Murder in the Title

by Simon Brett

  The turn-out for the first Undress Rehearsal of Shove It seemed unusually high. Perhaps, Charles reflected, there were no more members of the stage crew there than there would be for any other Dress Rehearsal in an outside rehearsal room, but he did wonder about the motives of some of those present. Certainly he couldn’t think of any reason why Leslie Blatt should be there other than prurient interest.

  There was about the proceedings an air of unnatural casualness. People joked too loudly to show how relaxed they were. Actors and actresses studied their crosswords and knitting with much greater concentration than they could usually muster. The ones who weren’t going to have to take their clothes off seemed guilty and quite as unrelaxed as the rest of the company. (There were actually very few who didn’t have to strip. Royston Everett’s dramatic method seemed to involve every member of the dramatis personae baring their all at some point. Time Out had hailed this as an important symbolic representation of the truism that men are born equal and free but are everywhere in the chains of class, convention and fascism’.)

  Charles felt quite as nervous as anyone else. He reckoned it must be worse for the men than the women. Female modesty was a traditionally powerful force, but, on the other hand, they didn’t have the one great worry that dominated his mind (and, he wouldn’t mind betting, the minds of most of the other male actors in the company).

  That worry was extremely basic, and it dated back a long time. It was a worry that had been present in changing-rooms at school, at Army medicals, and when wearing swimming trunks.

  It was of course, What happens if I get an erection?

  Though it was some years since Charles had worried about getting an erection at an inappropriate time (indeed, a more recent worry had been not getting one at an appropriate time), the anxiety had not diminished in intensity. The sense of shame involved was very primitive. (Presumably Adam’s original recourse to the fig-leaf was born of some similar instinct.)

  Charles tried to take his mind off psychosomatic stirrings in his underpants by concentrating on Tony Wensleigh. The revelations of the previous day made him see the Artistic Director in a completely different light, and his new disillusioned vision explained many inconsistencies of behaviour.

  It explained, first and foremost, Tony’s air of manic anxiety. The director was surely the veteran of too many productions to be that worried about the show (it wasn’t as if he had to take his clothes off, after all). Even a play as disastrously chosen as Shove It was the sort of thing an experienced director of three-weekly rep ought to be able to take in his stride.

  But, if one interpreted his anxiety as that of a man facing total exposure of many years of mishandling theatre funds, of a man prepared to kill to keep his secret quiet, everything became clearer.

  The same applied to his general air of abstraction and lack of concentration on the job in hand. There was only one important date on Tony Wensleigh’s horizon and that was the moment the following evening when he had to face the Theatre Board and try to prevent his own fall by shooting down his General Manager.

  Tony Wensleigh was a desperate man, prepared to do anything to save his position in the Regent Theatre.

  In spite of the strained atmosphere of this-is-all-perfectly-normal-nothing-unusual, some concessions had been made to the modesty of the performers. Two sets of screens had been set up either side of the acting area ‘to represent the exits and entrances to the wings’ (though tape markings on the floor had been thought sufficient at all previous rehearsals). The effect of this was to give a measure of surprise to each new entrance (as well as a measure of privacy to the shyer members of the cast).

  Behind the screens Charles Paris, who had the advantage of making his first entrance with clothes on, chatted with heavy unconcern to a young actor, who had thrown off all his garments immediately on arrival in the rehearsal room.

  ‘You done, er, this sort of thing before?’

  ‘Oh yes, did a year in O, Calcutta.’

  ‘Oh.’ The new generation of actors had a totally different training from his own, Charles reflected.

  ‘And of course a good few movies.’

  ‘Ah. Yes. Of course.’ The young man seemed amiable enough. Charles decided he dared to confide his great anxiety. ‘Tell me, when you are doing that sort of work . . .’

  ‘The movies, you mean?’

  ‘Yes . . . do you ever have any trouble with . . . erections?’

  ‘All the time, mate, all the time.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Oh yes. I’ve tried everything, nothing has any effect.’

  ‘Oh dear.’

  ‘Total disaster. Whatever I do, I can’t keep it up.’

  Ah, thought Charles, that sort of movie.

