by Nicola Upson
21
‘What a beautiful throat for a razor!’
The poster outside the Little Theatre showed Tod Slaughter in his most famous role, the Demon Barber of Fleet Street, and announced that the King of Blood and Thunder was back on stage for a limited season. ‘It’s a shame they’re not doing Maria Marten this week,’ Josephine said. ‘I’d love to see it on stage.’
Marta threw her a cynical smile. ‘Maria Marten, Sweeney Todd – do you honestly think there’s much difference? I’ll say this for Mr Slaughter – he’s excellent value for money. At least six performances for the price of one. Or do I mean that the other way round?’
A group of friends peeled off from the Saturday afternoon shoppers in John Street to climb the steps to the theatre’s foyer, and Josephine fell in behind them. ‘You can scoff now, but you know you’ll enjoy it once it starts.’
‘Of course I will – it’s not the play I’m here for.’ Marta nudged her, and pointed to a crowd by the sweet kiosk. ‘Obviously I’m in the minority there.’ Several theatregoers had gone to the trouble of wearing mock Victorian garb in the spirit of the production – at least, Josephine assumed it was mock rather than an unconscious hangover from the music hall era – and all seemed ready to enjoy themselves. Slaughter’s fans knew exactly what they were getting, and the idea that they might be disappointed had never crossed their minds; the faint air of challenge and scepticism that always radiated from a West End audience was entirely absent here, and for Josephine – whose own plays had enjoyed varying levels of popularity and criticism – it was a refreshing change.
The Little Theatre had been converted from a derelict banking hall between the Strand and the Thames, and it maintained a feeling of solidity in the face of uncertainty that seemed appropriate to its new life. Bombed during the war, the interiors had been carefully reconstructed along the original lines and the auditorium still lived up to its name, seating only a modest three hundred or so. The venue was unusual in that there were no seats or boxes at the side, only rows of chairs in straight lines – more like a church hall with delusions of grandeur than a conventional theatre, but steeply raked to ensure a good view of the stage all round. The room’s simple, classical lines were emphasised by fresh, clean decor: walls of Wedgwood blue with white medallions, and no heavy drapes or rich colours except for a deep red stage curtain which stopped the overall effect from being too austere.
‘This is nice,’ Marta said, when they had found their row. Thanks to Slaughter’s recent successes on screen, the entire run was a sell-out, but he had insisted on giving them his house seats, pleased that Josephine wanted to see the performance. ‘Have you been here before?’
Josephine shook her head. ‘No, never. Hester played here in the early twenties, though, so it’s nice to see it.’ She opened a box of chocolate gingers and passed it over. ‘She was in one of the Grand Guignol seasons here.’
‘As in the Paris idea? All horror, blood and sex?’
‘Something like that – a whole evening of horrible little plays, as someone described it to me recently. Actually, it’s probably not an exaggeration. I looked it up when I found out Hester was in it, and apparently they had nurses on standby in case it got too much for the audience.’
‘She was quite a girl, your Hester, wasn’t she?’
‘Yes, she was. I believe she gouged Sybil Thorndike’s eyes out in one of the plays.’
‘Lydia’s been wanting to do that for years.’ Marta glanced through the programme and found a paragraph on the history of the theatre. ‘This is interesting. The woman who started it – Gertrude Kingston?’ Josephine shrugged. ‘No, I’ve never heard of her either. It says here that she was a suffragette, and she insisted on withholding the name of a playwright until after the first night so that female authors stood a chance with the critics.’
‘Now that is a bloody good idea. If everywhere did that, I might never have had to call myself Gordon.’
‘Oh, I don’t know,’ Marta said with a wink. ‘I quite like it.’
