by John Gardner
‘You think there’s a future for the Theatre in our age?’ asked Silver, backing away from the personal involvement.
‘As long as we don’t get bogged down in trying to do things we are not equipped to do. Television and the movies are always a threat, just as they’re another way of earning a living: but the Theatre’s got to be different. It can’t rely on having to create realism, because audiences get that sort of realism on the box or in the cinema, which is the natural medium of our time. Our job is to convey emotion...Truth...the great senses, in a different way...’ He was wallowing a little and could see that Douglas Silver detected it.
‘What about the British classics then?’ The director eased the situation. ‘What about Shakespeare? Does he have any relevance to the present day?’
‘Complete relevance.’
‘Why?’
‘Well, language for one thing, the poetic beauty, but, most important to me, his characters are set and established living beings. Man doesn’t change much, as far as basic emotions and reactions are concerned. The great Shakespearean figures are figures for all time, from whom we can learn, interpret and re-interpret. Then, of course, there are the classic patterns of history...’
‘Okay,’ Silver held up a hand. ‘You just convinced me.’
‘Asher?’ It was Art Drays, the silent unassuming man, smiling now and speaking quietly. ‘How do you stand with directors? What do you think is the function of a director?’ It was no accidental, stray question. This one was a sniper for Douglas Silver.
Asher knew that he could not fake it. ‘The director is the overall controller of a production,’ he began, searching for the right words, the ones that would not offend a man like Douglas Silver, yet would communicate his feelings. ‘The director is the eyes and ears of an audience. He can tell me, as an actor, what he hears; what he needs to hear; where I should go, on stage, and what I should do. He can give me a central focal point: how he sees the play and the character I am playing within that conception; but that of the character which is within me is mine, and the director must not meddle with it.’ At least, he thought, he had been honest.
Silver leaned forward. A solemn look. ‘Ronnie’s already told you something of our plans for Shireston?’
‘Yes.’
‘Is there anything particular you’d like to ask me about those plans?’
‘Not at this stage. If I was offered something then naturally...’
Another motor-cycle and some catcalls in the street: Capulets and Montagues having a go in the Euston Road.
‘Great.’ Silver rocked back in his chair. ‘Have you got anything you’d like to do for us?’
Now the moment had come, Asher’s mind cleared, leaving one item uppermost. The approach had been almost casual, but he knew this was the crunch.
‘Ronnie said something about Romeo, so I’ve prepared the death soliloquy. Is that okay?’
Silver smiled, nodding. It was ideal, the one passage that would tell him what Asher Grey could do; how he could handle the text and make an audience feel, command them to listen to the words, see the poetic images, conjure emotion. The director indicated the centre of the room.
Asher Grey stood alone, mind drained and empty for a few seconds, his back to the trio. When he turned Douglas Silver had some intimation of the strength that the young actor possessed. Asher’s face had lost colour, seemed to be thinner, taken on a strained, haggard look, a surfeit of shock.
Silver softly spoke the dying words of Paris which are the cue lines for the soliloquy.
O I am slain! — If thou be merciful,
Open the tomb ,lay me with Juliet.
Asher did not see the bare room or the three fixed faces. He looked down at his hands trying to perceive the hands of Romeo, then up and around him, slowly. The setting body of Paris. Drugged Juliet. The blood-soaked Tybalt. Feeling the cold oppression of the tomb, the thoughts of shock and resolution, conveying the feelings as he spoke —
‘In faith I will. — Let me peruse this face:—
Mercutio’ s kinsman, noble County Paris!—
What said my man, when my betossed soul
Did not attend him as we rode? I think
He told me Paris should have married Juliet:
Said he not so? or did I dream it so?
Or am I mad, hearing him talk of Juliet,
To think it was so? O give me thy hand,
One writ with me in sour misfortune’s book,
I’ll bury thee in a triumphant grave;—’
Asher Grey’s voice, though pitched low at the start, contained the quality which directors long to hear: the timbre, accent, texture which makes a voice theatrically different. It contains the very heart of potential greatness, and one hears it in the voices of Olivier, Gielgud, O’Toole, Warner, a dozen more. It is something which holds the listener, captures the ear and, at the same time, brings total comprehension.
Douglas sat very still in concentration, noting the technical tricks, appreciating the skill which was here.
‘A grave? O, no, a lantern, slaughter’d youth,
For here lies Juliet, and her beauty makes
This vault a feasting presence full of light.’
The romantic tragedy took on form and meaning. Douglas glanced quickly towards Ronnie who gave a tiny tilt of the head.
‘Death, lie thou there, by a dead man interr’ d.
How oft when men are at the point of death
Have they been merry! which their keepers call
A lightning before death; O, How may I
Call this a lightning! O my love! my wife!
Death, that hath suck’d the honey of thy breath,
Hath had no power yet upon thy beauty:
Thou art not conquer’d, beauty’s ensign yet
Is crimson in thy lips and in thy cheeks,
And death’s pale flag is not advanced there.’
