The Rehearsal: A Novel

by Eleanor Catton

  Stanley looked at the boy for a second and then stepped aside to let him through. The boy ducked his head and muttered, “Thanks anyway.” He slipped past Stanley, bounded down the stairs and disappeared.

  Stanley looked up through the high mullioned window that lit the stairwell, and breathed heavily. He found his hands were balled into fists and he vaguely felt like hitting something, but he wasn’t sure what he wanted to hit, or even why. He stepped back as a flood of second-year actors thundered down the stairs, and as the crowd dwindled he looked up to see the Head of Acting descending calmly in their wake, holding under his arm a bundled mainsail, patched and rat-tailed and studded around its edge with reef-point eyelets filmed with rust. He looked preoccupied.

  “Stanley,” he said as he approached. “You’re the man who wanted to see me, is that right?”

  “It’s all right. I sorted it out with the Head of Movement,” Stanley said, stepping respectfully aside. “It’s all sorted out now.”

  May

  “This is an exercise in control and communication,” the Head of Movement said. “I want you all to divide into pairs and face each other. Starting with your palms together and your feet square, you will begin to move in exact tandem, each the mirror image of the other. You can move however and wherever you like, but I want to be able to walk among you and not be able to tell who is leading and who is following.”

  The class lumbered to its feet and Stanley found himself paired with the girl who had been sitting nearest to him. They smiled at each other quickly as they turned to face each other, and Stanley felt his heart leap. He felt a little stab of self-contempt and frowned to quash the feeling. He turned back to look at the Head of Movement, narrowing his eyes to show the girl that he was listening hard, and that he intended to take the lesson very seriously, and that despite what she may expect or believe he was utterly indifferent to the fact of her sex. In his vague peripheral vision he saw the girl watch him for a moment longer, and then turn back to the Head of Movement herself.

  “Between you,” the Head of Movement continued, “choose one person who will begin as the leader. You must also choose some sort of physical signal to indicate to each other that the leader will change. You can swap between yourselves as many times as you wish, back and forth. Eye contact is essential. We will conduct this exercise in silence.”

  The paired students leaned in to confer with each other in whispers. The Head of Movement turned away and pressed a button on the stereo surround system, wiping the dust off the protruding edge with his finger while he waited for the disc to load. The dust was thick and silver-gray, accumulating on his fingertip in a soft feathered wafer. He rolled it into a ball and flicked it away. The disc began to spin, and he twisted the volume knob slowly up and up so the music faded in, swelling larger and larger until it filled the gymnasium completely. He had chosen a cinematic score, instrumental and surging and overblown.

  “Please take your places and begin,” he called over the opening bars. “The music is your pulse. Take inspiration from it. Detach yourself and divide your mind between watching your partner and listening to the pulse. You should feel alert but at peace. You may begin.”

  Stanley turned to face his partner and held up his palms for her to touch with her own. They looked clearly at each other, and at first he squirmed and frowned, unsure as to what she might be seeing, looking at him in such a clear, frank way. She was a little shorter than him, and her chin was tilted slightly upward to meet his gaze. She had determined gray eyes and a straight thin-lipped mouth. Stanley was close enough to see the down on her cheeks, glowing soft pink in the slanting light, and the fawny scatter of freckles across the bridge of her nose.

  The heavier instruments dwindled to let the strings build their own quiet plucking crescendo. Stanley peeled his right palm away from the girl’s and felt her make the same movement, slowly and carefully, lagging perhaps a quarter of a second behind. She was frowning slightly, but even as he registered the expression he realized that she was attempting to mirror his own. He relaxed into a more neutral face and saw her do the same, his movements reflected back at him in a delicate feminine echo, like a cave that threw back a finer, female version of his own call. He balled his hand into a fist and brought it up under his chin, trying to move slowly and carefully so she would see the whole trajectory of his movement and be able to replicate it simultaneously. She watched his eyes, not the movement of his hand. They were both wide eyed with the strain of trying to communicate without words. Around them the other paired couples were moving similarly, waving their hands about in a slow and measured way. As he spread his fingers out and laced them through the thin cold fingers of his echo-girl, Stanley thought to himself that from above the class must look like some sort of windswept crop, swelling up and back like tiny quivering blades thrusting up out of the soil and into a stiff and ever-changing breeze.