  The opening scene of Shove It had been highly praised by the London critics. One of them, more pretentious and deluded than the rest, had found in it ‘parodic echoes of Restoration drama, producing by linguistic inversion a comment on the conventions of theatrical artifice.’ What he actually meant was that the scene had been lifted from The Way of the World and the language dirtied up in the approved Royston Everett manner.

  The broken-down old whore and brothel-keeper, Sylv, like Congreve’s Lady Wishfort, is, in the eighteenth-century phrase, ‘at her toilet’. The maid, Foible, is represented in the modern version by the retarded teenage prostitute, Tracey. But, whereas the audience only sees selected sections of Lady Wishfort’s preparations to face the world, Sylv enters stark naked and goes through the whole process of dressing and painting.

  Her first line is the repetition, five times, of a well-known four-letter word, which one Liverpool critic, intoxicated by the righteousness of the play’s social comment, actually had the nerve to compare to King Lear’s ‘Never, never, never, never, never’.

  In the Rugland Spa production of Shove It, the part of Sylv was being played by Kathy Kitson.

  There was more than the usual anticipation at an outside Dress Rehearsal as the A.S.M.s called for quiet and the Act One beginners crowded behind the screens. Tony Wensleigh, his large eyes glistening with anxiety, announced, ‘Okay, let’s take it from the top. As straight through as we can make it. We’ll only stop if there’s some really major disaster.’

  There was a silence. The acting space between the screens was empty.

  Then Kathy Kitson entered.

  She was dressed in a beige, silk ruffled negligée.

  ‘Oh dear,’ she said, in her usual beautifully modulated but totally characterless voice. ‘Oh dear. Oh dear. Oh dear. Oh dear.’

  ‘Sorry. I’ve got to stop you there.’

  Kathy Kitson turned innocently to the Artistic Director ‘You said you’d only stop for major disasters.’

  ‘Kathy, this is a major disaster. Look, you know you’re meant to be making this entrance completely naked . . .’

  ‘Yes.’ She nodded confidently, as if she had given a complete answer to his question.

  ‘Well, Kathy, I mean I hesitate to state the obvious, but I think it must be clear to everyone here that you are not naked.’

  ‘Oh, is that it?’ She spoke chidingly, as if he had picked her up on some minuscule detail of performance.

  ‘Yes, that is it. Look, I’m sorry, Kathy, but we’re beyond the moment for coyness. When you read the script and agreed to play the part, it was made quite clear to you that you would have to take your clothes off. I remember, we had long discussions with your agent about that very matter and got his full assurance of your agreement.’

  Kathy Kitson stretched her neck loftily. ‘Tony dear, when you book an experienced actress, you don’t only book the actress, you also book the experience and the judgement that that experience brings. And my judgement is that this scene is more effective with me acting naked than actually being naked.’

  ‘Acting naked?’ the director repeated weakly.

  ‘Yes, darling. I knew you’d agree.’ Kathy Kitson moved back towards the screens with an air of triumph. ‘Would you like
me to make the entrance again?’ she asked with sweet humility.

  ‘Kathy . . .’ Tony Wensleigh spoke with great weariness. ‘That’s not all.’

  ‘Something else, love?’

  ‘The line you spoke was not the line that Royston Everett wrote.’

  The actress conceded that this was indeed the case. ‘But my line does get over the same feeling as his. And so much more tastefully, don’t you think?’

  The rehearsal did proceed, after a fashion, though Kathy Kitson resolutely continued to wear her negligée. At the moment she was meant to put on her dress, she removed the garment to reveal a delightful silken petticoat.

  She also resolutely continued to expurgate Royston Everett’s lines.

  And Tony Wensleigh, sunk in an apathetic gloom whose cause Charles felt confident he now knew, made no further attempt to stop her.

  The rest of the cast who had to strip did so without demur. As garment after garment slipped off, revealing no greater excitement than the odd appendix scar and some surprising evidence of dyed hair, both female and male, Charles felt his main anxiety recede. Human flesh is not aphrodisiac under all circumstances, and in the goose-pimply chill of the Drill Hall, Rugland Spa, it had the opposite effect. Charles found his mind dwelling on butchers’ shops rather than sex, and when his own turn came to reveal all, he hardly thought about what he was doing.

