by Morag Joss
‘Alfano was…Look,’ George said. ‘Puccini wrote very nearly all of it. Alfano only finished the final love duet and the very last scene, after Puccini died. And of course he had to make certain judgements and decisions, based on Puccini’s sketches and outlines. Was that taking liberties? Of course not. If he hadn’t done it, we wouldn’t have Turandot as it is today.’
He looked round for support, taking in Raymond and some of the stage crew stationed at the sides and the Mathiesons behind him, busy with paperwork at a trestle table. He spread his arms wide and raised his voice.
‘So I, for one, am grateful that those judgements were made. And that is what I am doing, too. I am making certain necessary judgements, otherwise we would not have this production. Yes, I am making cuts. All companies do it.’
Puccini’s Turandot was two hours long. For a number of reasons, some of which he was keeping to himself, George’s version would run for half an hour less. With Gordon Black’s help he had cut out swathes of music that the singers were simply not up to, he had trimmed away long, static exchanges that held up the story and exposed some of the cast’s inability to act. He was speeding up most of the tempi, hoping that if he took the thing at a fair lick he could keep the audience’s attention from wandering away from the stage to the buttock-numbing properties of the Burnhead Townswomen’s Guild’s borrowed chairs.
And because Puccini’s cast called for seven male principals and George had only been able to find four, he had rolled the three parts of the courtiers Ping, Pang and Pong into one character called Pung. It was unfortunate that this new character was being sung by Sandy Scott, who was turning out to be a tedious purist. After all, the three courtiers didn’t affect the plot, and it moved matters on considerably when only one character instead of three had to have his say. They—or more accurately now, he—merely commented on what was happening or issued dread advice and morbid warnings to Prince Calaf which of course he ignored, because if, when he heard
Pazzo! Va’via! Qui si strozza! Si trivella!
Madman, go away! Here they garrote you! They impale you!
he were to pay any heed, there would be no opera.
George had also, by careful trimming of the scenes in which they appeared, made it possible for two other male parts—the Mandarin, and Turandot’s father, the Emperor Altoum—to be sung by the same person, an old man called Norman. George could not say so, but Norman’s hand tremor fitted the role of the frail old Emperor perfectly, and for his appearances as the Mandarin (in a switch of cloaks and headgear and a different beard) George had found him a sword to clutch that kept him from shaking too much.
The changes might make events on stage a little more difficult to understand, but nobody would be following the story from what was being sung, anyway. For one thing it was all in Ayrshire Italian and besides, the synopsis would be in the programme. George hoped by means of these and other tricks to get away with it. It tired him out just thinking of the time and ingenuity he had expended on these people. They had all been so thrilled and charming at the start and now some were almost sour. He could walk out right now, how would they like that? Again, as he did several times a day, he asked himself why he had allowed it all to happen. Then he caught sight of Joe, standing next to Lila.
He stood up straighter and said again, ‘All companies do these things. A production such as ours calls for certain concessions.’
‘Disnae mean you’ve to hack it to bits,’ came another voice from the chorus. ‘Disnae call for a hatchet job.’
There were murmurs, even from the Bergsma sisters who sat at the front of the orchestra with their instruments on their laps. George thought that Willy’s blind eye in its floppy socket looked wetter than usual. It shone brightly under the lights, shedding syrupy, reproachful tears that she dabbed with a tiny handkerchief.
‘I haven’t hacked it to bits,’ he said. ‘We have to make cuts so that we can manage with our reduced forces. And now,’ he picked up his baton, ‘I really think we should get on. We’ve hardly got started and it’s already after three o’clock.’
Mrs Mathieson’s voice behind him said, ‘Are you still wanting to break for tea at half past? Because if you are I’ll need to switch on the urn. It wants switching on at five past and it’s already gone that. There’s biscuits to put out as well.’
‘Oh, what kind are we getting the day?’ Jimmy Brock the coalman called out, peering round from his trombone. ‘Is there any custard creams?’
‘No, there’s shortbread,’ Mrs Mathieson told him, ‘and Bourbons.’