On the line, Death that hath suck’d the honey of thy breath,
Asher seemed to single out the word suck’d so that it took on the gruesome form of a death rattle, while the sequence about Juliet not yet having her beauty transformed by the ravages of death, became a poignant statement, at one and the same time personal to Romeo and the individual members of his small audience.
Asher looked up, staring at a point some three feet in front of the table—
‘Tybalt, liest thou there in thy bloody sheet?
O, what more favour can I do to thee,
Than with that hand that cut thy youth in twain,
To sunder his that was thine enemy?
Forgive me, cousin! — Ah, dear Juliet,
Why art thou yet so fair? Shall I believe
That unsubstantial Death is amorous,
And that the lean abhorred monster keeps
Thee here in dark to be his paramour?
For fear of that, I still will stay with thee;
And never from this palace of dim night
Depart again: here, here will I remain
With worms that are thy chamber-maids; 0, here
Will I set up my everlasting rest;
And shake the yoke of inauspicious stars,
From this world-wearied flesh. Eyes, look your last!
Arms, take your last embrace! and, lips, O you
The doors of breath, seal with a righteous kiss
A dateless bargain to engrossing death!—’
Even with a stage, and the full complement of actors’ bodies, the speech is difficult, for he who plays Romeo treads the delicate bridge between great emotion and pure ham. Asher walked it firmly and with confidence, holding the natural pauses for the exact amount of time, playing down the gestures and indications with hands and head and eyes. He knew that he was doing it well, his actor’s sense told him and he could feel it even from the audience of three. As he went into the last soft moment, in the final five lines, he caught the look on Douglas Silver’s face and knew that he had won: Silver’s look was that of a man who had j
ust struck gold.
‘Come, bitter conduct, come unsavoury guide!
Thou desperate pilot, now at once run on
The dashing rocks thy sea-sick weary bark!
Here’s to my love!’ A dangerous, half raising of the imagined cup: the hand curved up level with the shoulders, head tilted down in a flashing smile, on and off: a gesture of almost Errol Flynn romanticism. ‘O true apothecary!
Thy drugs are quick. — Thus with a kiss I die.’
The last words all but whispered, yet whispered in a manner that would carry them throughout any good auditorium. There was a pause and silence. Ronnie Gregor moved as though to start applauding, but Douglas restrained him with a careful and quiet gesture of the right hand.
‘Good,’ said Douglas Silver as though the performance had been commonplace. ‘Anything else?’
Since Douglas’s departure from Shireston on the Saturday evening, Tony Holt had thought about little else but the symbol he was supposed to find as a trademark for the festival. His first reaction was one of surprise that nobody had provided such an obvious device before. But, on examining the festival records, which consisted of twelve thick bound volumes of newspaper cuttings, programmes, letters and photographs, he found that nobody had anticipated them. The most obvious choice for a symbol was, naturally, the Longwell family’s coat of arms, but Tony thought it too dull to capture the imagination: an argent shield with a sable Bend Sinister and two martlets.
Tony Holt was, professionally, a solitary man. At Shireston he had four chosen female assistants, but he only achieved a reasonable happiness when working alone. It was the secluded search for ideas which intrigued him, and once his imagination was caught he could usually see quickly how a particular idea could be translated into action; the interpretation being, to him, a mere detail, almost a mechanical matter which, as often as not, could be left to others.
He spent the Sunday morning again perusing the festival records to see if anything in them could spark him, but nothing came. Early in the afternoon he decided to take a walk into the town itself. Since his arrival at Shireston House there had been little time for sightseeing, his only trip so far being a quick car ride to the Blue Boar for dinner: the food ordinary enough and the hotel giving off a pedestrian atmosphere.
About a hundred yards down from the main drive of Shireston House, the road dipped into a gentle slope from the top of which you could see the whole town spread out a mile or so below: the long straggle of main street cut in the middle by the market square from which four roads ran away into the country, disintegrating, at their outset, into narrow winding streets. By the shading and colours of the rooftops, and those buildings visible from the rise, it was plain that the centre of the town was its oldest area, the crux from which the community had grown; there the majority of buildings were either grey weathered stone or plaster, gently refurbished and kept in good condition by owners or the local council. The rooftops which sprang away along the main street all bore the solid grey or red tiling of Victorian builders, while the outer periphery of Shireston was already well scarred with the plain new bricks, concrete paths, blue, red, yellow doors, metal window frames, identical living boxes and the segmented uninspired geography of small housing estates.
It was a chill bright afternoon, well lit, but, as he walked towards the town, Tony Holt felt the vague uneasiness of a perpetual city dweller thrust into an almost rural situation. As he approached the almost empty main street he found himself anticipating a wealth of hostility, feeling that he was walking, unwanted, into a small tight and closely packed society which reserved a barrier against strangers. Perhaps, he thought, this was due to the history of the festival: the townspeople of Shireston had never really given it a wholehearted welcome and, going through the records, he had been struck by one or two occasions when there had been an almost violent hostility between actors and townspeople. He would have to mention that to Douglas, because at one time the town had sponsored a Shireston Festival Society which acted as a go-between and a repository for information: maybe the society was not quite dead, or at least it could be within the bounds of resuscitation.
