Musicians fled, fearing for their lives, and spectators ran for the exits like cattle in a stampede. People interviewed later aid it could not have been more horrifying or alarming than if someone had suddenly yelled that there was a fire. No one knew until much later what had actually happened—just a cable that should have been replaced years earlier. After the horrors of the war, nerves were still psychically strung out and despite the term PTSD not being in the vocabulary back then, this is what the sudden panic was attributed to. Once the dust settled, stagehands rushed to Rosalva and after disinterring her from the debris found she was miraculously still alive and breathing. She was rushed to the nearest trauma center in Bristol where only the heroic efforts of a young physician, Dr. Jonathan Prule, kept her from death’s icy grasp.
Rosalva went through many months of therapy and rehabilitation, even additional surgeries, to try and make her what she once was, but apparently, the damage from her injuries that night at The Regent were just too severe. Dr. Prule, even as gifted as he was, was unable to make Rosalva whole again. Her physical appearance was only part of the issue. Though her medical team got her over that hurdle in time, it was, oddly enough, the angle of the rack of lights that hit her that ended her singing career. No one, not even Prule or any other specialists that were brought in, could explain it, but when all that could be done had been done, Rosalva’s voice was just gone. Not gone as in mute…but what her voice had once been? That was gone, never to be heard again.
Rosalva sought the advice and treatment from vocal coaches and experts around the world, but in the end, her one magical and beautiful siren’s song-voice was now just a wheeze. In fact, the hideous wheezing sounds that came from Rosalva were there even when she just tried to talk. Singing was out of the question. When word reached the public, it was like a black cloud had descended on everyone who had ever heard her perform. They simply could not believe that Rosalva’s days of singing on the public stage were over. And though Rosalva was not the lone attraction at The Regent, it was like a spell had been cast over the concert hall when the verdict of her prognosis was made known. Perhaps people were too afraid to return to The Regent after Rosalva’s near demise…or perhaps she did, in some way, hold a lifeline to Barkley’s creation.
Whatever the truth, people just avoided the theatre like it was cursed or had a disease associated with it. The once proud and majestic Regent fell on hard times which soon spread to the village of Swinson as well. It had not been patently obvious when The Regent had been flying high, but when everything began to fall apart from the top down, The Regent had been supporting a lot of the other businesses in town. It was like a house of cards or an array of dominos: people stopped coming to Swinson…The Regent collapsed…the ancillary businesses, namely hotels and eateries dried up. And pretty soon, Swinson was once again just another pinpoint on the UK map, only the stuff of stories and legends of what once was from the old time locals. Swinson was still a lovely coastal spot, but it never recovered from what it had once been.
The Regent itself remained standing, but it devolved to just an empty husk, the once-elaborate façade and marquee chipped and faded as the weather from the sea ate away at it like a cancer. Milton Barkley was a casualty as well. When his primary attraction was no longer available, he tried mightily to revamp the place and bring it back to life, but no one was coming anymore. With the love of his life in tatters, Barkley just disappeared. Some said they saw him walk into the ocean and vanish under the waves…some said he drank himself to death…some said he just wandered off to end it all out of sight of the locals. But much like Rosalva’s heritage, nothing was ever definitively proven.
Which bring us back to Rosalva herself. After she had pursued every avenue of therapy and treatment that she could, poor Rosalva just could not cope. It was, most said, the diva in her that broke her spirit. Even as warm and unassuming as she appeared to her public, Rosalva just could not imagine a life for herself without being up on stage and performing. As the dark days of The Regent and Swinson encapsulated the area, Rosalva, according to an acquaintance, fell into a dark chasm of depression. No one in Swinson saw anything of her as time went by, but in practical terms, no one much was looking for her either. They all had their own emergencies to attend to as the town began to disintegrate and Rosalva’s station if life was not on anyone’s radar, even as cold and ugly as that sounds. Her one close acquaintance swears it was just a simple suicide. It was not as Rosalva had lived: no big production, no flashy show, no glamour or audience. She simply could no longer take what had become of her, how far she had fallen, at least in her own eyes, and overdosed on a myriad of pills that she had been hoarding since her initial injuries.
When Rosalva was discovered, it was by some vagrants looking to use the old decaying and dark and quite eerie interior of The Regent as a warm respite for a few days. The two men squinted into the dim light that leaked through the various cracks and fissures of the old theatre and spied a mound on what had once been the stage. They wandered closer to find Rosalva splayed across an old divan from her old dressing room. She was adorned in one of the finest, and as it was later reported, last costumes of her performing days, possibly wanting to go out in death still the consummate performer. Even as macabre and ghoulish and ghastly as it actually was. To add to her tragic end, Rosalva’s body was collected and interred in an unknown location just outside of Swinson as times were hard on everyone by then. No one knew if she had any family. It was a pathetic end to who had once been the toast of the town.
