What Bloody Man Is That

by Simon Brett

  ‘Oh yes, we can,’ Gavin Scholes countered. ‘We’ll do the whole play Saturday morning.’

  Felicia Chatterton’s mouth gaped in pained disbelief. It had never been like this at Stratford.

  By the Thursday afternoon, rehearsals were starting to slip behind schedule again. They were doing the Apparition Scene which, since Gavin was not resorting to any stylisation but doggedly insisted on all the manifestations being seen by the audience, was very complicated.

  Gavin’s little drawings of movements in his interleaved script somehow didn’t match the size of the stage for this scene, and the problems of getting the apparitions on and off unseen required a major rethink of his plans. He kept saying, ‘There’ll be lots of dry ice. And with proper lighting the audience won’t notice a thing’, but the cast weren’t convinced. They’d all, at some time or other in their careers, been caught in some ungainly posture on an ill-conceived entrance or exit, and none of them wanted to get laughs of that kind again.

  So, while the scene was rethought, time passed and they slipped further and further behind schedule.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Gavin said after a while. ‘I can’t concentrate in here. Just give me a quarter of an hour – break for tea – and I’ll go and work it out in the office.’

  The cast all trooped up to the bar, where Norman’s motherly ladies dispensed tea and rock cakes. Charles sat down at a table with John B. Murgatroyd, who suddenly asked, ‘Have you ever played the Walnut Game?’

  ‘I don’t think so. What is it?’

  ‘It’s an old actor’s game. Has to be in a play with a big cast. Shakespeare’s ideal.’

  ‘What happens?’

  ‘It’s a matinée game. Or late into a run. When the director’s not monitoring the performances too closely.’ John B. Murgatroyd winked.

  ‘What do you have to do?’

  ‘Somebody comes on stage with a walnut and secretly . . . you know, in a handshake or something, they pass it to another actor. Then he has to pass it on. The aim is to keep it on stage throughout the show.’

  ‘Just passing it from one to the other?’

  ‘That’s it. You lose if you’re the one who takes it offstage.’

  Charles smiled mischievously. ‘Sounds wicked.’

  ‘Must try it one day.’ John B. Murgatroyd looked innocently out of the window.

  ‘If you’re thinking what I think you’re thinking,’ said Charles, ‘be advised. There are one or two people in this company who wouldn’t see the joke at all.’

  ‘Felicia . . .’

  ‘To name but one.’

  ‘She wouldn’t see a joke if it knocked her over and raped her.’

  ‘No. Sad, isn’t it, really,’ Charles mused, ‘that someone so amazingly dishy should be utterly devoid of humour.’

  ‘Tragic,’ John B. agreed. ‘I wonder what she does for sex . . .?’

  ‘Talks about it, I’m sure. At length. At great, great length.’

  ‘You don’t think young Russ is getting anywhere there?’

  ‘No.’ Charles lengthened the vowel in disbelief.

  But further speculation about Felicia’s sex-life was interrupted by the arrival of Sandra Phipps, with a shy-looking schoolboy in tow.

  ‘Charles, I wonder, do you mind? Could you just keep an eye on Stewart?’

  ‘Sure. No problem.’

  ‘I’ve been with him all afternoon, but I must go and check what’s going on in the Box Office.’

  ‘Fine.’

  ‘You see, I’m meant to be chaperoning him . . .’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘The law says kids have got to have chaperones. Good old Gavin, always ready to save a few bob, says, “Why book anyone else when we’ve got Mum on the premises?” so I’m doing it.’

  ‘Don’t worry. I’ll see he doesn’t get into any mischief. Do you want a drink, Stewart?’

  The boy looked up at him through long lashes. He was still at a downy girlish stage of boyhood, just before his skin would coarsen and his beard start.

  ‘I wouldn’t mind a Coke, please, if that’s all right, sir,’ the boy replied politely.

  ‘Sure. But please don’t call me sir. Charles is fine.’

  Sandra looked at her watch. ‘I won’t be long. How late do you go on?’

  ‘Half-past five . . . six.’

  ‘Stewart was called for two.’