A hand went up from somewhere. ‘On the subject of biscuits, Mrs Mathieson, can I just put in,’ said a woman whose name George kept forgetting, ‘can I just say re biscuits anytime it’s ginger nuts please can an alternative also be provided as I’m sure my man’s not the only one can’t take ginger?’
‘It’s no the ginger, it’s the hardness. They’re too hard, ginger nuts,’ said a man’s voice.
‘Away you go, Alistair, you know fine you get heartburn after ginger.’
‘Thank you, Margaret,’ Mrs Mathieson called. ‘I’ve got that noted.’
George sighed. There was no point trying to get on with Act I while tea was in the offing. He spent the next half hour teaching them how to enter and exit without crowding or getting into jams, gliding noiselessly on stage and pouring off it quickly. They had to slip into the wings (which he explained were not in place yet, but would be suspended lengths of cloth held steady at the bottom by floor weights) and then the trick was to keep moving, flooding silently out through the open doors behind the backdrop and straight out onto the field. There were mutterings about the weather and the indignity. More promises were made; as soon as the scouts were back from summer camp they would be putting up two marquees just feet from the door for the chorus to use as dressing rooms.
After tea George conducted and shouted his way through Act II, now and then leaping onto the stage to pull people around bodily while still waving one arm in the direction of the orchestra and yelling at them not to stop. By twenty past four they had reached the middle of the act and Turandot’s first aria.
Fleur missed her cue.
‘Jesus, Fleur! Watch me for the beat. We’re in two,’ he said. ‘It’s a quaver rest and then you’re in. “In questa Reggia”! Okay?’
‘Oh, George! Oh, sorry, everyone!’ Fleur said, running down the steps at the side of the stage and turning to face them. ‘Sorry, sorry! Oh, George, it’s not about counting beats, it’s my imposto.’
She closed her eyes and made off down the length of the shed with her fingertips at her temples, swinging her neck from side to side and vocalising with her mouth closed to ‘mee, mee, mee, meee’. She walked around, stopped, rolled her arms in the direction of the sound, closed her eyes, walked around some more. The chorus, murmuring, sank away to the sides.
When she returned she accepted a hand from Calaf and was helped up the steps on to the stage. She smiled round again, too ready to be welcomed back, too much in need of compliments. She was emphatically made up; beads of sweat stood out on her powdered face like droplets of water on an apricot.
‘I am so sorry, I crave your indulgence!’ she cried. ‘I must place the voice or I can’t begin “In questa Reggia”. I daren’t take the voice there till it’s ready. Don’t look like that, George. Thanks, everyone!’
Lila, standing with Timur at the side of the stage, thought that she couldn’t have grasped l’impostamento della voce properly. Uncle George and her mother had tried to explain it and she had pretended to understand, but all she really did before she sang was to imagine the sound she wanted to make and the space she wanted it to fill, and then somehow she didn’t have to ‘place her voice’. Rather it was her voice that took her there. When she was practising exercises and scales she did not think about the high notes except to look forward to them and when she was being Liù she pretty much forgot about nerves and the technical things; she no more thought about Liù’s br
eathing and l’impostamento della voce than she worried about reminding Lila’s heart to beat.
The afternoon wore on. George allowed a five-minute interval between Acts II and III because he was desperate for a cigarette but he refused a request for another tea break. It was after half past six before they made it as far as Calaf’s and Turandot’s last duet in Act III. At least a dozen members of the chorus had gone outside for another smoke and disappeared altogether.
‘Calaf! Sing to Turandot!’ George shouted. His hair was hanging in wet black tails and dripping sweat onto his shoulders; with every swing of his head the first desk of the first violins and the cellos ducked.
‘Communicate! Turandot! You shouldn’t be downstage, no, go up! Up! No, turn round only when he comes towards you! Oh, stop, stop!’
At the heart of Fleur’s interpretation of her role was the idea that Turandot, as Principessa, should be free to stride or drift about the stage as she liked, her face wearing one of its two expressions, preoccupied or enraptured. Whatever she did she looked oblivious to her surroundings; Fleur’s Turandot appeared to be listening to voices that nobody else could hear.