Along the main street, Palmer Street it was called, so presumably pilgrims had walked that way at one time, there was only the occasional piece of interesting architecture: a chemist’s shop with original bow windows, a couple of carved oak front doors, a beautifully preserved and renovated ornamental clock, picked out in shining gold above George Harvey and Sons Jewellers and Watchmakers who, with the inevitable rumble of progress, now displayed only cheap and mass produced watches in their window. For the rest, only a thin film, new and vulgar, spread across the fronts of middle-aged buildings: the cheap transparency of little supermarkets with tinned goods, refrigerated meals and packets of coloured lavatory paper glared, whorish objects dressed gaily to catch the shining new pence.
Maynard’s Mod Shop, outdated name with outdated clothing, staving off the advance of progress in pastel shades. Radios. Televisions. Gardening Supplies. One bookshop with the window dressed full of romantic fiction, the feeding drug of the dull housewife. Shireston Gazette: Founded 1892.
The area around the market square was a different matter, with buildings dating from a whole range of periods, all certainly before the time of Victoria. The brashness of a new age had not been allowed to pollute here, even so the dead hand of a country Sunday flopped over the scene: a pair of arm-locked lovers, he in best blue and she in Sunday coat, shoes and hat, marched in step across the square, not pausing to glance at the seventeenth century gable ends of buildings, the targets of Tony Holt’s eye, while a policeman bent the knee in watchfulness at the corner.
Tony was undecided about the direction he should explore, his tic of intuition telling him that somewhere here there was a find waiting for him.
The silence of the square was broken by the noise of children who came bubbling in a small flock, school caps, boots, yellow and pink flowered dresses, bully boys and prim little girls, from a narrow side street to the right of where he stood: hands clutched at Sunday School stamp books, telling the year from Advent to the horror of Golgotha.
To Tony this was a clue and he set off in the direction from which the children had come: narrow pavements, barely room for one person to walk, the little street flanked by cottages which Tony could swear were original Elizabethan. He walked the fifty or so yards up the street to where it bent sharply to the left, turned the corner and suddenly came up against the church.
It stood within its own small square of green graveyard, well filled, a squat building, dark-grey stone, its outline full of the heavy Norman style but with a more slender tower than usual, making the total picture one of imbalance. The churchyard itself was surrounded by a low brick wall in which a dark wooden lych-gate was set, certainly much later additions.
Tony pushed open the gate and walked the neatly weeded gravel path to the West door. The door had been much repaired, creaking to let him into the atmosphere of old age, the scent of damp and successive flowers; death. For a second, Tony remembered the tiny Norman church he had discovered in Kent where some lack-humoured cleric had inscribed the altar with the text He is not here.
The interior of Shireston church was small, but made to seem smaller by the large archway, six concentric half circles upon small pillars, the circles ornamented and the whole arch standing between the main body of the church and the chancel. From a position just inside the door one could see up through the arch into the darkened chancel to the altar and what Tony took to be a constantly restored East window depicting the Ascension, Christ in a loin cloth being levitated on a sturdy cloud to the wonder of apostles whose hands were raised as though threatened at gun point. But his attention was quickly drawn away from the deep colours of the window and fastened outside the chancel, to the font which stood before the pillars to the right of the arch.
The font, he thought as he approached it, was probably the most unique item in the church, as it had been fashioned f
rom a large upturned bell, its headstock sunk into a thick square of stone and the marble piscina of the font itself fitted neatly into the rim of the sound-bow. The bell stood some four and a half feet high, the metal boisterously ornamented with leaves and branches, while around the outside of the sound-bow the inscription 1564 Elizabeth Regina 1564 was repeated several times.
A strengthening band of brass was clamped round the bell’s waist, and, on examination, Tony saw the reason: almost directly opposite each other, along the rim of the sound-bow, were two jagged V-shaped tears where the metal had been broken away. From the breaks, hairline cracks traced down either side of the bell. The whole line of the bell, its shape, the decoration, the cracks, the unusual use to which it had been put, made an instant appeal to Tony Holt who examined it for several minutes before he caught sight of a large glass picture frame leaning against the pillars. The frame contained photographs and drawings of the bell, together with two pages of neatly typed folio which told its ironic story.
In the year 1563 the Lord Bishop of Winchester received, from Queen Elizabeth I, a gift of church plate, silk, and other materials including monies and precious metals, both of silver and gold, to be used in the restocking and refurbishing of churches within his jurisdiction.
Certain churches in the diocese were then asked to state their most immediate needs and requirements. The Parish Church of S.S. Peter and Paul, Shireston, was single minded in its request. The church tower contained a small bell chamber but, for some obscure reason, the tower had for all living memory lacked a bell.
