by Bill Adams
Strange. But at this last moment, in a sentence, the Pretender had made me wonder anew what the play meant to him. And as I moved into the performance I seemed to rediscover it, from moment to moment, as a reflection of that brilliant but disordered mind…
It was eight o’clock. Act One, Scene One.
Manfred is alone on a raised round platform with a low and crenellated stone wall, the top of the highest turret of his castle, within a chalked magic figure. The vast and starry night sky is the true back wall of the stage, its glass-faced elevator shaft invisible in the dark. The play begins with my audition speech.
…Philosophy and Science, and the springs
Of wonder, and the wisdom of the world,
I have essayed. I’ve been a benefactor,
And battle’s victor too. It is all one.
The revelation of a single hour
Has left me desolate of fear—or love—
For anything still left upon the earth.
Now he commands the “spirits of the unbounded Universe” to appear, calling upon them by a book of charms, then by a magic ring, and finally, when those fail, in his own name:
…by a power,
Deeper than all yet urged, a tyrant-spell,
Which had its birthright in a star condemned,
The burning wreck of a demolished world,
A wandering hell within eternal space;
By the strong curse which is upon my soul,
The thought which is within me and around me,
I do compel you to my will—appear!
Various spirits introduce themselves with luminous special effects. The most powerful is that of Manfred’s birth star. For the first time, I noticed some of the emphases the Pretender had enjoined upon the actor:
The star which rules your destiny
Was ruled, ere Earth began, by me:
It was a planet fresh and fair
In plains and forests, seas and air;
A pearl that space held next to none,
A pendant round a lovely sun.
The hour arrived—and it became
A wandering mass of shapeless flame,
A pathless comet, and a curse,
The menace of the universe;
Still rolling on with innate force,
Without a sphere, without a course.
And you—beneath its influence born—
You worm—whom I obey and scorn—
Forced by a power you only wield
On loan, for which your fate is sealed,
For this brief moment I descend
Amid weak spirits you can bend
And parley with a thing like you—
Child of Clay, what must I do?
Manfred asks the spirits for “Forgetfulness” and “Oblivion, self-oblivion” for a sin he cannot name. They cannot promise him forgetfulness even in death. They offer him treasure and power instead; he scorns them. But before sending them away, he says:
I would behold you face to face. I see
The steady aspect of a clear large star;
But nothing more. Approach me as you are.
A lesser spirit replies:
We have no forms, but mirror forth your mind.
You choose a form—in that we will appear.
Manfred carelessly says that there is no form on earth hideous or beautiful to him. The Birth Star assumes the shape of a beautiful young woman. [That is, swirling colors projected on a scrim dimmed out while a bright light gradually came up on Julia, who had been standing in darkness behind the gauze screen until now.] At the sight of the shining, slightly misty image of his sister Astarte, Manfred falls for the cruel hoax:
Oh God! If it be she! If you
Are not a madness and a mockery,
I might yet be most happy. Let me hold
You close again—
The figure vanishes.
—My love! You crush my heart.
Manfred falls senseless, and the triumphant Birth Star utters its curse over him. [The Pretender had removed the thees and thous, and made other changes as well.]
…You’ll be wrapped as with a shroud,
A black and circumscribing cloud,
Forever after left to dwell
Within a bubble world of hell.
Within your brain I found the charm,
Your broken past, its power to harm;
In testing every poison known,
I found the strongest was your own.
I call upon you!—and compel
Your self to be your proper Hell!
Blackout, as the three-story castle interior is rotated into place: two ground-floor rooms, seemingly connected to many others extending offstage; a long dining hall above them; and—perched atop that on the stage-center side—the base of a narrower cylindrical tower, apparently one of four corner turrets on a very large castle.
Scene Two. When the lights come up again, Manfred is treading down circular stairs through the tower whose top the audience saw in the previous scene. Unlike the lower floors, whose audience-side wall is cut away for obvious reasons, this tower presents a curving stone outer face. But a large arched window provides an interior view as well: a dark, book-lined study; the top of a desk with a candle and skull on it; and Manfred on the stairs behind.
He descends past the second-story dining hall into the more center-stage of the two ground-floor rooms, an entrance hall.
Diego and Jacquez, a pair of allegedly comic idiot servants out of Walpole, come to him in superstitious fear. We learn that Manfred’s father, also named Manfred, has died recently enough for people to fear his ghost. Our Manfred has inherited his father’s title of local prince, though not the title of Emperor, which the Electors will probably settle on the ruler of some other province. But the dead Emperor is not out of the story yet.
The servants report that the Emperor’s giant suit of black armor has mysteriously moved from the family crypt up to the room next door, where the audience can see its baleful form standing like a man. Can it have walked on its own? The servants are too afraid to confront it, but Manfred claims to fear nothing, and takes a step toward the room. Just when the servants tell him that the Emperor’s widow, Manfred’s stepmother Bel-Imperia, wants to see him before he approaches the thing, he shakes his head and leaves the castle for a hike in the mountains. Blackout, and the castle set swings aside again.
