by Lucy Parker
How bad do you want this? Ash had asked before she’d left the studio.
Savage turned on the camera. “Ready?”
Bad. She wanted it bad.
He kicked off the scene, reading in a flat monotone. He was purposely emotionless, giving her absolutely nothing to work with and bounce off. She was forced to rely completely on her own interpretation. She glanced up at him every few seconds, but it was like trying to get a smile out of Picasso’s Portrait of Gertrude Stein. A stony mask.
Her voice cracked halfway through, but she continued without a stumble. When she closed Elizabeth’s impassioned monologue, there was a long silence. She stared down at the paper.
“Again,” Savage said, and she flipped back to page one.
They read the scene four times before he closed his copy and set it back on the desk. He went straight to the crux of the problem, and didn’t bother to sandwich the criticism between token compliments. “Your voice is a real issue. We have a very good speech therapist on contract. She could work with you on a vocal hygiene programme, but realistically, you need to be hitting a much higher level on your delivery and you would need to get there quickly. Rehearsals begin in less than two weeks. Part of it is laziness.”
She was so caught on his first statements, the tummy-jump of hope followed by the let-down, that it took her a second to react to that last remark. “Laziness?” she repeated. It fucking was not. She turned up on time. She learned her lines. She put in the groundwork. She was lazy on Sundays, when she got up, walked to the café around the corner from her flat to collect her pancake order, and then returned to pyjamas and bed. She wasn’t lazy when it came to her work ethic.
“You’re babying your voice. Literally,” he said drily. “Helium Barbie has to go.”
A long time ago, Lily had owned a Ken Doll. She’d once discovered that putting her thumbs on his neck and applying the exact right amount of pressure beneath his plastic ears caused his head to pop off. It probably wouldn’t work with Savage.
He leaned against the edge of his desk, arms folded, as he continued his impersonal assessment. “It’s frustrating as fuck to listen to. If I played the recording back on mute and we focused entirely on your physical performance, totally different story. You’re defaulting to the easiest level on your vocal delivery, and the way you’re breathing and swallowing is never going to give you the long-haul projection to make it through one performance, let alone six a week. I don’t usually advise an actor to come in and lower the tone, but in this instance…”
“That was a lower tone,” she said glumly. She was well aware that voiceover and narration gigs were never going on her resumé. The female Benedict Cumberbatch, she was not.
“God help us all.” Turning off the camera, he glanced down at her abandoned boots. “I’d like to see you on the stage.” For another heart-stopping moment, she thought that was a job offer, but he continued, “We’ll move through to the amphitheatre. Shoes optional.”
Savage Productions had a no-frills theatre that was used for teen outreach programmes. Lily had been to their charity production of Romeo and Juliet last year. Fun acting. Great cause. Not her favourite play. Self-indulgent teenage stupidity at its finest. Most likely, if they’d survived their mistakes, middle-aged Romeo and Juliet would have looked back on the whole debacle and wondered what they’d made such a fuss about. It was one of the great literary examples of unhealthy co-dependency.
It might be a bit hypocritical to label Savage an unromantic.
The boots went back on. She wasn’t walking around his building in her mismatched socks.
As they walked through the corridors, they passed members of staff who glanced up and greeted their boss with friendly smiles. Despite the tabloid mud-flinging, he’d obviously earned a lot of professional respect.
She personally had nothing but respect for him on a professional plane. As a director, he was one of the greats.
However, he’d rated her longest-running performance as being on par with a blow-up doll and just called her Helium Barbie to her face. As a human being, he was a total dickhead.
A youngish, cocky-looking guy in a sharp suit came out of the lift, stopped in his tracks, and actually wolf-whistled at her in his workplace.
He then caught sight of Savage, and Lily witnessed the interesting phenomenon of every ounce of colour leaching out of a man’s face in about three-quarters of a second.