  ‘Running late. The murder of the Macduffs is the next scene, though.’

  ‘Hmm. You think Gavin’ll get to it today?’

  ‘I know he’s hoping to.’ But Charles’s optimistic prediction proved incorrect. They worked on the blocking of the Apparition Scene (which now involved much use of the stage trap-door) for the rest of the afternoon. When they broke, the director shouted out, ‘Okay. Thanks for all your hard work. Macduff murder scene prompt at ten in the morning – okay?’

  ‘Is that okay for you?’ Charles asked the boy sitting beside him in the auditorium. ‘I mean, with school?’

  ‘Oh, I’m sure it’ll be all right.’

  ‘Where are you at school?’

  ‘St. Joseph’s.’

  The name didn’t mean anything to Charles. But then the name of none of the local schools would have meant anything to him. Stupid question to ask, really.

  ‘Hey, that’s great,’ said Stewart. ‘It means I’ll miss Double English.’

  ‘From your tone of voice, that’s pretty boring.’

  ‘And how!’ The boy grimaced. ‘Boring.’

  ‘Why? What are you doing?’

  ‘Macbeth,’ Stewart Phipps replied with a groan.

  Chapter Five

  THEY DID MANAGE to get the whole play blocked by the end of rehearsal on the Friday, but only by dint of going into overtime. Most of them worked through till just after eight, because virtually the entire cast was involved in the battle scenes at the end. (Charles, incidentally, had picked up a couple more parts here – one of the soldiers in Malcolm’s army who grabs a bit of Birnham Wood, and then, with a change of allegiance which might have confused an actor of more Stanislavskian approach, one of Macbeth’s army who runs away as the tide of battle turns.)

  All the cast logged in their overtime with the theatre administration. To Charles this still seemed strange. Though he approved of much of what Equity had done to improve actors’ working conditions, and though he always welcomed a little extra money, this unionised clock-watching seemed dangerously closer to the world of the Civil Service than the theatre. Charles felt wistfully nostalgic for the days of weekly rep. Then you worked ridiculous hours, you moaned and groaned and complained about it all the time, but the feeling of mutual exhaustion kept everyone on a permanent high, pumping adrenaline at a rate he had never since encountered.

  Still, those days were gone. Now there were rules fixing the permissible hours of work, and those rules had to be obeyed.

  Stewart Phipps’ scene was blocked first thing on the Friday morning, as Gavin had intended. It didn’t take long. Stewart spoke the rather prissy lines of Macduff’s Son with commendable animation, and was clearly going to relish the moment of his death, when he was despatched by John B. Murgatroyd (as the First Murderer) with the immortal words,

  ‘What! you egg, Young fry of treachery!’

  But the boy didn’t leave straight after his scene. The theatrical atmosphere patently excited him, and he gazed from the auditorium with sparkling eyes, taking in everything that was going on.

  ‘Shouldn’t you be getting back to school?’ Charles asked just before they broke for lunch, but the boy said, ‘No. They won’t mind. They aren’t to know how long I’m actually needed for rehearsal.’

  Charles shrugged. It wasn’t his business. And Sandra Phipps, whose business in her dual role of mother and chaperon it certainly was, spent most of the day in the Box Office and was either unaware of, or unworried by, her son’s continuing presence.

  So, by the end of the Friday, every move in the play had been gone through at least once.
All was set for the Saturday morning run-through – though the less optimistic definitions of stagger-through, lurch-through, hobble-through, stumble-through or even tumble-through, became increasingly likely to be apt.

  The advantage of doing a full run so prematurely was that at least everyone in the cast got an idea of what they were up against.

  Felicia Chatterton, who had given up remonstrating about the folly of running the play so soon, approached the exercise with her customary seriousness, and was to be found at nine-thirty on the Saturday morning in the middle of the stage, working through a series of yoga postures and breathing exercises. She felt that proper preparation was always essential in acting, even just for a first run.

  Beside her on the stage, shadowing her every movement, and with his face set in an expression of equal reverence, was her faithful dog – or perhaps puppy – Russ Lavery.