  From the stage the Head of Movement watched them all in silence, his fingertips still resting on the stereo and filmed gray with dust. His gaze drifted over them and came to rest upon one of the boys, standing on the edge of the group and reaching out his hand to touch his partner’s neck with his index finger. The Head of Movement watched the mirrored pair trace an invisible line down each other’s windpipe and into the hollow at the center of the collarbone, and thought, The boy is leading. He could always tell.

  The boy was standing with his chin high and his legs apart and wearing a solemn burning expression on his face that almost made the Head of Movement smile. It was the first time he’d had class with the boy since the teary outburst in his office following the Theater of Cruelty exercise, and when he had walked into the gymnasium that morning and called for the attention of the class he’d at once spotted Stanley bobbing on the periphery, anxious and desperate to be seen. The Head of Movement had looked away. He did not want the boy to cling to him in such a fearfully filial way, craving attention and recognition and time, unaware that all the trembled first-experiences and thought-dawnings that affected him so wholly were, for the Head of Movement, only the vicarious latest in a long line of the same.

  Every year at least one of the students complained about the Theater of Cruelty exercise. The lesson fell into the Head of Acting’s domain and mostly it was he who took the distressed student into his office and soothed any lasting damage. Some years, as with this one, he contrived a reason to leave the class at the last minute, scuttling up the back staircase to the lighting booth above the gymnasium to watch the students from behind the darkened glass. The view was always different. One year the victim-student had been able to wrestle free and fight back, and several of the students on stage had been seriously hurt; another year, the watching students stormed the stage in a mass rescue. But lately, year by year, the acting students had been losing something—a readiness to act, he thought, without irony. Take this year—a shirt, a bit of hair and the water-trough, and one student crying into his shirtsleeve afterward from the pain of it.

  Sometimes the Head of Movement wanted to strike them, to rush down on to the gymnasium floor and slap them and shake them until they stirred and snapped and fought back; sometimes he felt almost driven mad by this cling-film sheet of apathy that smothered them and parceled them and stopped their breath until they were like dolls in shrinkwrap, trademarked and mass produced.

  He tossed his head. They were cushioned, that was all. They needed a wakeup.

  Down on the floor Stanley had invisibly passed the leadership to his partner, who was now drawing away from him and fanning out, the two of them black-tee-shirted against the wooden floor like a symmetrical inkblot on an aged card. Not quite symmetrical. The male movements could never quite match the female, and vice versa: there was always something missing, some bright edge that gave the deception away. The Head of Movement sighed and looked at them all in panorama for a second, the silken apathetic crowd of sleepwalkers who had watched their classmate get stripped and shorn and nearly drowned, and had done nothing. He th
ought, How can I possibly wake them up? And then he thought, Who will awaken me?

  June

  “I am here to tell you about the end-of-year devised theater project,” the Head of Acting said briskly, “which is by far the most important event in the first-year calendar.”

  The Head of Acting always commanded a fearful unmoving silence whenever he spoke. He did not need to raise his voice.

  “First of all I must stress that you will be completely on your own. The tutors will not oversee rehearsals, scripts, lighting rigs, costume designs or concept discussions. This is your project. When we arrive in the auditorium at eight in the evening on the first of October, we want to be surprised. And shocked. We want to see why we chose you out of the two hundred hopefuls who auditioned. We want to leave feeling proud of our own good taste.

  “I might add that this project has an impressive legacy at the Institute: the work that has been dreamed up as part of this project has many times been later reworked into greater productions, some of which have toured internationally. You have big shoes to fill.”