The house lights dimmed before Josephine could think of a suitable response. When the curtain went up, she was surprised to see that the stage itself was actually bigger than many West End theatres’, and it rather dwarfed Slaughter’s sets. The scenery was crude stuff – a few second-hand flats, an old backcloth, a lick of paint and a moderate lighting set – and it took her back instantly to the theatre of her childhood and to the pantomime she had seen Hester in. The whole thing had probably been done for less than twenty pounds, but it was exactly what was needed: pieces of frayed cloth, suspended from the roof and carelessly touching the walls of an interior set, did well enough for a ceiling and equally well for a sky; and a vaguely painted backdrop of buildings would be easily transformed next week from Sweeney Todd’s London to Burke and Hare’s Edinburgh. The audience seemed perfectly happy to help the play along with its imagination, and in any case it was the performers who mattered: from the moment Slaughter stepped on stage, wearing his barber’s apron and a villainous grin, the peeling paint and crumpled curtains were forgotten. ‘Not a single customer today,’ he announced to the audience, his delivery timed to squeeze every nuance out of the phrase. ‘I pine for something exciting to happen, so I’ll just put a beautiful edge on my beautiful razor in case someone comes in.’ An evil, throaty chuckle rolled out across the footlights, the first of many that afternoon, and Slaughter moved about the stage with a dancing, sinister step, graceful and precise for a man of his size. Everything about his performance was exaggerated, a reminder that melodrama had its origins in mime, but it held the attention of an audience that was considerably less reserved than the ones Josephine was used to, and it occurred to her that – as delicious as his performance in the film of Maria Marten had been – live theatre was where he really came into his own. He was the consummate showman, always working the crowd: if someone called out a wisecrack, Slaughter fixed the culprit with a wicked stare, stroking his razor across his hand and purring ‘Oh, I’d love to polish you off!’ – and every time the trademark catchphrase was a cue for booing and cheering in equal measure.
‘At least we won’t have to bother with a pantomime this year,’ Marta muttered as they got up for the interval, but she had hissed and clapped with the best of them and Josephine knew she was enjoying herself. ‘Let’s go and get a drink.’ Their aisle seats gave them a head start to the tearoom. Like the rest of the theatre, it was tastefully decorated with pale yellow walls, Japanese prints and an Angelica Kauffman painting salvaged from the original ceiling, but the effect was confused by the temporary conversion of the room into Mrs Lovett’s Pie Shop. A table at the far end promised pies ‘to last you to Aldgate pump and back’, and Marta shook her head in admiration. ‘No one can accuse them of taking themselves too seriously,’ she said. ‘I bet the regulars who come here every week have had the shock of their lives.’
‘Mm. Especially if they’re vegetarian. What’s it to be? Pork or chicken and ham?’
‘Assuming that is what’s in them, why don’t we try one of each?’ They found a table in the corner, and Marta ordered tea. ‘Before you say anything, I give in – he’s very, very good. Much better than I expected.’
‘Thank God. There’s nothing worse than going backstage after a performance and having to lie. “Darling, you were wonderful!” doesn’t trip easily off my tongue, even when it’s true.’
‘That’s a shocking admission. You’ll never be a proper playwright. But I was thinking about the Hollywood lot when I was watching him, and he’s just as convincing as Karloff or Lugosi. All right, so he milks it for all it’s worth, but you do genuinely believe he could dispatch someone without breaking a sweat, and that’s what you want from a villain.’
‘And the actual plays are brave, too, when you cut through the stereotypes. They might be period pieces to us, but they were dealing in their own time with crime and class and gender, and I suppose that was quite progressive.’
Marta looked
doubtful. ‘I’m not sure about that. The next time I pinch your cheek and say “upon my soul, you’re a delightful little baggage”, you’ll have to remind me of how liberated we’re being.’
Josephine laughed. ‘I wasn’t trying to claim it as a feminist classic. I just meant that the scenarios must have seemed far more shocking to a contemporary audience than they do to us.’ Before she could explain herself further, Tod Slaughter himself appeared in the bar, still in his bloodstained apron, and called everyone back in for the second half. The barber’s crimes escalated as the play romped through to its conclusion, and Josephine watched in admiration as the audience was drawn along by the power of the company and by good, honest dialogue; if anyone had come to sneer at a second-rate drama, they were wrong-footed. Marta was right about Slaughter’s villainous credentials: the laughter dwindled in the second half, and he played his character’s growing insanity completely straight, never once allowing himself to lapse into burlesque. There was an integrity to the performance that equalled anything Josephine had seen on stage at the New or the Garrick, as if the actor really believed in good and evil, in a morality that had a thousand years of history behind it. Melodrama was not unlike detective fiction in that sense, she thought: a dream world with dream justice, ordered as it should be, not as it was, and peopled with characters who behaved exactly as they were expected to and got what they deserved. Hester had lived most of her life in that world, and Josephine wished with all her heart that the illusion had not been shattered before her death.