  The other actors who trickled into the auditorium may have grinned covertly at what they saw on stage, but at least they restrained themselves from outright sniggering. Though they didn’t all favour such intensity of approach for themselves, they were a tolerant lot. If that’s how Felicia wanted to work, fair enough, it didn’t cause any trouble.

  ‘Oh, Christ love,’ hissed John B. Murgatroyd to Charles in a voice of agonised campness, ‘how can Gavin expect me to give a performance at this kind of notice? My body-clock’s all set wrong for a start. And then, although I did all my Lennox exercises before I left the digs, I just haven’t had time to do my First Murderer workout.’

  ‘You think you’ve got problems, sweetie,’ Charles murmured back in matching style. ‘I tell you, I’ve been up half the night. First, I had to do my Bleeding Sergeant build-up, then my Drunken Porter build-up . . .’

  ‘Must be hell getting yourself into that part.’

  ‘Yes, character acting’s always difficult. Then I had to do my Third Murderer exercises, then the English Doctor, then . . .’

  They both subsided into stifled giggles.

  But once the run started Charles was made aware of the problems that his multiplicity of parts caused. Not acting problems – he could come up with a sufficient variety of accents and postures with no effort at all – but purely logistical problems. The blocking rehearsals had taken the play scene by scene; it was only when the whole thing was linked together that the difficulties of so many entrances and exits became apparent.

  It soon became clear that Charles Paris would spend almost the entire play running at full tilt round the back of the stage.

  As the Bleeding Sergeant, he entered from the auditorium and exited downstage right (had to be downstage – in any scene featuring Duncan, only Wamock Belvedere got upstage exits). Then, in Act One Scene Seven, Charles had to enter upstage left and cross over to exit upstage right. (Yes, the worst had happened – he’d also been lumbered with the part of that bloody Sewer.) As the Drunken Porter, he entered and exited downstage left. As the Old Man who talked to Ross in Act Two Scene Four, he entered and exited upstage right. The Third Murderer, like the Bleeding Sergeant, entered through the auditorium and, after the despatch of Banquo, went off upstage left.

  There was then a brief respite, which encompassed the interval (Gavin Scholes had predictably followed the traditional practice of placing this immediately after the Banquet Scene), until Charles had to give his Apparition of an Armed Head. For this, following Gavin’s rethink, he made his entrance through a trap door under the stage, to emerge in a haze of dry ice through the Witches’ cauldron (assuming that this particular bit of stage magic worked – an assumption which, at that point, only the director was making with any confidence). The Apparition vanished the same way he’d come.

  The Third Murderer was once again enlisted to help massacre the Macduff family, and for this occasion he entered and exited downstage left. The English Doctor, whose four-and-a-half lines were so pertinent in the definition of Kingship, entered and exited upstage right. The Scottish Doctor, brought in as a consultant on the Lady Macbeth sleepwalking case, also entered and exited upstage right.

  From there on, Charles was into acting soldiers on one side or the other in the final conflict, and for these the entrances and exits (sometimes with and sometimes without chunks of Bimham Wood) were respectively downstage left, upstage right, from the auditorium, upstage left, downstage left and upstage left.

  Basically, it seemed to Charles that each performance would qualify as a heavy training session for a decathlete.

  And that was before he started thinking about costume and make-up changes.

  The Pinero Theatre, Warminster, was only about twenty years old, and of an attractive and intelligent design. Its one drawback was its location which, though it commanded beautiful views over towards Salisbury Plain, was too far out of town for economic health. It was not a theatre which shoppers would pass; anyone who wanted to go and see a play had to make a special expedition. This did not help in the crazy game of knife-edge juggling by which most theatres manage their financial affairs. Arts Council and local council grants come and go, lucrative transfers from the provinces to the West End are rare, and the basic survival of a theatre depends on the time-honoured resource, much cited by Gavin Scholes, of ‘putting bums on seats’. In achieving this, the Pinero was always going to be hampered by its position.

  But those who did make the effort to get to the theatre, found a welcoming environment. They entered a large, glass-fronted foyer, which housed Sandra Phipps’ Box Office. Staircases on either side of this took the visitors up to Norman Phipps’ bar, at either end of which were the two main entrances to the auditorium.

