The Ballet of Dr Caligari

by Reggie Oliver

  It looked as if Falconer and Vhokes would stay to argue the toss and make themselves still more disagreeable to my master but just then the returning procession, camel, clown, dog, ponies, carts and all arrived at the theatre. I threw back the sliding panels of the outer proscenium and gave the order ‘Door!’ to let them in. The result was that the parade passed in very close to Falconer and his companion. Fatimah the camel, with her habitually vulgar curiosity, poked her nose into the face of the lessee and gave his bald head a fearful lick; whereupon that gentleman and his friend without waiting for further familiarities from Fatimah took a hasty departure.

  But that was by no means the end of it. As you may imagine, the two rival Maria Martens were the talk of Bradford and I may say that our version was unanimously judged the better. It certainly showed itself in the receipts at the box office. There was standing room only on many occasions and we sometimes took as much as £90 for a single performance. Some of the notices in the local press singled out my gallows for especial praise and mention. And indeed the whole hanging of Corder, was deemed a triumph of dramatic verisimilitude. Our other plays did well, and Old Finch pleased the town very much with his mirthful representation of ‘Jemmy Gobbler’ in A Fig for a Farthing, but, by popular demand we were called back to represent Maria Marten.

  It was on the second night of Maria’s revival that the tragedy occurred. Medley had recently had six gas lamps made for the outside of the theatre. They were supported on pillars five feet in height and arranged at regular intervals along the front which had been painted to represent the Great Palace of Glass at the 1851 Exhibition in London. When lit at night these gas lamps made a great show and did much to attract the crowds to the theatre. I had done my best to make these lamps secure, but I had my doubts about their safety, and they were confirmed that night.

  It was a warm evening and the atmosphere within our theatre was steamy but tense. Some of our galleryites had taken a little too much to drink and were inclined to be vocal in their enthusiasm, but there was nothing that couldn’t be managed. Davenant had come to his final scene and had mounted the scaffold to utter his last lines:

  ‘Be warned, ye youths who see my sad despair,

  Avoid lewd women false as they are fair

  By my example learn to shun my fate,

  How wretched is the man who’s wise too late.’

  And as he mounted the scaffold to have his head placed in the noose, I heard a commotion coming from outside. As I was myself enacting the silent but important role of the hangman, I could not go to investigate. I proceeded with the hanging with as much care as my distracted thoughts would allow. Suddenly, there was a crash from the back of the auditorium and I could hear flames crackling. Then the pit began to be engulfed in smoke. Women screamed; men bellowed. There was a general run for the exit doors in which many were trampled underfoot. I was for a few moments paralysed by the shock of it all until I heard the voice of Davenant through gritted teeth: ‘Get me down from this infernal gallows, boy, and be sharp about it!’ Through all this commotion he had been suspended in mid air from a gibbet.

  In a moment I had him unlocked from his harness and free of the noose. Then we were running for the scene dock doors and out of the theatre round to the front to see what was afoot and what could be done.

  The painted front of our theatre was now a sheet of flame. We could see immediately what had happened. Two of the gas lamps had been toppled onto the façade of our wood and canvas construction and had set it ablaze. It could not have been a mere accident, as there was no wind that night.

  Medley, with the assistance of Old Finch the clown, his daughter Louisa and others of the company had managed to turn off the gas jets and were now forming a chain of buckets to the nearby pump. They were greatly impeded by the crowd who surged out now indignant at the rude interruption to their entertainment, rather than terrified.

  Davenant and I with the aid of ropes managed to pull down the façade in order to prevent the spreading of the fire. It only had a partial effect, but it helped. There was a desperate struggle to contain the blaze, and the Parish fire engine arrived too late to have much effect. Much had been saved in the way of costumes and properties, but the structure of the theatre was irreparably damaged, and there was no hope of resuming performances for some while. Very fortunately no lives were lost, except that of Fatimah the camel, and that was a consequence of her own madness and folly. As she was being led to safety, she broke loose from Old Finch who had seen fit to rescue her, having grown unaccountably fond of the beast. The mad animal dragging Finch with her made straight for the flames. Finch let go of her bridle just in time to see her leap into the conflagration only to be felled by a piece of burning wreckage from the gallery. What possessed the creature I cannot say, but she was mourned only by Old Finch, and in some measure by Mr Medley who had lost a singular if unreliable attraction. But the loss of Fatimah was the least of my master’s worries. His whole business was in ruins. Medley in his distress and anger remarked to me the following day that ‘there was dirty work done that night’. He said no more, for fear of being had for slander, but we all guessed at and agreed with his inferences. All we could ascertain from subsequent enquiries was that some drunken ruffians had overturned the gas lamps and fled the scene shortly after.