‘You’d better go and find the stage door,’ Marta said, as the company took the last of four curtain calls.
‘Aren’t you coming?’
‘Would you mind if I gave it a miss? Between Lydia and the Hitchcocks, I see more than enough of actors and dressing rooms.’
‘Of course I don’t mind.’
‘Unless you think Mr Slaughter is a crazed killer with a passion for murder relics, and all this is actually an elaborate double bluff?’
‘That hadn’t occurred to me and I’ll bear it in mind, but I think I’ll be safe enough in a busy theatre. What will you do?’
‘Go for a walk by the river, I think, and watch the lights come on from Westminster Bridge. Then I’ll wait for you in the bar. Don’t hurry, though – there’s plenty of time before dinner.’
They fought their way through the crowds in the foyer and parted in John Street. At the stage door, Josephine was a met by a woman of around sixty, no longer in costume but easily recognisable as the Demon Barber’s partner in crime, Mrs Lovett. ‘I’m Jenny Lynn,’ she said, holding out her hand. ‘Tod’s wife. Come with me – he’s just wiping the blood off, but he’s looking forward to meeting you.’
Josephine followed her along a labyrinthine sequence of corridors and stairs. ‘That was quite some performance,’ she said. ‘Are you in every production?’
‘Most of them. He’s killed me twice a night now for thirty years, and it doesn’t seem to matter if I’m a beggar or a duchess – I’m never breathing by the end of the play.’ She smiled, suddenly seeming much younger. ‘There were times during the early days when I was every corpse in Burke and Hare. Fortunately the company’s a bit bigger now.’ Judging by the scene-shifting that was going on overhead, the dressing room area was directly under the stage, and the thickness of the walls suggested that they were standing in the old bank’s original strongrooms. ‘Tod’s over there. I’ve made you some tea – unless you’d like something stronger after the matinee?’
‘No, thank you. Tea would be lovely.’
‘Good. You’ve got nothing to worry about. We keep chickens when we’re not on tour, and he’s far too soft even to polish them off, so you’ll be quite safe.’ She squeezed Josephine’s arm, as if welcoming a distant member of the family back into the fold. ‘He was so pleased to hear from you, you know. Hester was very important to him – to both of us, actually. That’s how we met – working for her and Walter. Go and make his day.’
Touched, Josephine looked across the green room to where Mr Murder sat surrounded by his company, enthralling them all with another tall tale. He tore himself away as soon as he noticed her, and kissed her hand. ‘Miss Tey – how delightful. Thank you so much for coming.’ From his welcome, it would have been easy to believe that it was she doing him the favour – the old-fashioned gallantry of a different generation – and a number of the cast looked at her curiously. ‘Did you like the show?’
‘Yes, very much.’ Close up, the actor’s face was beginning to sag a little, but the twisted stage smile was now a broad one, and eyes that had been filled with madness were friendly and intelligent. The question was more than polite conversation; he seemed genuinely interested in her opinion, and Josephine was happy to give the answer he was hoping for. ‘I can’t actually remember when I enjoyed a performance quite as much.’
‘I’m so glad. It’s good old stuff, isn’t it? I know it’s fashionable these days to sit around on stage, smoking cigarettes and being witty, but I prefer to save that for my club. Give me the shadow of the noose and the scream in the dark any day – the good old plum-duff.’