“Mitchell.” She’d thought Savage’s tone was cold when he spoke to her. This was arctic by comparison. “Since you obviously have time on your hands, you can demonstrate cold-calling for the student interns. General office, second floor. And I’ll see you in my office at five o’clock.”
She almost felt sorry for Mitchell, whose spiritual home was clearly a roadside construction site. He looked so mortified and shrivelled as he stammered an apology.
“You need to direct that apology about two feet to the left,” Savage cut in. “I’m not the one you just publicly embarrassed and disrespected. This is Lily Lamprey. You seem to be under the impression that she’s an inanimate object brought into the building for your amusement.”
Wow. If she hadn’t been privy to the load of sexist crap that had come out of his own mouth, she’d be quite impressed by that. It wasn’t that much better to say something just because the breathy Marilyn Monroe impersonator in question couldn’t hear it.
“Sorry,” Mitchell managed, throwing the word in her direction. The colour returned to his cheeks with a vengeance as he scuttled off. Until the past minute of his life, he’d probably thought pretty well of himself.
Savage held open the door to the amphitheatre for her. “I’m sorry. That was totally unacceptable.”
She hesitated and then lifted one shoulder in an awkward, hunched shrug. “It’s like you said,” she said carefully. “In this business, people can forget you’re a real person. Or they think you’re public property. They think they know who you are.” She looked back at him. “Based on a fictional character or their own assumptions.”
And by “their” assumptions, possible boss, sir, let’s all read “your.”
Savage was still striving desperately for a facial expression, but she thought she saw a wry flicker in his eyes.
“Bring that fuck-you attitude to your performance and we’re another step up the ladder” was all he said in return, mildly.
It was like no audition she’d ever been to, and she’d racked up quite a list. She stood on the wooden stage, reading lines with as much depth and volume as she could manage, to empty seats and one lounging man in the farthest row.
“As loud as you can without losing expression or falling off the cliff and shouting,” he interrupted, and annoyingly she could hear his resonant tones perfectly, despite the fact that he was visually a dark blur.
Anyone with a speaking part would have a concealed microphone pack to help with projection in the towering, multi-level Queen Anne, but she got it. Her voice had to be strong.
“Lower, slower, and breathe where you would naturally pause.”
She started again—
“I can’t hear you.”
And again—
“Not that slow. You’re not being paid by the minute.”
And again—
“You’re regal. Stately. You rule this room. You have no fucks to give. And, underneath it all, you’re frightened.”
And—
“Frightened, not full-on panic attack! If you need some sort of inhaler, raise your left hand. Otherwise, breathe between sentences, not through words!”
Let’s face it, she wasn’t getting this role.
When she’d finished butchering Starkey’s brainchild, and Savage had probably pulled out most of his hair, he lifted a hand—universal director-speak for “put a sock in it.” He stood and came back up the aisle, his footsteps a dull echo on the paisley carpet. She sat down on the edge of the stage, leaving her feet and life goals dangling.
He took a seat in the f
ront row, opposite her, leaning forward to rest his forearms on his thighs. A lock of black hair touched with grey fell across his brow.
If he asked her how she thought she’d done, the way therapists pulled the intensely irritating “why do you think that is?”, her mood was officially going to plummet through the floor.
His question, when it came, surprised her. “How do you feel?”
Tired, depressed and fully capable of cleansing your fridge of cake.
“Frustrated,” she said honestly. “I feel like I’ve got the instructions, I know what I’m doing, I like what I’m doing, but I’m just—not there.”
He rotated his thumbs, ropey tendons moving under the skin of his hands. His eyes were shrewd. “You have…a certain look. Have you struggled to get roles in the past because of your appearance and your voice?”
“Yes,” she said after a moment, uncomfortably. He must know that she had; he’d been extremely reluctant himself to even meet her in person.