‘Turandot! Get back! Stand where I put you!’ George yelled, still conducting Calaf who was dragging the beat, and stirring his arms as if he were clearing his way through clouds of smoke. Joe’s voice was hoarse. He had split every high note in ‘Nessun dorma’ and now he was skipping anything above an E. But the final curtain could not go down until he had removed Turandot’s veil, kissed her, taken her in his arms and melted her into submission.
George shouted, ‘Turandot! Turandot! Go back to the steps!’
Joe’s voice sank to a standstill and Fleur turned to face George with her hands on her hips. ‘I’m entering the part!’ she said. ‘A princess contemplating her destiny would walk about if she wanted to.’
‘Don’t be ridiculous!’
‘I know you told me to stay there till Calaf’s aria’s finished,’ she said, ‘but she’s the Principessa! If it feels right for Turandot to move when he’s singing “Ah! Solleva quel velo” to her, then why shouldn’t she?’
‘Because, my dear,’ George said, his voice dangerously sweet, ‘Calaf’s aria is addressed directly to you, and he needs to know where you’ll be. Plus the aria’s all about getting you to move, which you are refusing to do. He’s trying to get you to submit to him. To descend to earth—“scendi giù sulla terra”. You see? And the point is—the whole bloody point is—that you don’t. You don’t move, you remain icy and aloof. And that means in one place. On the bloody steps.’
Joe said, keeping his voice light and pleasant, ‘And don’t forget, when the aria’s finished I’m meant to rush forward and pull off your veil and I need to know where to rush to. It won’t look right if I’m chasing you all over the stage.’
‘But standing in one place all that time doesn’t feel right. I just don’t think Turandot would.’
George said tightly, ‘Just do it. Let’s go again. Calaf, from the top—“Principessa di morte!” ’
Fleur said, ‘But what am I supposed to do all the time I’m just standing there?’
‘I don’t care,’ George said, leafing back through the score to the beginning of Calaf’s aria, ‘if you do a bloody strip-tease. Just don’t wander off.’
For a while she tried, until her presence at the top of the steps became so oppressive that nobody said anything when she turned from Calaf and strolled away again.
Although it was Joe who was most affected by Fleur’s wanderings it was impossible to tell if he was truly exasperated. For the last part of the final scene he was still using the score, and with his eyes glued to the music he couldn’t pay much attention to her. When he glanced up from time to time he seemed more puzzled than anything else, and this was good acting, Lila thought; Joe was revealing the complexity of Calaf’s feelings under all the princely bravado, for surely a person seized at first sight by a sudden passion for somebody else would, even in opera, be very taken aback. A person in that predicament might well find himself perplexed. She smiled encouragingly at him. But he was not looking at her; he was sending furious looks to George who was driving the tempo so relentlessly that he was having trouble keeping up. Angrily, he sang:
La mia vita è il tuo bacio! Non la temo! Hai vinto tu!
My life is your kiss! I don’t fear it! You have conquered!
And then George fluffed the entry of the brass so that it was Jimmy Brock’s trombone that led the orchestra in a blast of sound as the women’s chorus, crowded offstage in the wings, sang of perfumed gardens in the light of morning, before the scene faded to silence.
George was now too tired to raise his arms but he tapped the top of his music stand with the baton again. ‘Nearly there!’ he called. ‘Only the last scene to go! Cast, please. La folla, Calaf, Turandot, Altoum, positions, “Diecimila anni”!’
‘’Scuse me.’ Sandy Scott stepped forward to the front of the stage. ‘D’you mean we’re going straight from Scene One into Scene Two?’
‘More or less, yes,’ George said.
‘Because I think you’ll find Scene One takes place in the Palace gardens, in front of a pavilion,’ Sandy said, raising an eyebrow and looking round, ‘and Scene Two takes place outside the Palace. That calls, unless I am mistaken, for a scene change.’
Several people murmured agreement. George coughed. ‘I am aware of that. There are certain staging issues, and they are being dealt with.’ He cast his eyes around. ‘Stage manager? Raymond? Do we have a stage manager?’
Raymond emerged reluctantly from the wings, stroking his moustache.
‘Ray, can you answer Sandy’s query about the staging here?’
