart. As Keyes raised his head, he saw the shining again, the brief glow which had brought him here, just off to his left; there, in a slight indentation in the soggy earth, was a tiny pile of silvery fragments. In a daze, he picked them up and stared at them long to enough to identify them as sequins, then forgot them as he automatically reached into his pocket for his cigarettes. The star-shaped flakes drifted down the lining of his jacket to join his house-keys, the stub of his ticket, and some errant lint
Breathing deeply several times to regain his self-control, Keyes stood up. For a moment he was unable to take his eyes from the body. Alan Wales, he thought, had certainly picked an uncomfortable position in which to die. Limbs were protruding every which way. Still, there was something oddly theatrical about Wales’ pose, not that it mattered to him now that his acting was
ended permanently.
“He wasn’t this dramatic onstage tonight,” Keyes said softly. Then, he heard a voice above him and cocked an ear in its direction, as if he was a troll at the bottom of a well listening to the song of an innocent peasant about to draw water.
(2:8) The Festival Theatre, grounds
Keyes recognized the affected drawl of Hobart Porliss.
“Where is the damned thing?” Porliss was muttering, and Keyes assumed the director was alone, since there were no other voices or footsteps. A few seconds later, Porliss’ voice was followed by Porliss’ face, which became puzzled as soon as he looked down and saw Keyes through the round frame of the well.
“Porliss,” Keyes said without prologue, “you’ve got a problem.”
“Only one?” Porliss asked sourly, his eyes darting about as if seeking someone other than Keyes. Then Porliss saw the body.
“This one’s enough.” Keyes gestured for Porliss to descend, and the fat man obliged.
He stared at the corpse.
“Alan...?”
Keyes nodded.
“Is he...? I mean he looks...”
“He is,” Keyes said.
“Alan...” Porliss murmured again, with an intonation and expression Keyes could nor quite interpret; it seemed almost like relief.
Porliss shook his head, as if to clear