  The Head of Acting brightened now, as he always brightened when talking about past students. His admiration and approval was only ever retrospectively bestowed, a fact which these first-year students did not yet know. In their ignorance they gazed fiercely up at him and champed at this new and shining chance to prove themselves.

  “It is a tradition at the Institute,” the Head of Acting continued, “that on closing night the cast will choose one prop from their production to be handed on. The prop they choose will serve as the driving stimulus for the production the following year. Last year’s production, titled The Beautiful Machine, received from the previous year’s students a large iron wheel. In the original production the wheel had been part of a working rickshaw. In Beautiful Machine the wheel was redressed as the Wheel of Fate and became a central visual component of the beautiful machine itself.”

  One of the boys was nodding vigorously to show he had seen The Beautiful Machine in production and remembered the wheel very well. The Head of Acting smiled faintly. He said, “The cast of Beautiful Machine, last year’s first-year students, have chosen a prop from their production that will become the locus of yours. I have it here in my pocket.”

  He paused for a long moment, enjoying the tension.

  “Does anyone have any questions, before I leave you all to conduct your first meeting?” he asked.

  Nobody could think of a question. The Head of Acting reached into his pocket and withdrew a playing card. It was a card from an ordinary deck, thinly striped on the reverse side, pinkish and round edged. He held it up for them all to see and turned it over in his fingers to show the King of Diamonds, bearded and thin lipped and pensive, holding his axe behind his head with a thick hammy hand. The Head of Acting tossed the card on the ground, inclined his head politely, and left the room.

  The gymnasium door closed softly in his wake and sent the King of Diamonds scudding sideways. The card was ever so slightly convex, shivering on its slim bowed back like a small unmasted ship lost at sea. For a moment there was only silence. Then one of the girls said, tentatively, “The King of Diamonds is one of the Suicide Kings. In case anybody didn’t know.” She spoke in an apologetic way, as if meaning to excuse herself for breaking the silence and speaking first.

  “The King of Hearts is holding his sword so it looks like it goes into the side of his head—” she demonstrated “—and the King of Diamonds is shown with the blade of his axe facing toward him. It’s the same on every pack. The two red kings are always called the Suicide Kings.”

  Everyone craned to look, and saw that she was right. There was another silence, a different sort of silence this time, a silence ringing with the last words spoken: the Suicide Kings. It’s always a different sort of silence once the first idea has been cast, Stanley thought.

  After a few moments more the collective concentration broke. They looked up and grinned sheepishly, and laughed and stretched and shifted and began to chatter and looked around for a leader who would guide them on from there.

  July

  “Do we get to a stage, do you think, as teachers,” the Head of Movement said, “when the only students who can really affect us are the ones who most remind us of a young version of ourselves?”

  The Head of Acting laughed. “And always a very flattering version, too,” he said. “Only ever the vigor and the ideals. And the bodies. The supple, fit young bodies that we all imagine we must once have had, before everything else set in.”

  The Head of Acting was some ten years older than the Head of Movement, and he had not aged well: his pale eyes were rimmed on their undersides by a wet pink rind that always made him look rather ill.

  “I think it’s sadly true for me,” the Head of Movement said. “There’s this one acting student this year—a boy. He’s very much like how I was, I suppose. How I imagine I must have been. When I’m teaching his class I forget all my doubts about… about everything, really. I watch him so closely and I really delight in his progress—I mean really—I keep seeking him out and watching him change, little by little, and I feel excited and generous and all the things that teachers are supposed to feel.”

  As a teacher the Head of Acting had always maintained a deliberate distance from his students, but his withdrawn and profoundly unmoved manner seemed to cause them, strangely, to worship him the more. It was the Head of Acting who most of the students sought to impress, and it was the Head of Acting who most of them remembered in the years that followed. His coldness and his deadness attracted them somehow, like puppies to a master with a whip. The Head of Movement did not possess this gift of indifference, the Head of Acting thought now: he showed too much of himself, wore his skin too plainly; he was too contemptuous of his students when they let him down.

