World of Wonders

by Robertson Davies

  “It also meant some neat work behind the scenes, because there were times when Mr Henry had barely left the stage before the Master came swaggering on through another door. Sir John’s dresser was an expert at getting him out of one coat, waistcoat, boots, and wig and into another in a matter of seconds, and his characterization of the two men was so sharply differentiated that it was art of a very special kind.

  “Twice, a double was needed, simply for a fleeting moment of illusion, and in the brief last scene the double was of uttermost importance, because it was he who stood with his back to the audience, as Mr Henry, while the Guvnor, as the Master, was being dug up and making his terrible accusation. Then—doubles don’t usually get such opportunities—it was the double’s job to put the gun to his head, fire it, and fall at the feet of Miss Alison, under the Master’s baleful eye. And I say with satisfaction that as I was an unusually successful double—or dead spit, as old Frank Moore insisted on saying—I was allowed to fall so that the audience could see something of my face, instead of dying under suspicion of being somebody else.

  “Rehearsals went like silk, because some of the cast were old hands, and simply had to brush up their parts. Frank Moore had played the old Lord of Durrisdeer scores of times, and Eugene Fitzwarren was a seasoned Secundra Dass; Gordon Barnard had played Burke, the Irishman, and built it up into a very good thing; C. Pengelly Spickernell fancied himself as Fond Barnie, a loony Scot who sang scraps of song, and Grover Paskin had a good funny part as a drunken butler; Emilia Pauncefort, who played Madame de Plougastel in Scaramouche, loved herself as a Scots witch who uttered the dire Curse of Durrisdeer—

  Twa Duries in Durrisdeer,

  Ane to bide and ane to ride;

  An ill day for the groom,

  And a waur day for the bride.

  And of course the role of Alison, the unhappy bride of Mr Henry and the pining adorer of the Master, had been played by Milady since the play was new.

  “That was where the difficulty lay. Sir John was still great as the Master, and looked surprisingly like himself in his earliest photographs in that part, taken thirty years before; time had been rougher with Milady. Furthermore, she had developed an emphatic style of acting which was not unacceptable in a part like Climene but which could become a little strong as a high-bred Scots lady.

  “There were murmurs among the younger members of the company. Why couldn’t Milady play Auld Cursin’ Jennie instead of Emilia Pauncefort? There was a self-assertive girl in the company named Audrey Sevenhowes who let it be known that she would be ideally cast as Alison. But there were others, Holroyd and Macgregor among them, who would not hear a word against Milady. I would have been one of them too, if anybody had asked my opinion, but nobody did. Indeed, I began to feel that the company thought I was rather more than an actor who doubled for Sir John; I was a double indeed, and a company spy, so that any disloyal conversation stopped as soon as I appeared. Of course there was lots of talk; all theatrical companies chatter incessantly. On the rehearsals went, and as Sir John and Milady didn’t bother to rehearse their scenes together, nobody grasped how extreme the problem had become.

  “There was another circumstance about those early rehearsals that caused some curiosity and disquiet for a while; a stranger had appeared among us whose purpose nobody seemed to know, but who sat in the stalls making notes busily, and now and then exclaiming audibly in a tone of disapproval. He was sometimes seen talking with Sir John. What could he be up to? He wasn’t an actor, certainly. He was young, and had lots of hair, but he wasn’t dressed in a way that suggested the stage. His sloppy grey flannels and tweed coat, his dark blue shirt and tie like a piece of old rope—hand-woven, I suppose—and his scuffed suede shoes made him look even younger than he was. ‘University man,’ whispered Audrey Sevenhowes, who recognized the uniform. ‘Cambridge,’ she whispered, a day later. Then came the great revelation—‘Writing a play!’ Of course she didn’t confide these things to me, but they leaked from her close friends all through the company.

  “Writing a play! Rumour was busily at work. It was to be a grand new piece for Sir John’s company, and great opportunities might be secured by buttering up the playwright. Reginald Charlton and Leonard Woulds, who hadn’t much to do in Scaramouche and rather less in The Master, began standing the university genius drinks; Audrey Sevenhowes didn’t speak to him, but was frequently quite near him, laughing a silvery laugh and making herself fascinating. Old Emilia Pauncefort passed him frequently, and gave him a stately nod every time. Grover Paskin told him jokes. The genius liked it all, and in a few days was on good terms with everybody of any importance, and the secret was out. Sir John wanted a stage version of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, and the genius was to write it. But as he had never written a play before, and had never had stage experience except with the Cambridge Marlowe Society, he was attending rehearsals, as he said to ‘get the feel of the thing’.

  “The genius was free with his opinions. He thought little of The Master of Ballantrae. ‘Fustian’ was the word he used to describe it, and he made it clear that the era of fustian was over. Audiences simply wouldn’t stand it any more. A new day had dawned in the theatre, and he was a particularly bright beam from the rising sun.