  The bar was directly above the dressing room area, which was thus behind and under the auditorium rather than in the traditional backstage position. Passages led along the sides of the theatre to the wings, and there were pass-doors at the corners of the auditorium.

  In the course of that first Saturday morning run-through, Charles Paris got to know this geography rather well.

  It was a somewhat giggly occasion for those of the company prone to giggling (in other words, everyone except Gavin, who was too busy, and Felicia, who didn’t know how to . . . oh, and Russ, whose devotion to Felicia would not allow him to).

  Faced with the enormity of the whole play, George Birkitt’s performance slipped down the few notches it had so laboriously climbed during the previous week. Apart from anything else, he was distracted; his mind was on the next day’s filming in Paris, and he continually glanced at his watch or peered out into the auditorium for the outline of a hire-car chauffeur.

  The interval break was brief, because of the pressure of time, and the company struggled into the Green Room to make themselves coffee from an inadequate number of electric kettles. Charles decided to avoid the crush; he’d wait till lunchtime and have a proper drink then. A good few proper drinks. After all, there’d be no more work till the Monday morning. He looked forward to the weekend. A few days before he had contemplated another attempt to make contact with Frances, but since then he’d discovered that John B. Murgatroyd had a car, and they had agreed to devote the break to an in-depth investigation of the pubs of Wiltshire.

  As Charles came out of his dressing room, trying to remember what the hell character he had to play next, he encountered Norman Phipps and his son staggering along under the weight of a large metal beer keg. They were carrying it from the delivery door to a small storeroom where the bar supplies were kept.

  ‘Can I give you a hand?’

  Norman accepted the offer gratefully. ‘There are three more outside. And a few crates. Why they have to deliver on a Saturday I don’t know.’

  The keg was heavy. Charles took over one end from Stewart and Norman backed into the store-room. ‘Watch out, Charles. There’s a little step down.’

  They collected the other three. After his multi-character exertions in the first half of Macbeth, Charles found he was quite puffed as they wheeled the last keg clattering into position. He leant back against a padlocked c
upboard in the storeroom.

  ‘Thanks very much,’ said Norman. Stewart had run off as soon as he saw his father had alternative assistance. The boy seemed to run everywhere. He was in the state of high stage-struck excitement, and, until the moment for his big scene came, just couldn’t see enough of what was going on backstage. He seemed to have lost his initial shyness and now chattered away cheerfully to anyone and everyone in the company.

  Charles looked around the store-room. There were gas cylinders beside the kegs and from the top of each keg thin translucent tubes ran up to holes in the ceiling.

  ‘That’s how the beer gets pumped up?’

  Norman nodded, as he clamped the fixture at the end of one of the tubes on to a new barrel. There was a little hiss of escaping gas. ‘Yes, for the ones who like their beer fizzy. The Real Ale specialists don’t like the idea of CO2 near their beer. Theirs is done by hand-pumps.’

  ‘Do you get much call for Real Ale?’

  The Bar Manager shrugged. ‘Not as much as there was a few years ago. The campaign seems to have died down a bit.’

  ‘What do you keep in here?’ Charles indicated the padlocked cupboard.

  ‘Spirits. Can’t be too careful. Lots of people come in and out of a theatre.’

  ‘Actors, you mean?’

  The Bar Manager allowed himself a brief smile. ‘Not just actors.’

  At that moment Russ Lavery appeared in the doorway. ‘Oh, I’ve often wondered what was in here.’

  ‘My stock-room,’ said Norman Phipps stolidly.

  ‘Don’t worry, I recognise it,’ said Russ. ‘I’ve been working as a barman the last couple of years to supplement my grant.’ He turned to Charles. ‘They’ve started the Apparition Scene.’

  ‘Oh, I’d better shift. I wonder if they’ve got the trap working this morning . . .’

  Norman Phipps followed him out of the store-room, switching the light off as he came. Then he closed the door, and bent to attach another padlock to the metal rings that fixed it.

  ‘Don’t you use the ordinary lock?’ asked Charles, indicating a keyhole in the door.