  “The illusion of depth in a character,” the Head of Acting had said only this morning to his second-year class, “is created simply by withholding information from an audience. A character will seem complex and intriguing only if we don’t know the reasons why.”

  The Head of Movement was stroking his knuckles with his fingertips. He shook his head.

  “And I keep reminding myself that in all probability it’s just vanity,” he said, “my seeking out a younger version of myself and watching so greedily, like someone in a fairy tale bewitched. It’s a sad thing. I don’t think I can connect in the same way with the other students. I just don’t—” He spread his arms and shrugged. “I just don’t care enough,” he said. “I don’t care enough in what makes them different. They’d never know. I get up in front of them and teach and it’s like any stage performance, knowing the role back to front and getting on and doing it. But underneath it all it’s just an act.”

  “Maybe you’re being too hard on yourself,” the Head of Acting said. “Putting too much of an expectation on yourself that you actually have to care. Maybe you don’t have to care. Maybe you can not care and still be a great teacher.”

  “Maybe,” the Head of Movement said.

  “Who is the student who captures you?” the Head of Acting said. “The younger version of you.”

  The Head of Movement hesitated, squinting up at the light fitting above the Head of Acting’s head.

  “I’d rather not say,” he said at last, a little shyly, as if the boy was a crush that he held still too close to his heart.

  “All right,” the Head of Acting said. “But if you let me, I bet I could guess.”

  April

  “My dad has this theory,” Stanley said. “He reckons schools should take out insurance policies on the students they think are most likely to die.”

  There was a pause, then all six of them put down their forks and turned to look at Stanley properly.

  “What?” they said.

  “Because there’s always one kid who dies,” Stanley said. “In any high school, right? During your time at high school, any school, you can always remember one kid who died.”


  His smile was faltering now. He had intended the remark to be flippant and amusing and slightly shocking, but his classmates were looking nauseated and confused. He tried to let a surprised and disappointed look flit across his face, as if to communicate that his audience was not as debonair and outrageous as he had hoped, that the six of them had let him down somehow by this pinched and prudish outlook, by their backward and unfashionable scope that left no room for wit or scandal. He tried to make his eyebrows peak in the center and his smile turn down slightly, a worldly look that was contemptuous and cheerful and uncaring. He tried not to care.

  “That’s retarded,” one of the girls said.

  Stanley smiled wider. He could not rightly retreat now. He was committed to voicing, and thus partly owning, a point of view that wasn’t his own. He felt trapped, and so tried to redeem himself by becoming jolly and charming, like his father could be, and amplifying his own part, his own sponsorship of the idea, until it seemed as if the idea really was his own.

  “You can take out an insurance policy,” he said, “for something like two hundred a year. Insurance policies on kids are really, really low. Making money is all about seeing something’s going to happen before it happens, right? So if you can get in there and make something good of it—if you can pick the kid who’s most likely to die—”

  He spread his hands and shrugged, as if the logic were self-evident.

  “And you reckon the money should go to whoever takes out the policy,” a boy said. “Like, it should go to the school as a reward for being clever enough to spot the kid that was likely to die?”

  “What does it mean, ‘most likely to die?’ ” snapped the girl. “That’s retarded. How can you tell if a person’s likely to die?”

  Stanley was feeling hot now. He started to feel resentful, not at his father, whom he was instinctively moving to protect, but at this nauseated audience, who were scowling at him across the mirror-glaze of the linoleum tabletop as if he had mentioned something truly dreadful. He forgot that he himself had met his father’s insurance idea with something a little like nausea; he forgot that his father’s deliberate provocations often gave him a tight feeling in his chest and a helpless clenching anger that lingered for days and weeks afterward. He glared back at the six of them and said, “Who’s to say something good can’t come out of a death? Who’s to say it’s wrong to make something good out of something terrible like a death? To spot it before it happens, and pounce?”