  Medley gave me what pecuniary assistance he could in the days that followed while I helped to recover the poor remains of his theatre, but I knew he could ill afford what he gave me. Davenant helped out by giving benefit readings in an old parish hall, which included his celebrated rendition of ‘The Dream of Eugene Aram’. Knowing my savings to be exiguous he invited me to share his lodgings at no cost to myself.

  It was on the fifth day after the disastrous fire that an extraordinary interview took place. Davenant and I were having breakfast together in the first floor front parlour when our landlady Mrs Perrott entered and announced that there was ‘a gentleman below wishing to call on Mr Davenant’.

  ‘And the name?’ my friend enquired.

  ‘A Mr Falconer,’ she replied. I was astonished, as much by the name, as by my friend’s reaction. It appeared to me that he had been expecting such a visit.

  ‘Ah, yes. Show him up, Mrs Perrott,’ says he, cool as a cucumber, then as I made to leave the room, he restrained me. ‘Nay, Dobbs, you remain where you are. This concerns you as much as it does me.’

  I looked at my friend, but his expression was as impenetrable as a Chinaman’s. He waved me to a seat facing the door.

  The Edwin Falconer who entered was by a small degree different to the one we had encountered a few week s before in the company of Vhokes. He had the same outward manner of authority and swagger, but I thought that his approach had a touch of hesitancy about it.

  ‘Mr Davenant?’ he said, but his eye was on me.

  ‘This is my good friend Mr Dobbs,’ said Davenant with a wave in my direction. ‘Also late of Mr Medley’s company. Anything you may wish to say to me may be said in his presence. Pray be seated.’

  This appeared to disconcert Falconer, but he sat and explained his mission. In short, he wished Davenant to join his company for a new season of plays. He made no mention of a fact of which we were fully aware, which was that since the fire at Medley’s his business had suffered even more than when he had a rival. There was much sympathy for Medley, and many in the town suspected that the ruffians who knocked down the gas lamps that night had been in Falconer’s pay. The lessee of the Theatre Royal had no doubt calculated that the hiring of a popular performer from Mr Medley’s company might help to dissipate the ill feeling. When Falconer had said his piece there was a silence. I suspected Davenant of wanting to add to the man’s discomfiture by forbearing to speak. Falconer tried to retain his composure, but after a while his right forefinger began to drum nervously on his knee, a habit of his.

  ‘Well, sir,’ said Davenant. ‘I will consider your proposition very carefully and accept under two conditions, the first being that Mr Medl
ey gives my engagement his approval.’

  ‘Of course, of course!’ said Falconer eagerly. Medley’s blessing could only be to his advantage. ‘And the second?’

  ‘That you also employ my good friend Mr Dobbs here. He is the finest stage carpenter of my acquaintance and would be an invaluable addition to your company.’

  Falconer seemed put out by my friend’s stipulations; his countenance darkened.

  ‘Those are my conditions, Mr Falconer,’ said Davenant after a pause. ‘You may take or leave them.’ There was further hesitation; more drumming on the knee.

  ‘Very well, gentlemen,’ said Falconer rising stiffly. ‘I shall expect you both at my theatre tomorrow promptly at nine o’clock in the forenoon.’

  ***

  Old Medley was at first dismayed by Mr Davenant’s suggestion that we should ‘enlist with the enemy’, as he put it, but he heard my friend out. Davenant pointed out that we should thereby release him from any financial obligations towards us and, moreover, if there was truth in the suspicion that Mr Falconer had been in some way responsible for the fire, Davenant and myself might be able to discover evidence for it by, as he put it, ‘entering the enemy’s lair’. The phrase was calculated to appeal to Medley, whose appetite for drama and intrigue was not confined to stage performances alone. Thereupon he readily gave us his blessing.

