by Greg Egan
—Der Führer hasn’t come yet
I tell her.
The hours drag on, then Miss Mulligan arrives, jubilant.
—He’s not coming
she screeches joyously.
—How the hell did you manage it?
inquires Miss McDougall, just a hint of admiration in her voice.
—A secret, dear, a secret
she giggles. She winks, looks conspiratorial, in her usual hammy way.
—Everybody home! Just remember that it was me who did this for you! The ultimate sacrifice, just for my precious children!
Mmmmm/ahh.
The last rehearsal is on Sunday afternoon. The play is running from Tuesday to Friday.
We sit nervously in the cold concrete room beneath the stage, waiting for our cues. Somewhere along the line, cue sheets were planned, and one of the production assistants was going to watch the action and give appropriate cues. Somewhere along the line this got dropped, and cues turned into the cast remembering who was on soon, and warning each other. Which made it kind of exciting and comradely.
On Monday we are called out of classes half-way through the morning for a surprise rehearsal (Which we are later told had been planned for weeks. Grrr!) which we must carry out in front of the people dragging chairs into the hall.
And then it is Tuesday and I cannot think or work all day. Every time anyone in the cast sees somebody else who they speak with in the play, they quickly go over their lines together.
I try to sleep in the afternoon, but cannot.
I begin to regret (violently, physically) ever joining, but I am happy as much as I am terrified.
Then it is time to go.
Chapter 18
PERFORMANCES
As I cross the oval I notice a miserable huddle of people outside the entrance to the hall. Half an hour ago, the main characters should have been inside having their make-up done. Curious, I zoom in (it is marginally quicker than a fast-track with a viewpoint, and in this case the two-dimensional feel is just right). Everyone from the first scene is there, sitting on the concrete or pacing on the grass.
I arrive.
—What’s the matter?
—Mulligan. She hasn’t arrived yet, and nobody else has a key
says everyone unhappily.
Oh.
I start pacing on the concrete. You’ve got to make lumps.
Half an hour later we hear the characteristic roar of her souped-up red sportscar. Everyone looks cheerful. She screeches to a stop in the car park.
Short cut-away to fantasy sequence: The door of the car opens, she collapses onto the ground. We rush over, find her covered in blood, a bullet wound on her shoulder.
—Thugs from Stratford
she gasps.
—Go on
we encourage.
—Just as I was going to the car, two people approached me. They tried to convince me to cancel the performance! They said they were from the Royal Shakespeare Company … they said that our version was sacrilege, that we’d made too many changes, that we should never be allowed to go through with it! When I argued with them, one of them pulled out a gun, and …
She faints.
Somebody gets the keys from her pocket and we hurry over to the hall. The show must go on!
Actually, she gets out of the car, runs (daintily) over to the entrance, and says sheepishly:
—Flat tire. Sorry.
And lets us in.
Down the silent aisles with echoes from empty chairs. Will anyone come tonight? It seems unbelievable that pure coincidence can bring five hundred people under one roof all at the same time. We’ve been told it’s a full house tonight, but truth has become irrelevant in every aspect of this play.
Good.
Deceit makes a great theme for my film, especially since Macbeth itself is so full of it.
The hall is silent, eerie. I can almost hear W.S. stirring in his grave.
—Sacrilege!
whispers the wind through the window.
—Cobblers
I tell it. It doesn’t hear me, keeps on whispering.
—Nobody can say this is virgin Shakespeare
I say loudly.
—Shakespeare was undoubtedly not a virgin when he wrote it
says Lord Ross brushing past me.
—And stop clogging up the aisle.
—I was looking for a rabbit!
I yell after him but he has vanished into the bowels of the hall.
But I wasn’t really. I just felt like saying that.
Ho hum.
Through the door at the side of the hall, into the cold, dark, concrete corridor. Down the stairs at the end into the dressing-room complex.
I film the make-up preparations with a purposefully distorting fish-eye lens, with a one-hundred-and-sixty-degree field. Streaked brown faces loom and stretch. And when it is my turn, the fingers daubed in goo bend and curve like rubber as they move around my eyes.
The critics would call it surrealistic. How can it be, when it’s exactly as I see it?
I pace nervously. Production assistants dart around everywhere like humming birds, checking on props and costumes and actors and musicians, checking things that have been checked before a thousand times, and things that have just come up seconds ago.
I grab one with a watch and ask her for the time. She hides the watch face jealously and squirms away, saying:
—Nobody, nobody is allowed to know the time. Mulligan’s orders. She told us that it would only make you nervous, so just stop worrying and leave everything to us.
—I swear I won’t get nervous I just want to know the time so I can have some idea of how things are going and …
She has vanished.
Why do I need to have some idea of how things are going and … ?
Well it would be nice.
I should wear a watch. Or grow one in my head. Now that would be very useful. I already have an accurate time-pulse source for other purposes, such as regulation of the film-transport mechanism, so it would be easy, I’m sure …
Not now. Concentrate, don’t wander off like that!