Scene Three. Morning on the cliffs of the Jungfrau—a cyclorama of mountains against a sky-blue flat that conceals the back wall and elevator.
Manfred issues a series of Romantic speeches—trimmed down, to good effect, from Byron’s original—about the wonders of nature, the fallen state of man, and his own unhappiness. The abyss before him tempts him to suicide, although
I fear it my fatality to live—
If it be life to bear before myself
An empty mirror-frame; for I have ceased
To justify my deeds unto myself—
The last infirmity of evil men.
At the brink, he is rescued by a darkly-tanned young man, who catches him by the hair. This is [Ivan as] Theo, a hunter of wild goats, who can see from Manfred’s clothes that he is a rich man. Theo claims that this bleak world can still be saved.
Scene Four. One of the lower castle rooms, dimly lit on an otherwise dark stage and with a new complement of props, doubles as Theo’s cottage.
Wanting to learn more about his new friend, Theo tries to loosen his tongue with wine. But this just sets Manfred off:
Away, away! There’s blood upon the brim.
My blood—and hers. My love! The pure warm stream
Which ran in Father’s veins, and mine and yours
When we were in our youth, and had one heart,
And loved each other as we should not love…
[The audience’s silence was so absolute, and the drops of spilled wine so much like blood, that I imagined at any moment we would all hear Van Damm’s tortured screams coming
up through the floorboards. But the break in my voice fit Manfred’s ranting:]
I never quelled an enemy except
When forced—But my embrace in love was fatal.
Manfred goes on about the epochs that seem to have passed since then, “space and eternity and consciousness.” Though Theo thinks him a “Man of strange words, and some half-maddening sin,” he recklessly tries to enlist Manfred’s fortune in support of a revolutionary group, the Carbonari. The countryside is up in arms, he explains, with rumors that the late Emperor was murdered by his son, a dissolute poet and black magician. Now, while the other princes of the empire compete against each other for the favor of the Electors, is the perfect time to get rid of this monster Manfred and establish a democracy within his principate.
Manfred, darkly amused, asks whether the Carbonari are led by substantial men or fools, and soon extracts the names of all the substantial men from Theo, the fool. Then he departs.
The lights remain fixed on the same area of the stage, but the turntable rotates the castle entrance hall through them, and the audience catches a lightning-fast Scene Five: Diego and Jacquez’s conversation about the continued ghostly prowlings of the Emperor’s armor is interrupted by a peasant messenger sent from Manfred with the list of Carbonari members, and instructions concerning them. As the servants pass out of sight, lights come up on the full stage.
Scene Six—back amid the mountains, while a bright milk-glass moon rises within a lurid sunset orchestrated by the lighting director. The newly exposed side of the castle turntable represents a waterfall, and from its mists Manfred summons a Witch of the Alps [Julia with a different makeup and voice]. Manfred hints again at the nature of his sin and his torments since, concluding
I dwell in my despair
And live forever. Aid me, if your power
Can wake the dead, or lay me low with them.
Do so—in any shape—in any hour—
With any torture—so it be the last.
Luring him with her ever-increasing resemblance to Astarte, the witch says that she does not have such power. But at midnight she will attend the festival of spirits at the Hall of Ahrimanes. Perhaps if Manfred is willing to swear obedience to the fallen god or devil Ahrimanes—
Manfred will never submit to another will. But he would like to know the way to the Hall. The witch refuses to answer, and as full darkness falls, she joins the stream of witches and spirits that is boiling up the mountainside and into the night sky [Chinese magic tricks accompanied by the spirits’ boasting songs].
Manfred questions the creatures of the night as they pass, trying to learn the way to the Hall by pretending to be a spirit himself. Who? “Why, Nemesis, the hand of destiny,” he replies.
I’ll be detained: repairing shattered thrones,
Restoring dynasties, and from the dull
Shaping out oracles to rule the world
Afresh, for they were waxing out of date.
Now mortals dare to question kings, and speak
Of freedom, the forbidden fruit—
What spell
Will give me access at the midnight hour?
They tell him which grimoire to consult, and he leaves, but they have recognized him, and laugh. They tell each other that his father’s ghost is stalking him, and that Theo is his half-brother, a bastard begotten on a peasant girl, who plans to use the Carbonari to install himself as a dictator. And the spirits are confident that if the Emperor’s armor takes Manfred’s life, and Theo his place, Ahrimanes will obtain his soul:
Father, son, and hellish spirit,
A trinity, or something near it.
They’ll triumph: Chaos hates to see
A single soul whose will is free.
And so, exactly where it should—with all the plates balanced up high and spinning, and no certainty which way they’ll fall—the curtain comes down on Act One.
Rolling volleys of enthusiastic applause. Intermission.