  It may seem strange to you, but until that morning I had never been inside a bricks and mortar theatre. All my young life had been spent in portables and circuses. My father had been a slack rope dancer in Sanger’s circus and my mother an equestrienne. I had passed my infancy and youth in tents and caravans, and the opportunity to enter a theatre building had never arisen. When I told Davenant of this, he instructed me to take note of my sensations for, he said, first impressions are always the most vivid and usually the most truthful.

  The Theatre Royal was a fine edifice, built some fifty years previous to my entry to it in the classic style with a porticoed colonnade at the front. Davenant and I entered from the back by the stage door and my first shock was that the stage door keeper, or hallkeeper as he is often called, was the same Vhokes who had visited our theatre with Falconer. He barely acknowledged our presence, merely indicating the way we should go in order to reach the stage.

  In spite of the mild weather outside, within the place was chilly and damp. I felt enclosed, almost imprisoned. We walked down a windowless corridor lit by gas. The whole building was pervaded by the faint odour of gas and orange peel, mingled backstage with tinctures of sweat, facepaint and powder, and the size used for priming canvas flats. It is a distinctive theatrical smell that you come to love, or perhaps hate, passionately, not for itself but its associations.

  To one side of the corridor were the doors to the dressing rooms, on the other there was only one with STAGE painted upon it in bold white lettering. We passed through it to enter a vast space lit only by a few gas footlights. These cast light on the stage and its occupants from below so that they looked like ghosts, half lit, half cloaked by the deep shadows cast upwards from these sepulchral illuminations. The curtain was up and the vast cavern of the auditorium was only dimly visible. As we came upon the scene the alien beings, members of Falconer’s company, who were standing in little groups about the stage cast their eyes towards us.

  I was conscious of wariness and suspicion in every glance, of a kind I had never encountered during my time with Medley, but this, I told myself, was only to be expected. I was now in a strange land. I had stepped out of the vagabond world of portable theatre into a temple of dramatic art. Though it was Davenant’s familiar environment, I noticed that he seemed almost as uneasy as I was.

  A man and a woman were standing slightly apart from the main groups. She was dark haired and in the full bloom of her womanly beauty; the other was a tall man, handsome and foppishly dressed with a florid complexion and red gold locks. For all his good looks, there was a dissipated air about him. Though the two were standing some feet apart I sensed a connection between them. Presently, the man detached himself from her and came over to Davenant smiling.

  ‘My dear Davenant,’ he said. ‘Good to have you with us. We were last together in Coventry, were we not? You were Claudius to my Hamlet, if I remember aright.’

  ‘You remember correctly, Mr Hawtrey,’ said Davenant shaking his hand heartily. At this I detected a slight slackening of the unease in the rest of the company, but though Davenant’s greeting of Hawtrey had been very gentlemanly, there was no great warmth in it.

  At this moment Mr Falconer, the lessee and manager of the Theatre Royal made his entrance from the back of the stalls, and climbed onto the stage by the steps at the side of the orchestra pit. He was accompanied by a small wizened man who was carrying a bundle of manuscript papers.

  The company at once made way for Falconer, and the Stage Manager and Prompter, Mr Ketterridge went to fetch a chair from the side of the stage for him to sit upon. Once Falconer had sat and we were standing in a rough semicircle facing both him and the auditorium, he began. I noted the complete command which Mr Falconer had assumed and clearly enjoyed. There seemed to be a certain arrogant disregard for all but his own concerns, but he was clearly in a buoyant frame of mind.

  ‘Good morning, ladies and gentlemen,’ he said. ‘Allow me first of all to introduce to you Mr Goole, with whom some of you are familiar.’ The little wizened man with the papers stepped forward. From a distance I had thought him an old man, his outline was so stooped and shrivelled; but now, closer to, I could see that he was barely out of his twenties. ‘He plays our character parts, and our ancients, but he is also an Oxford man and a writer, and he has composed for me a new piece to initiate the coming season which I believe will be a great novelty, namely Ruthven, or the Vampyre of the Isles.’ There was a general murmur of interest. ‘Mr Goole, if you would be so good as to distribute the parts among the ladies and gentlemen? Those of you with smaller roles may need to take notes, for Mr Goole has not had time to copy all your parts.’

  Mr Goole, who looked thoroughly exhausted, began to distribute manuscripts among the actors. The chief members of the company received ‘cue scripts’, that is, scripts with only their cues and parts written on them. It was evident to me that Mr Goole had been up all night copying them out. ‘I will not ask Mr Goole to read his script to you.’ At this Goole looked thoroughly relieved. ‘I will direct proceedings.’