I am not in the first scene but I still feel a shiver pass through my body as the familiar music starts, and the audience grows silent, and Mulligan sticks her head in and says gaily:
—Two minutes, everybody! Two minutes!
Of course there’s nothing to worry about, everyone in the first half of the play is made up and costumed and … ready? Who will ever be ready?
Then everybody wishes everybody else Good Luck despite the tradition of saying Break A Leg instead. We’re not much for tradition.
With a cast of thirty including dancers and acrobats there are eight hundred and seventy (no kidding) ‘Good Luck’s to be said, each taking about a second. However, fifteen of those ‘Good Luck’s can be said simultaneously, as there are fifteen pairs of people, so it only takes about fifty-eight seconds in total. Which makes sense: from each individual’s viewpoint, there are twenty-nine ‘Good Luck’s he must say, and twenty-nine to be said to him.
We are, of course, standing in a preplanned configuration to expedite this procedure. It has been choreographed and rehearsed. It was all worked out by an IBM computer.
Wow!
Then The Play Has Begun.
I sit below as the first scene starts; the words cannot be heard down here but I can follow roughly what is happening by the music. I could always send up a viewpoint, but that would mean opening one of the doors down here to make a free path to the stage, and Mulligan would not approve (and I could never explain). I must work on ways of removing that shortcoming. The little people in my head must work harder!
If I let them, certain things could make me very nervous.
Distractions.
Besides, it is better this way. So I just sit and listen to faint sounds. After all, this is part of the novel way to film the play: through the eyes and ears of an actor, waiting offstage for much of the time.
I can intercut rehearsal footage of the scenes I will not see performed for real, perhaps some kind of montage. Suggestive of memory? But that would be a lie, I’m not sitting here remembering those scenes, I’m sitting here thinking about editing them. Should I indicate that? Hold on tight, this is getting out of control.
I don’t have the courage to dive into wells like that. I’ll probably do something simple and dull. I could never record my thoughts without thinking about the fact that they were being recorded, which would give very messy results. Acting with just your body you can hide, but who could manage to act with their whole soul?
Not me.
Not that I can record thoughts directly. I’ll just lie to cut out the messy bits.
Distractions.
I wonder about the audience. We have been told by Mulligan to throw rotten fruit at them if they misbehave, but there is no fruit on the stage, and nowhere in our costumes to hide nice squishy month-old plums. There isn’t even any fruit in the banquet scene.
Lousy preparation!
What can you expect?
And then the acrobats from the very beginning of the first scene arrive downstairs with news of the audience.
—They’re all old-age pensioners getting in free!
—They’re all about ten years old and they laugh at everything!
—They’re all university students with glasses and they look like they’re at a funeral!
—They’re all teachers, and their families! Nobody else!
—They’re all high-society ladies and their gigolos!
—They’re all high-society gentlemen and their whores!
—They’re all Neapolitan gangsters!
Huh. I thought that was a type of ice-cream.
—It’s too dark. You can’t see anyone out there at all!
At least there seems to be a wide spectrum of the community present.
I will be on soon, so I creep up noisily and take my sword from the rubbish bin by the side of the stage where they are all kept. I pick it up in slow motion to avoid banging it but then someone bumps me and there is a dull thud. A dozen people turn and shush me … making ten times as much noise.
Ho hum.
My scene consists of standing on the stage looking dumb. (No problem.) Then I get to hand my sword to the King so he can ceremoniously name Malcolm as his heir.
Back in the wings, I can’t resist the temptation: I send a viewpoint into the audience to look around. I look through the viewpoint, but keep filming through my eyes. My strange compromise.
I move along the front row: It is all old-age pensioners.
I move along the next row: It is all young children.
I move along the next row: It is all sober scholars.
I move along the next row: It is all staff and their families.
I move along the next row: It is all richly dressed women with fawning male companions.
I move along the next row: It is all richly dressed men with fawning female companions.
I move along the next row: ah, it is ice-cream!
Structural seating … there’s something familiar about it! But surely they wouldn’t get away with doing that to the audience?
Why not? If we let them do it to us now, we’ll let them do it to us later. Conditioning is for life!
Behind me, Miss McDougall begins to make soft crowing noises.
—Caww! Caww!
Someone shushes her. She giggles.
—You’re sloshed
I say. A joke, of course.
Then she leans towards me and I can smell vodka on her breath.
—How can you be shertain?
she asks me with her eyes closed. I feel like saying something scolding, but what’s the point? She won’t foul things up. She just needs a bit of courage to watch us foul things up and not go off her rocker.
Another scene for me. This time I only have to stand on the stage looking dumb. The layer-cake audience snoozes happily.
In the right wing, Mulligan is at least sober. She is sitting with a red-glowing torch (stick plus rag soaked in kerosene …) reading Everything You Always Wanted To Know About Sex But Were Afraid To Ask. Someone else (sorry, animal fat not kerosene) is reading it over her shoulder.
I can’t imagine why.