“Your physical appearance is irrelevant in this case,” he said bluntly. “There’s a distance in live theatre that you don’t have in TV and film, and skilled makeup artists can produce an illusion of good looks and youth in any face, regardless of the base material they have to work with. Being beautiful is not going to help you here.”
He’d called her beautiful. Not vapid, not vacuous, not even pretty. Beautiful. In a calm, disinterested way, like it was just a fact. The sky is blue, the grass is green, you’re beautiful. She suddenly flushed.
She twisted her fingers together as he went on, “It’s also not a detriment, which I can see might be the case in some instances.” He frowned. “The vocals, though—”
“Are a problem.”
“Are a disaster,” he corrected, and she winced. “You managed to halve Elizabeth’s IQ in one paragraph.” It had been a short-lived warm glow. Nice while it lasted. “And you’re starting to annoy me now.” Well, pot, meet fucking kettle. “There’s only so much you can achieve without professional intervention, but you’re still not pulling your weight. Your performance is falling well short of your capability.”
She blew out an exasperated breath—probably in the wrong place to optimise her feelings in this scene—but was saved a repetition of “But—but—but…” when his phone rang.
He pulled it from his pocket, glanced at the screen, and turned all thunderous. “Sorry,” he said, scowling. Wow, visibly pissed off. It must be bad. Seemed like someone would have to burn down his house or kidnap his grandma or something to provoke that sort of reaction. “I’ll have to take this. Two minutes.”
Maybe an irate employee was suing him.
“How the hell can they be the wrong design? We approved the sample. So now we’re short six hundred tiles?”
A renovation fail. That was barely worth the eavesdropping.
She jumped when her own phone vibrated in her pocket. At least she’d remembered to put it on silent. Savage’s call didn’t look like it was ending anytime soon, so she snuck a peek at the screen. It was Trix. Her best friend was due back from a gala performance in Paris, and Lily had forgotten to tell her she would be locked down in an audition. She probably ought to send it to voicemail, but Savage was heading for the back of the theatre with long, hacked-off strides and her alternative was to sit here in uncomfortable silence.
She swiped to answer. “Hey, are you at the airport?”
“I’m in the flat. Got an earlier flight. Thanks for taking me back in, by the way,” Trix added cheerfully. “The landlord at my new place says I should be able to move in after New Year’s Day.”
“Happy to have you.”
“Are you at the studio now?”
“No, I’m at my audition with Luc Savage. For 1553.”
There was a brief, startled pause. “Shit. Did I interrupt? Sorry! What the hell are you talking to me for?”
Lily glanced over to make sure Savage was still occupied. “It’s all right. We’re on an unofficial break at the moment. I think he’s talking to his contractor.”
“Right, well, how’s it going?”
“The word disaster has been thrown around.”
“Don’t do your perfectionist thing, where you obsess over everything you did wrong and ignore everything you rocked.”
“I’m trying not to. It’s hard.” Steadying herself with her free hand, she jumped down to the floor. She needed to pace. “I don’t know. I think my voice issues are going to be a deal-breaker.”
“Did he say that?”
“He said it was a huge problem. Apparently he’s got a top speech therapist on speed-dial, but he’s doubtful it would be enough, with the limited timeframe before the play opens.”
“I told you that woman you’ve been going to in Hammersmith isn’t good enough. You should ask him for the person’s number regardless, if this is going to be an ongoing issue. And don’t write yourself off. If Savage wasn’t interested, he would have ushered you out of the building in five minutes flat. He wouldn’t be talking about voice specialists.”
Ash had said something similar, and now that she’d met Savage, she had to agree. He didn’t beat politely around the bush. He also didn’t hold back with the criticism, so she had no idea which way the judgment call was going to swing.
“And no matter what happens, you got a personal audition with Luc Savage. Give yourself some credit. He gets top billing for a reason.”