◆◆◆
There are two classes of actors at an intermission: the ones who don’t want to speak to anyone, and the ones who have to say, “I think it’s going well, don’t you? Don’t you think it’s going well?” to each other. After a few moments, they sort each other out.
Julia approached, her face aglow, but one shake of my head and she knew enough to pass me by.
Nine-fifteen. A good, fat, twelve-minute intermission.
Van Damm would have broken a few hours ago, giving up my secrets first, though Malatesta, with nearly two more hours to kill, would no doubt be bleeding him of whatever he knew about the whole Tribunal. But behind the curtain the utility lights left no shadows I could sneak through, and stagehands crossed past the elevator constantly, rescuing abandoned props—I marked where Ivan’s mountain-climbing rope was hung—and putting new ones into place.
A good thing I hadn’t counted on the intermission.
Renfrew appeared before me, his choked voice trying to express pleasure. “The Boss sent a note, he thinks it’s going—”
I put my hands over my ears; he withdrew his head like a tortoise and scurried off.
What did the Boss think, when he was alone at night, doubting the existence of the world because even his own identity didn’t ring true? What was the play trying to tell me?
Sure, you could read him as Manfred, and the dead Emperor as a dark version of resurrected Summerisle, the Consultant. Theo would be the bastard image of Larkspur as Kanalists saw him: the revolutionary firebrand, threatening to usurp the name of the real, less political, Larkspur. Bel-Imperia was obviously the Domina of today, and Astarte might be how the Pretender imagined her girlhood—after all, whoever he was, he hadn’t actually known her. Point-by-point allegory is dull stuff, and he had source materials to keep faith with; but it was easy to see what he was saying about his life, his struggle to find his own Larkspur to be. It fit with the Scandia raid tonight—his own revolution, not the old man’s.
But only a fool or a critic could ever be sure.
The trouble is that story plots are like Tarot cards; they “mirror forth your mind” at every facet, if you look into them deeply enough. To me, of course, the reckless young double leading the revolution would be the Pretender. The holy Abbot who counsels Manfred in the next act—that would be Summerisle. And what are spooks? Secret agents, of course, working for Ahrimanes Von Bülow. Meanwhile the other force from the dead past uses a giant suit of armor for its agent—the Few’s Malatesta to the life. The women would be trickier to work in, but surely I was the perfect Manfred—the man in the middle, playing the game well but without a goal, nothing to win, no place in the world.
An interpretation is just an epitaph. The true play can only be appreciated live, on stage. It has a mind and spirit of its own, distinct even from the author’s, as a child may differ from a parent.
I could never know the Pretender. I could only know my part.
Fair enough. I stopped by my dressing room, tried on the loaded magician’s cape, swore, and removed it. I’d been crazy to think Olivia wouldn’t detect its added bulk during the seduction scene; I’d have to make the switch after that, somehow. Only one way, and I had to act now. I put on the original Manfred cape, then the magician’s cape over it, and walked back out onto the stage. It was nearly empty, one minute before curtain-rise. But Renfrew was still there, checking last-second details with his wristcomp.
“Are the matches in the right place?” I asked him.
His whole body flinched. “What?”
“In the study. To light the candle. At the technical, I couldn’t find the matches in the dark.”
A strangled croak. “They’re in the right place.”
“I’ll check. Don’t worry, I’m fast.”
He made a spastic little attempt to stop me, but I was already dashing for the castle turntable. I left the magician’s cape high on the circular staircase, out of audience sight, came straight back down, and hit my marks as the curtain rose on Act T
wo. Perhaps my last act.
◆◆◆
Act Two, Scene One. Within the castle.
Manfred arrives, and is met on the ground floor by his servants. They whine about the Emperor’s armor, whose supernatural travels have taken it upstairs. Could its inexorable rising motion have anything to do with the old prophecy that says, “If a false prince of Otranto should rise too high, he shall be cut off from the earth?” “Whom do you have in mind—if mind you have?” Manfred asks. Dead silence. Manfred asks after the men he’s had arrested, the leaders of the Carbonari. They should arrive at any time. Good, Manfred says—when they do, lead them into the dining hall upstairs. The servants warn him that the armor is also there.
Scene Two. The dining hall.
The great black suit of armor stands menacingly at the far end of the room. Manfred unhesitatingly marches up to it.
I cannot fear to face you dead whom oft
I braved in life. No answer? Maybe I
Have yet to rise too high. Or was it you
Who were cut off—for high-flown Empery?
He insolently raises the helmet’s beaver and looks inside.
Only my own reflection—and that’s dim;
In both respects, though, much resembling him.
He pulls a curtain across that end of the hall, concealing the effigy.
His widowed stepmother Bel-Imperia enters. [Olivia Viviani, looking ten years younger and ten centimeters bustier under the lights.] She warns him against confronting the armor, wherever it is now. It is her way of letting him know that she suspects him of killing the Emperor, in revenge for