His fondness was sincere. There was none of the resentment or false modesty that Josephine had seen in actors who were doing something that they felt was beneath them, and she liked him instantly. ‘A lot of people are with you on that,’ she said. ‘You’ve sent a crowd home very happy today, and I imagine they’ll keep coming as long as you’re happy to entertain them. There’s something timeless about it.’ It was true, she thought; the heroes in her plays – Richard II, Mary Queen of Scots – had been given a contemporary relevance that had proved extremely popular, but she doubted that they would still draw an audience in thirty years’ time; the plays about Sweeney Todd, however, or Jack the Ripper and William Corder, had outlived the moment in which they were written, and continued to flourish in a very different age – anti-heroes, almost, for each new generation.
‘I’m pleased you said that – they’re age-old truths,’ Slaughter agreed, ‘and keeping them alive after the war is the thing I’m proudest of. I cut my teeth on those stories forty years ago, and I still love them – when something catches you young, it usually holds on. I’ll tell you a story,’ he added, and Josephine suspected it would be the first of many; if she wasn’t careful, Marta would still be on Westminster Bridge when the sun came up. ‘We had Edgar Wallace in when I was at the Elephant, and you’ll appreciate this, being a thriller writer. I kept a box for him but he wouldn’t sit in it, and we had to shift four people out of the front row of the gallery for his party. At the end of the night, he got up on stage and told the audience that the first pennies he’d earned as a boy selling newspapers were spent on a gallery seat at the Elephant and Castle. That was where he learned to write – and look what it’s given us. They call them thrillers now, but it’s the same glorious stuff that I learned all those years ago from your godmother. She was a splendid woman, and I’m so sorry you never knew her – but let’s see if we can do something about that, shall we?’
He opened a door for her – not dressing room number one, as she had expected, but an office and living room combined, which made it clear that he saw himself as an old-school actor-manager rather than a star. The room was busily furnished, and it took her a moment to establish that the things she was looking at – ornately framed portraits, a heavy oak settle and a fine collection of Toby jugs – were personal treasures and not props, objects designed to make the couple feel more at home during the long hours spent at the theatre. Tea was laid out on a central table, and she took the seat offered to her, feeling as though she had just walked into the pages of Nicholas Nickleby. ‘I’ve brought you these,’ she said, taking a small bundle of photographs out of her bag. ‘I thought you might like to have some pictures of your early days with Hester and Walter.’
He took them from her, delighted with the gift. ‘My goodness, these take me back.’ He looked through the sepia images, smiling in disbelief at h
is younger self. ‘The pantomime shots were taken in Inverness – did you know that? Babes in the Wood, I believe it was.’
‘That’s right.’ She told him about the photograph she had found of herself as a child on Hester’s knee. ‘I realised then how much I owe her.’
‘She’d be pleased with that. It was never easy for her to perform there after everything that happened. Tell me – are they as sniffy about the theatre now as they were in Hester’s day, or have they warmed to your success?’
Josephine gave him a knowing smile and accepted a cigarette. ‘I’d say tepid at best.’
‘Oh well, that’s not bad. Hester told me there was a civil war in the family when she announced she wanted to go on the stage.’
‘Really? I didn’t know that.’
‘Her parents had decided that she was going to be a teacher. They never stopped to wonder if she was capable of teaching anybody anything, but the only other thing she could do was cook, and that smacked of service, God forbid.’
‘My grandparents were exactly the same, except – as far as I know – my mother was happy to teach, and sorry when she had to give it up. Was Hester supposed to teach anything in particular?’
‘Piano. All girls played the piano then, whether they could or not. Every house groaned under the protestations of the Collard and Collard.’ Josephine smiled, remembering the upright that stood in the study at Red Barn Cottage to this day: it was indeed a Collard and Collard. ‘The piano was her destiny. Or the pianoforte, as my dear grandmother insisted on calling it to her dying day. Hester hated it.’
‘Did she? She still had one when she died.’
‘That will have been Walter’s. He was a wonderful musician. He arranged all the songs for the shows, and Hester loved to listen to him – except when he played Gilbert and Sullivan. If they’d had a row – which they often did – he’d play a medley from H.M.S. Pinafore and train his dog to lie on the loud pedal.’