Raymond said, ‘We’ve just the one set of steps. We move them from stage left after they’re finished being the pavilion steps in Scene One to centre stage where they’ll be the palace steps in Scene Two. Right?’ He nodded at George and melted back out of sight.
Sandy stared after him. ‘Well, in that case why aren’t they being moved? Who’s in charge here? Where’s the stage hands?’
From the wings came Raymond’s voice. ‘Stage hands have buggered off. Move them yourself.’
George said quickly, ‘That’ll do, let’s remember this is just a stage run-through, not a dress rehearsal. And moreover,’ he said to Sandy, ‘we shall further suggest the change of location by the use of lighting.’
Above the confused discussion he heard somebody say, ‘Ach, it doesn’t really matter.’ George looked up and scanned the faces. ‘I mean, if your man Puccini couldn’t even be bothered to finish it…’
‘I told you, Puccini died. He couldn’t finish it because he died,’ George said into the crowd. ‘So Alfano completed it, so that we have a whole opera.’
‘See your man Alfano, though. No guarantee he knew what way Puccini meant it to go.’
‘Why can’t we sing it in English?’
George let out a roar, threw his arms in the air and flung his baton across the room. ‘For Christ’s sake! Jesus Christ! Look, just shut up and do as you’re told!’ he screamed. ‘Shut up, all of you!’
Nobody said anything. Slowly George crossed the floor and picked the baton up. Pulling his fingers through his hair, he remounted the creaking podium. He fixed hard eyes on them all and said quietly, ‘Right. Thank you. Act Three, Scene Two. Cast on stage now.’
He was ready, baton raised, by the time the chorus and principals had flopped back into position. The orchestra cranked itself into the foursquare beat of ‘Diecimila anni al nostro Imperatore!’ and the exhausted crowd sang in a peal of high, approximate notes and involuntary trills, at first subdued and tentative:
Amor! O sole! Vita! Eternita!
Love! O Sun! Life! Eternity!
But as George bent and swayed on top of his beer crates with wide swimming movements of his arms, the chorus’s nervy squeaking swelled in excitement and volume as if a subterranean colony of disturbed bats, rising from darkness, had found t
he cave mouth and were flittering out and singing into the open sky:
Luce del mondo è amor!
Light of the world is love!
i’m reviewing a number of things since I saw Mrs Foley.
Did I really escape altogether feeling like me, jaded and alone?
No. There are days that summer—there are, of course there are—when I feel like my old self, when I wake up unable to summon Liù except as a passing ghost. The sensations of my own skin and clothes and surroundings—the damp and complex musk of old carpet, underarms, Woolworth’s talcum powder, the smell of bacon in my hair—anchor me to Seaview Villas and the everyday pessimism that sours all my longings. Liù’s ringing voice and her supple form in luminous silk stiffen into a mute doll as tawdry and dismayed as I am, lying in a patch of struggling daylight in a house of shrivelled hopes.
On such days, in gaps in rehearsals, I seek out Enid and other safe disappointments. I call in at Sew Right and if Enid’s mum is these days a little less interested in me, I somehow think it appropriate, since I am not who I was. There may be something distracted and even forgetful about her, and she’s always busy. Even when she’s not reaching for pins or cutting difficult curves in material or serving customers, her mind seems fixed on some task connected to the costumes that is about to demand all her attention.
Och it’s yourself, you’ll be wanting Enid, is all she says nowadays.
Instead of delaying me with an offer of tea she’ll say, She’s away out with Senga and Deirdre, you’ll be better trying the Locarno.
Senga and Deirdre dropped out of the chorus weeks ago but they still hang around on the fringes of the production, sneering or ogling, and Enid still hangs around them. If I do go to the Locarno and find her there, she comes and greets me at the counter as if I’ve returned from somewhere far away. She talks fast as if I may not be staying long, and usually I don’t. She still says, glancing back at them, that Senga and Deirdre are fine when you get to know them and even if they call Turandot a load of shite, they don’t really mean it. Anyway, she shouts over the jukebox, she’s only in it herself because her mum says she’s got to see it through and there’s nothing else to do round here.