  I will not describe to you the details of Goole’s play, except to say it was very like many plays I had seen and exactly like none of them, not even Mr Planché’s melodrama of The Vampyre to which it owed many of its characters, incidents, and, it has to be said, dialogue. One circumstance of importance involving the plot I must convey to you. After the first halting run of the play under Mr Falconer’s supervision he approached me and asked if I could make him a ‘vampire trap’. Now, as it happens, I knew how such a thing worked, for I had made one only the previous winter for the Demon King in Medley’s production of The Bottle Imp or the Fiend and the Sorcerer.

  It involved making two spring leaves that part under pressure and immediately reclose. Placed in a wall or a floor it can, with the aid of a little smoke and flash powder, make it look as if an actor has passed through solid matter. Falconer wanted one placed in a portrait on the wall of a ‘gallery at Castle Ruthven’. Through it the ghost of the Marquess of Marsden, murdered by his vampire brother, would glide to warn Margaret, the heroine of the piece, that she is about to marry a usurper.

  I was not often at rehearsals as I spent most of my time in the scene dock working with Mr Mowbray the scene painter. He remarked to me that he had received elaborate instructions from Falconer himself about the decorations to be used, the cloths to be painted. Several times Falconer came down to inspect our work. I have rarely known a theatre manager take such a lively interest in the scenic aspects of the production.

  Occasionally I would be summoned to the stage, to go through my small roles as a demon who haunts the storm-bat
tered caves of Staffa in the first act and as a fisherman who performs a rustic dance in the second. Mr Falconer left the scene setting and placing of the actors mostly to the prompter, though he would intervene on occasion. I noticed him several times watching the proceedings from a box, half concealed from view by a curtain. Often it was only the sight of his hand resting on the red velvet-upholstered front of the box that alerted me to his presence.

  During this period I also began to understand the relationships and hierarchies within the company. Though Mr Falconer, whom we were invited to address as Guv’nor, was the titular head, it seemed to me that Maria Falconer, our leading lady, was an almost equally dominant figure. While both Mr Hawtrey and my friend Davenant might be greater ‘stars’ to the outside world, it was Maria Falconer who was ‘Bradford’s favourite’ and drew the crowds.

  She was a fine figure of a woman, even if she was beginning to be inclined to matronly embonpoint. Her big lustrous eyes and her low mellow voice served her well. She was a good actress, though, as my friend Davenant, who was always one for a precise definition, remarked: ‘more of a stage presence than an impersonating actress’. She seemed a good foil for Hawtrey, her leading man, who in contrast to her powerful, magnetic but essentially static manner was dashing and mercurial. There existed between them something that both were at pains to conceal, but which, as is often the case with stage people, was not hard to detect.

  Mowbray, our scene painter, was a lugubrious man, much inclined to drink, but he painted as fast as I could build flats and scenery for him. He found the Gothick style sympathetic and we worked hard on our ruined chapels by moonlight, our wood and canvas grave stones, our sepulchral monuments and gloomy baronial halls. But it was the painting of the vampire trap itself which caused most difficulty and excited the critical attention of Mr Falconer.

  In this play, set mainly on the rugged coast of Skye in the Hebrides, the Earl of Marsden has been murdered by his brother Lord Ruthven, a vampire (or ‘vampyre’ as Mr Goole, following Polidori, would have it) and played by my friend Davenant. Ruthven assumes the earldom, having, as he believes, also contrived the death of the Earl’s son Lord Ronald (played by Hawtrey) by drowning in a shipwreck off Staffa. Meanwhile, Margaret, daughter of Sir Murdoch Berkeley ‘of the Isles’ (as he is termed for no good reason other than romance) has been pledged to marry the heir to the Earl of Marsden. No-one knows that the true heir, young Lord Ronald, has been washed up on the beach and, having lost his memory, is living the life of a simple fisherman on the coast not far away. I apologise for reciting the plot of this work which Davenant described to me once as ‘an ancient piece of sheer whangdoodle’, but it is important you should be acquainted with its rudiments. My friend Davenant also added that the writer Mr Goole was well named, for he had fed upon the literary corpses of Shakespeare, Byron and Polidori (not to mention the still living Mr Planché) for its dialogue and incident.