To this day, legend holds that the spirit of Rosalva still lingers in the old Regent Theatre structure which was never demolished. Perhaps it was decided that her old stage should remain as a testament and remembrance of its most famous and beloved performer…
Not The Same Old Theatre
Swinson, UK
May 2017
Over time, Swinson finally began to recover as the rest of the country was prospering in the modern era. It was not really notable in comparison to the economic standing of other places along the shoreline that had maintained a reasonable but not raging success in the years since The Regent fell by the wayside along with Swinson. None of the other places had been able to offer the draw of the old theatre that made the rise and fall of Swinson’s cultural offering so dramatic, but they had chugged along as they always had, and now Swinson seemed to be hanging onto the coattails of its surrounding localities, capitalizing on the general rise of the area, financially speaking. New life began to be breathed into the town as the hotels and restaurants and cafes, and coffee houses that had been boarded up in the wake of Swinson’s demise appeared again. Some of the old venues were refurbished, and some brand new ventures sprung up as well.
To top it all off, Darren Lynch, backed by a group of outsiders from Birmingham, sought to revitalize the decrepit and still oddly creepy old Regent Theater. The aura of mystery and death and tragedy still hung in the air like a heavy blanket in and about the old theatre, but after much research and interviews with the locals who had seen the original structure, the investors decided it as worth a try to reopen the old showplace. The scars and damage of The Regent, both physical and emotional, were still very fresh in the minds of Brits for miles around, so it was decided that if the venue was to be opened again that it should be on a much smaller scale than what Milton Barkley had created.
It was debated and discussed for months as to how to approach this, but in the end, Lynch convinced his backers that perhaps a combination offering might be the best option. From his research, he advised them that a theatre based purely on the dramatic arts, including musical offerings might be too risky based on the old place’s history. The locals, including those old enough to still remember that horrid night when Rosalva had been struck down in her prime, as well as younger residents that had grown up with only the legends of The Regent, seemed hesitant to recommend a return to what was still thought of as “the golden days of The Regent.” Lynch had a deep background and l
ove for the theatre as had been well represented at the old Regent, but he understood trying to recreate that scenario was most likely just asking for failure.
As well, Lynch had lots of baggage that came along with his background and experience. First in London and then in Manchester, his personal vices had kept him from the true success he had imagined as the manager of a major theatre complex when at university. From his early days in the drama department, Lynch, despite his love of the performance arts, had seen his talent on stage was limited. He just could not compete with the wealth of talent possessed by his fellow students and the best he could ever attain in university productions was as a secondary or even tertiary cast member. After getting over this initial realization and healing the wounds to his ego, Lynch mapped out how he could still remain close to the field without having to continually suffer the pain of rejections from auditions.
Knowing he had a wealth of knowledge of how the performances were produced and marketed, Lynch refocused his efforts on a behind-the-scenes role for himself. Though it was not an actual course of study, Lynch threw himself into all the aspects that would be required to operate and manage a professional theatre company one day. In the course of this pursuit, he fell into some less than admirable pursuits, namely too much alcohol and a somewhat disreputable reputation with female members of productions. He was never quite in the category of being accused of assaulting any women, but was a major letch all the same. Word soon spread among the performers of his excessive drinking which often fueled his flirting excesses, and female students that came into his realm quickly learned to be on high alert.
After graduating, Lynch moved on to his first real opportunity to apply his skills at a small but growing theatre in London, but his vices became an obstacle in his rise to the success he had envisioned. With each performance, despite his great skill in making the shows shine and prosper, Lynch’s drinking and association with the female cast members soon became his downfall. Unlike the undergraduate students in his university days, who would just ignore his advances and write it off to his being inebriated, the professional actresses and singers took more active roles toward his behavior. Once Lynch was found out to have accosted the rising star of a prominent member of London’s elite, Lynch was summarily relieved of his position, dashing the dreams of his youth.
To keep his indiscretions as low key and as hidden as possible, the father of the burgeoning starlet had him shuffled off to a second-tier theatre owned by one of his financial partners in Manchester. It was not London, by any stretch of the imagination, but Lynch accepted the opportunity once the London partner explained to him, in vivid detail, what the alternative was if he refused to move along and vacate London immediately and never show his face in the theatre business there again…ever. With his tail metaphorically between his legs, Lynch shuffled off to Manchester recalling in shameful memory how this felt like the time when he had realized he was no great performer. The smaller operation in the north was a fledgling and struggling start-up when Lynch arrived, and for a while, he behaved himself and was instrumental in getting the little theatre up and running.
They were not quite making a profit yet, but with Lynch’s skills and drive it seemed as if it was only time before that came to pass. However, just as the theatre, The Magnolia Yard, looked destined to turn that corner, Lynch succumbed to his old patterns, and like a leopard that cannot change its spots, his drinking and womanizing exploded again. It appeared that Lynch had this unfortunate habit of getting entangled with performers that had prominent or elite family members, and it was London all over again. Although this time, based on his recent history down in London, Lynch was not offered the same opportunity of a gracious and delicate exit. The owner of the theatre was not nearly so accommodating and generous as his partner in London, and Lynch was, for all intents and purposes, run out of town as the offended star’s uncle was out for blood.