“Tell that to the tabloids. I see there’s another article painting him as the villain who drove off Margo Roy and bullied multiple employees into submission,” Lily muttered, purely out of frustration. She wasn’t Savage’s biggest fan, but she knew a smear campaign when she saw it. London Celebrity had had a controversial change of editor recently, after the previous incumbent had slept with the married Minister of Education and ironically been exposed by his own newspaper. Their already low standard of reporting had now dropped to below sewer level.
“Yeah. Conveniently full of vague, anonymous sources. Did Savage hit a staffer at London Celebrity with his car or something? Someone over there really hates him. Bet it’s pissing him off, too. His reputation’s been solid until recently. So totally work-focused that he never got any press, unless it was tagged on to something about Margo.” Curiously, Trix asked, “How are you finding him?”
Contradictory.
“‘You’ll have to speak up,’” Lily said quietly, in her best bossy man-tones. “‘I can’t hear you over the sound of the half-arsing. Are you a woman or are you one of Cinderella’s mice? Was that a laugh or an asthma attack? Louder. Lower. Less. More. You’re shouting!’”
Trix snorted. “I hope he’s not right behind you.”
Lily turned around as she spoke. “No, he’s—”
Literally right behind her.
“Um,” she said into the phone, meeting Savage’s even gaze. She was pretty sure her heart was now lodged somewhere around her tonsils. That black eyebrow rose again, sardonically. “I’ll call you back later.”
Trix was desperately trying not to laugh. “Oh my God, he’s right there, isn’t he? Sorry, but you might be right after all. It’s definitely going to be the vocals that swing it.”
Savage leaned back against the stage and crossed one ankle over the other, exuding infinite patience.
Lily gritted her teeth. “I’ll see you at home.”
“I’ll have pizza and vodka waiting at the door.”
Ending the call, she slipped her phone back into her pocket. Plan A was to immediately dissolve into the carpet. When she remained corporeal and the silence stretched, she was at a loss.
“There’s really no way to recover, is there?”
“Perfect illustration of my point,” he said unexpectedly.
She didn’t know what that meant, but suspected it was leading into another of his personal insults—and okay, fair cop on this one. She’d been pretty opinionated about his unprofessionalism behind her back.
“As you’ve now ably demonstrated,” S
avage went on, with forgivable irony, “you are capable of lowering the register of your voice when you want to. Ergo: lazy.”
And ergo: unemployed, shortly.
*
After imitating him with deadly accuracy and zero spatial awareness, Lily was now impersonating a beetroot. However, when she was pissed off and whinging to her friends, her voice transformed. She could do depth, when she could be arsed, and with strength, not pseudo-sexiness. She had smashed most of his preconceptions in the first five minutes, and wasn’t tapping into half of her potential. She was becoming a dangerously appealing prospect. He’d always enjoyed surprising an audience and seeing an actor develop beyond their self-imposed boundaries.
Although he strongly suspected that she would be an even bigger pain in the arse than Bridget, in very different ways.
She kept rubbing her nose, which he’d noticed was her go-to fidget when she felt unsure of herself. He looked at his watch and took pity on both of them. He had enough footage to review with David. “I think I’ve seen enough.”
“Yeah, I can imagine,” she said with a grimace, and pulled on the end of her nose. She could add confidence issues to her mental worksheet. The best actors he oversaw had a strong core of arrogance, ideally balanced out with a sense of humour so they weren’t a complete and utter shit to work with. The ones who needed constant validation eventually broke under the pressure. A West End run was brutal, competitive and exhausting.
“Someone will be in touch in the next twenty-four hours. We’re doing a full cast and crew meet-and-greet this weekend, so we aren’t mucking around with this.”
“Okay.” She picked up her bag and reached out her hand. “Thanks.”
Automatically, he closed his fingers around hers again. Her skin was calloused. She’d listed guitar on her resumé, so it was possible that wasn’t a lie. Like her circus acrobatics. He almost grinned.
She started to turn away, and then paused and turned. Reaching into her bag, she pulled out a small notepad and pen and scribbled something down.