  The only person who did seem to find the flesh on display exciting was the one person who shouldn’t have been there, Leslie Blatt. Given the evidence he had already shown of a Peeping Tom mentality, it was no great surprise, but Charles did find it mildly revolting. The playwright was of a generation to whom permissiveness, if it came at all, had come late, and his reactions were those of a twelve-year-old sniggering over a dirty picture.

  Charles felt glad for Nella Lewis’s sake that she wasn’t in Shove It, because she was so obviously the centre of the old man’s smutty desires. Laurie Tichbourne wasn’t in the play either, so he was not around to protect her from unwanted attentions. On the other hand, Charles reflected, he couldn’t actually see Laurie doing anything so positive, even if he had been there.

  Nella was prompting, because at this stage of rehearsal the lines were still a little shaky, arid, since no one could ever quite predict what cue they were going to get from Kathy Kitson, there were frequent breakdowns in the dialogue. The A.S.M. sat demurely on a chair behind one of the screens, her eyes fixed on the page, perhaps just in punctilious discharge of her duties or maybe out of modesty in the face of all that naked flesh.

  Leslie Blatt hung around behind the same screen, alternately ogling other female members of the cast and passing comments to Nella. As Charles made his naked exit after the police raid on the brothel, he heard the old man breathe in the A.S.M.’s ear, ‘Pretty strong meat, this. Couldn’t have written this sort of stuff in my day. Didn’t know what I was missing, eh?’ He sniggered adolescently. ‘Still, healthier times now. Healthier attitudes people’ve got. Very healthy, very nice to see all these naked bodies around, eh?’ Then he leant forward, pressing himself very close against the back of Nella’s chair. ‘Though, of course, there are some one would rather see than others.’

  The girl’s eyes did not leave the page, nor did any part of her body move except for her right arm. But that moved decisively, and the sharp point of its elbow was unerringly accurate.

  ‘Mmmf’ squeaked Leslie Blatt.

  And ‘Good girl,’ thought Charles Paris, as the old man moved away from the chair, doubled up with pain.

  The police raid ended Act One of Shove It. It was a kind of climax and, given Royston Everett’s dramatic method, this meant that more people had their clothes off at that point than at any other in the course of the play (except for the end of Act Two). The last words before the interval were spoken by Sylv and were an exact repetition of the five with which she opened the play (a device which had prompted one of the sillier critics to speak of ‘an almost classical demonstration of cyclical unity’).

  The naked gathered behind the screens as Kathy Kitson moved to centre stage (a habit she had) to deliver herself of the same – or who could say, perhaps some new – euphemism. But what she would have said at that rehearsal was never revealed.

  Because at that moment came the Invasion of the Hats.

  The doors of the Drill Hall burst open and, led by the redoubtable hat of Mrs Feller, in marched the Massed Hats of Opposition to Shove It.

  There were about a dozen of them. Most carried banners. To those with which they had picketed the theatre had been added such choice slogans as ‘DON’T POISON THE MINDS OF OUR CHILDREN’, ‘NO ROMANS IN BRITAIN HERE’, ‘FILTH CORRUPTS’ and, rather surprisingly, ‘YOU KNOW WHERE YOU CAN SHOVE IT!’

  In the wake of the hats, shamefaced and wishing he was anywhere else in the world, was dragged a very young policeman.

  The aim of the demonstration was disruption and the first action of the hats, loudly shouting out the slogans on their banners, was to knock down the two screens. The sheer size of the nudist colonies these revealed struck them dumb.

  In the ensuing silence Tony Wensleigh’s voice could be heard weakly asking what on earth they thought they were doing.

  ‘There!’ Mrs Feller pointed an accusatory finger, as far as Charles could see, directly at him, and turned to the young policeman saying, ‘If that isn’t an obscene display, I’d like to know what is.’

  ‘Well, erm . . .’ The wretched young man blushed beetroot. ‘In fact, the law on obscenity is not always clear.’

  ‘But this is clearly obscene,’ insisted Mrs Feller.