I am on again, this time with speech. I have pre-recorded all my lines from the rehearsals when Mulligan has said I’ve been OK, and I play them back in my head and say them just as I hear them.
I film the scene with an enormous horizontal compression ratio. Later, during editing, I will select the most important part of each frame and print it with the normal compression ratio … this saves too much panning as I actually shoot … panning shots will be simulated by printing a gradually shifting section from successive frames.
At the entrance to the hall there is a noisy struggle, then gunshots. I rush a viewpoint over (the best of intentions …) to catch the action (I can’t resist it). Another crank organisation, Friends of Stratford, are mounting an assault. They have two sub-machine-guns and a mortar. We have grenades and rifles. Blue smoke supplied by a very expensive chemical fills the end of the hall, but nobody notices. The invaders are repelled.
The Show Must Go On.
I hear the reassuring sound of the RAAF jet on patrol above.
I shouldn’t worry. We’re well protected.
Macbeth has just said his last piece for the scene when Seward suddenly leaps to his feet. He is in a row of the audience all of his own. He booms out:
—Would you just repeat that bit again, a little louder this time, eh? You have to pro-ject your voice! You have to use your lungs, my boy!
Macbeth ignores him.
Seward looks a little ruffled, but sullenly sits. There is a faint rustle of comment throughout the audience. Now that’s entertainment!
My next scene: I stand at the end of the stage with Lady M. and Lord R. as we casually sip sherries and go over the latest castle gossip. Occasionally I glance out at the audience. The row of Neapolitan gangsters is empty … they have gone to the end of the hall to help defend us from the Friends of Stratford. The seats are strewn with empty violin cases.
At the other end of the stage, Macbeth and Banquo are taking turns at telling each other whoppers. The fine nuances of their voices are lost amongst the resounding rifle reports.
Opening nights are always chaotic.
Mulligan chuckles so loudly that it drowns out even the battle noises. Ought she be reading that at her age, with a weak heart and all?
I am not afraid of the Friends of Stratford. There are always the squares to count on if things get really sticky.
There is a long gap before my next scene, so I head for the basement to tell everyone how well it’s all going. As I climb down the stairs, the light bulb above me shatters.
—Snipers!
whispers someone in the dark. I fall on my face, wiping my make-up all over the bottom stair. Behind me there are footsteps. I hold my breath. They approach the top of the stairs, where my sheepskin-boot-shod feet are clumsily caught. Then there is a yell, and a suspicious-looking figure in jungle green is lying beside me on the stairs.
—Who are you?
I ask irritably. Things aren’t turning out all that well.
—Je suis avec les Amis de Stratford, succursale parisienne!
He bites a false tooth and expires quietly.
This is all beginning to remind me of Casino Royale.
The Big Banquet Scene is next, one of the most vital parts of the entire play. There is sure to be an attempt to sabotage it … perhaps poison. I rush upstairs to tell Mulligan.
She has finished the book (she is a very fast reader) but she has started a new one, Portnoy’s Complaint. I tap her on the shoulder. She shoves me away. I stand behind her and whisper urgently:
—The Friends of Stratford managed to get a sniper into the basement, and I think they may have got to the food for the banquet and tampered with it.
What should we do?
She spins around angrily, says:
—You’re all supposed to be responsible actors capable of handling these sorts of minor crises! Don’t come whingeing to me every time some little thing goes wrong! Fix it yourself!
She turns back to her paperback.
I stiffen my upper lip, raise my chin, square my shoulders. This is very uncomfortable, but necessary. This is my chance to do something positive, something worthwhile! This is my chance to show them all that I can handle anything, that even when the going gets tough I will never crack!
And that sort of thing.
I rush back down the stairs to the basement. The banquet scene starts in ten minutes, and the barrel of Kentucky Fried and the bottle of Coke are on a tray ready to be taken up. They are both unopened, but careful inspection reveals tiny punctures in the lids of both. I flush them down a toilet then leave the hall by the back entrance. The closest telephone is in the office at the other end of the school, and I have to get that food delivered in eight minutes! In the cool night sky, the RAAF jet is fighting off FOS helicopters armed with atomic missiles.
I sprint along the side of the school, ducking sprays of bullets and dodging infrared lasers. I make it to the office with six minutes to go.
I flick quickly through the telephone book, find the number, dial.
—I want a barrel of chicken and one bottle of Coke immediately!
I gasp.
In the distance I hear the sirens of the police escort. Minutes later, the food is in my hands.
I dash back to the hall, in the back entrance, up the stairs.
At the entrance to the stage, a fire is raging. Twice I try to make it through the heat and smoke, but it is impossible. There is only one solution … a compromise.
I pour the Coke over the flames. They are vanquished in a cloud of unwholesome vapours.
The servants are just carrying the table onto the stage. I am in time!
The scene goes without a hitch, except that we are forced to drink air from our Made-In-Japan imitation stoneware mugs.
Ho hum.
At least I’ve managed to get some drama into an otherwise dull evening.