With nowhere else to turn, Lynch moved to the shore near Bristol where he heard of a new project. From what he had heard through the grapevine, the theatre was to be a revitalization of a very old, but rundown drama house in Swinson. He had never heard of Swinson, but he was sure the isolation and remoteness of the little village would insulate him from his sordid past. Sure enough, through some little read professional journals, Lynch discovered that some investors were looking for an experienced theatre manager to run the rebuilt theatre. Carefully obscuring the background from his expulsions in London and Manchester, and just highlighting his successes since university, Lynch was immediately hired. When he arrived in Swinson, he was shocked and dismayed at just how backward the little village was relative to what he had grown accustomed to in the big cities. It was definitely a step down, in his opinion, but with his shady history, he figured he was in no position to be too picky.
Once Lynch met with his beneficiaries, and then talked about the proposal to as many people in and around Swinson as he could corral, the consensus was a mixed venue operation: some drama, maybe a few musicals—depending on the talent available—and then fill in the rest of the open dates with films. As Lynch said with his last meeting with the investors:
“This is going to be a challenge for sure, based on what has gone down here in the past. I think over time we can bring people back to the dramatic offerings, but in the meantime, it will most likely be a slow conversion. Films will be the cash cow in the interim. Besides…who doesn’t love going to the movies?”
A budget was drawn up, and the group jumped in with both feet. True to his prediction, people were reluctant to come to the new theatre, The Swinson Review, for the mostly mediocre and pedestrian dramas as the talent they could attract was limited. Lynch was not sure if performers were still gun shy from the days of The Regent and the legend of Rosalva or if the major cities were now sucking up all the truly gifted artists. If he was a talented thespian, he told himself, he sure would not leave the elite offerings in London and elsewhere to come to the Podunk of Swinson and its macabre backstory. However, also as he predicted, the film nights were a rousing success and were keeping them afloat until the plays and musicals could gain some traction and take off.
As for Lynch, with the limited number of dramas being produced, his womanizing issue had become nearly nonexistent, other than a few of the staff that had no choice but to put up with his advances. The job opportunities in Swinson were not plentiful. Lynch still had a taste for the bottle, but he did his best to partake of this vice on his own time. However, as time went by, and Lynch daydreamt over the lost opportunities he had squandered when younger, and hating himself for having ended up where he was, he began to grow depressed. The job was not nearly as challenging as it had been in London and Manchester, his interests when not working were not really an option here in Swinson, and it was taking much longer than he had imagined it would for The Swinson Review to succeed. One day, Lynch awoke realizing he hated Swinson, The Review, his job and just about everything in his life at the moment.
But, even though he had no one to blame but himself, Lynch realized he was stuck in this situation for the foreseeable future. He tried to put a happy face on his station, but soon his dissatisfaction spilled over to his professional life. The investors were putting more and more pressure on him each day, wanting to know why the theatre was languishing in the doldrums. They were getting impatient on the delayed return in their investment and the faith and trust they had placed on Lynch to make this happen more quickly. The pressure was making him more miserable with each passing day, and unfortunately, he passed this stress along to his staff. Overall, the Swinson Review was a sad and desperate place from the top down.
Introducing The Swinson Review Staff
Swinson, UK
May 2017
With all of Lynch’s anxieties and personal problems, it was no wonder the staff he was holding together with what at times seemed like duct tape, and glue was just as discontent as well. Lynch’s primary employee at The Review was Amy Roberts. Amy was a local girl wh
o had been away at both school and then in London trying her hand at serious professional drama and music, but was now back home in Swinson living with her parents. From an early age, Amy had set her mind and focused all her intentions on being an actress. She had been blessed with a high degree of innate talent for the stage, and even as a young child was involved in local theatre productions in and around Swinson that were unheard of for a girl of her youth. Granted, the theatre opportunities in the area were not exactly the bright lights of The Harold Pinter or The Lyceum or The Aldwych, but Amy was getting a good introduction to how the theatre business was run and what it would take to succeed as she grew older.
Her parents and close friends encouraged her as she got deeper and deeper into her pursuits, and by the time she went off to school, Amy was full of confidence and ambition. From her primary school days, she left early and was accepted at The Sylvia Young Theatre School in London. Based on her extensive background in local theatre and the talent that the administrators there saw in her, she began at the tender age of ten. In the history of the school, admissions at this young of an age were not unheard of, but certainly not that common either. Her parents were initially concerned with Amy not getting much of a general education at Sylvia Young, fearing it was just focused entirely on helping students build careers in the performance arts. But their worries were quelled when administrators assured them that the school combined the performance studies with a very high standard of academic studies as well.
In a quiet conversation with just Amy’s parents, the headmistress of Sylvia Young, Paulette Kingman, explained:
Haunted House Tales Page 106