  ‘Well, it might be, but, even if it were, I’m not quite sure what I could do about it.’

  ‘Not sure? I’ll tell you exactly what you could do – and exactly what you should do – arrest the lot of them!’

  The young policeman looked even unhappier. The prospect of rounding up a dozen naked men and women and marching them through the streets of Rugland Spa to the police station was not one that appealed to him.

  He tried to look authoritative by getting out a notebook and pencil. ‘Right,’ he began tentatively. ‘Who’s in charge here?’

  ‘I am,’ Tony Wensleigh replied.

  But not for long, thought Charles. This latest incident was just what the Artistic Director didn’t need. Charles wouldn’t have offered much for Tony Wensleigh’s chances at the Extraordinary Board Meeting the following evening.

  Chapter Eleven

  MRS FELLER DID not get any arrests, but she achieved the lesser objective of totally sabotaging the Undress Rehearsal. By the time the Hats had been cleared from the Drill Hall, the cast had all apologetically put their clothes back on again and it was too late to start on Act Two of Royston Everett’s little masterpiece. Even if the cast of the evening’s show had forgone the break due to them between rehearsal and performance, there wouldn’t have been time. So a somewhat sheepish little group traipsed back to the Regent Theatre.

  Where at least one of them was met with a further set-back. Charles, now feeling that he should watch the Artistic Director’s every move, had walked back with him from the rehearsal room but there had been little conversation. Tony Wensleigh was sunk in a gloom of his own.

  But they were still walking together when they entered the foyer of the theatre, and so Charles overheard the words of Donald Mason, who rushed up anxiously to his colleague as if he had been awaiting his return for some time.

  ‘Tony,’ the General Manager whispered as Charles moved away, ‘just had a call from Nigel Hudson.’

  ‘Nigel Hudson?’

  ‘My contact at the Arts Council.’

  ‘Oh yes.’

  ‘Well, it wasn’t so much a call as a tip-off. Apparently our grant prospects are dicier than we thought.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘They’re going to make their recommendations within the next fortnight.’

  ‘Oh yes?’

  ‘And they’re sending the assessment team down t
o the first night of Shove It to, as Nigel charmingly put it, “give us a final chance”.’

  Which, Charles reflected as he left the foyer. was considering the current state of the production, tantamount to a straight refusal of the grant.

  But the new blow aroused very little reaction in the traumatized Artistic Director. All it got was another dulled ‘Oh yes?’

  Charles was surprised to find there was a telegram from him backstage. There are perhaps actors whose lives are full of ecstatic messages from fans and urgent news from agents about film offers, but he wasn’t one of them.

  His first reaction was that something awful had happened to someone in the family. Juliet was ill. One of the grandchildren had been in a car accident.

  It was family. But it wasn’t bad news. Or, he decided quickly before his mind was swamped with mixed emotions, it probably wasn’t bad news.

  ‘COMING DOWN TO RUGLAND SPA FOR LUNCH ON SUNDAY. RING ME IF YOU CAN’T MAKE IT. LOVE. FRANCES.’

  The dear departed Sir Reginald De Meaux was now on his best behaviour. He had given his word to Donald Mason and, not wishing to add to the dissension between General Manager and Artistic Director, he therefore did not even contemplate a visit to the pub after he had discharged his artistic duties in the Thursday night performance of The Message Is Murder. He would wait around for the curtain call, following Tony Wensleigh’s desires.

  Other nights he would have been content to sit quietly with a book (he was re-reading Samuel Butler’s Erewhon and enjoying the experience), but on this occasion he felt twitchy and couldn’t concentrate. His dressing room chair felt uncomfortable, and Leslie Blatt’s banal dialogue, half-heard over the loudspeaker, was a constant distraction.

  Partly, he knew, it was the telegram. The prospect of seeing Frances filled him with reactions he didn’t want to itemize.

  But there was also a general air of tension in the theatre. The afternoon’s débacle would normally have been laughed off by the company, but it merely added to the anxiety over Shove It The show was due to open the following Wednesday and everyone was aware that it was well behind schedule. They were also becoming aware, given no assurances to the contrary from their director, that it was not a very good play.