  “He was modest, however. There were brighter beams than he, and the brightest, most blinding beam in the literature of the time was somebody called Aldous Huxley. No, Huxley didn’t write plays. It was his outlook—wry, brilliantly witty, rooted in tremendous scholarship, and drenched in the Ironic Spirit—that the genius admired, and was about to transfer to the stage. In no time he had a tiny court, in which Charlton and Woulds and Audrey Sevenhowes were the leaders, and after rehearsals they were always to be seen in the nearest pub, laughing a great deal. With my very long ears it wasn’t long before I knew they were laughing at Milady and Frank Moore and Emilia Pauncefort, who were the very warp and woof of fustian, and who couldn’t possibly be worked into the kind of play the genius had in mind. No, he hadn’t begun writing yet, but he had a Concept, and though he hated the word ‘metaphysical’ he didn’t mind using it to give a rough idea of how the Concept would take shape.

  “Sir John didn’t know about the Concept as yet, but when it was explained to him he would get a surprise. The genius was hanging around The Master of Ballantrae because it was from a novel by the same chap that had written Jekyll and Hyde. But this chap—Roly says his name was Stevenson, and I’m sure he knows—had never fully shouldered the burden of his own creative gift. This was something the genius would have to do for him. Stevenson, when he had thought of Jekyll and Hyde, had seized upon a theme that was Dostoyevskian, but he had worked it out in terms of what some people might call Romance, but the genius regretfully had to use the word fustian. The only thing the genius could do, in order to be true to his Concept, was to rework the Stevenson material in such a way that its full implications—the ones Stevenson had approached, and run away from in fright—were revealed.

  “He thought it could be done with masks. The genius confessed, with a laugh at his own determination, that he would not attempt the thing at all unless he was given a completely free hand to use masks in every possible way. Not only would Jekyll and Hyde wear masks, but the whole company would wear them, and sometimes there would be eight or ten Jekylls on the stage, all wearing masks showing different aspects of that character, and we would see them exchange the masks of Jekyll—because there was to be no nonsense about realism, or pretending to the audience that what they saw had any relationship to what they foolishly thought of as real life—for masks of Hyde. There would be dialogue, of course, but mostly in the form of soliloquies, and a lot of the action would be carried out in mime—a word which the genius liked to pronounce ‘meem’, to give it the flavour he thought it needed.

  “Charlton and Woulds and Audrey Sevenhowes thought this sounded wonderful, though they had some reservations, politely expressed, about the masks. They thought stylized make-up might do just as well. But the genius wa
s rock-like in his insistence that it would be masks or he would throw up the whole project.

  “When this news leaked through to the other members of the company they were disgusted. They talked about other versions of Jekyll and Hyde they had seen, which did very well without any nonsense about masks. Old Frank Moore had played with Henry Irving’s son ‘H.B.’ in a Jekyll and Hyde play where H.B. had made the transformation from the humane doctor to the villainous Hyde before the eyes of the audience, simply by ruffling up his hair and distorting his body. Old Frank showed us how he did it: first he assumed the air of a man who is about to be wafted off the ground by his own moral grandeur, then he drank the dreadful potion out of his own pot of old-and-mild, and then, with an extraordinary display of snarling and gnawing the air, he crumpled up into a hideous gnome. He did this one day in the pub and some strangers, who weren’t used to actors, left hurriedly and the landlord asked Frank, as a personal favour, not to do it again. Frank had an extraordinarily gripping quality as an actor.

  “Nevertheless, as I admired his snorting and chomping depiction of evil, I was conscious that I had seen even more convincing evil in the face of Willard the Wizard, and that there it had been as immovable and calm as stone.

  “Suddenly, one day at rehearsal, the genius lost stature. Sir John called to him, ‘Come along, you may as well fit in here, mphm? Give you practical experience of the stage, quonk?’, and before we knew what was happening he had the genius acting the part of one of the menservants in Lord Durrisdeer’s household. He wasn’t bad at all, and I suppose he had learned a few things in his amateur days at Cambridge. But at a critical moment Sir John said, ‘Clear away your master’s chair, m’boy; when he comes downstage to Miss Alison you take the chair back to the upstage side of the fireplace.’ Which the genius did, but not to Sir John’s liking; he put one hand under the front of the seat, and the other on the back of the armchair, and hefted it to where he had been told. Sir John said, ‘Not like that, m’boy; lift it by the arms.’ But the genius smiled and said, ‘Oh no, Sir John, that’s not the way to handle a chair; you must always put one hand under its apron, so as not to put a strain on its back.’ Sir John went rather cool, as he did when he was displeased, and said, ‘That may have been all very well in your father’s shop, m’boy, but it won’t do on my stage. Lift it as I tell you.’ And the genius turned exceedingly red, and began to argue. At which Sir John said to the other extra, ‘You do it, and show him how.’ And he ignored the genius until the end of the scene.

  “Seems a trivial thing, but it rocked the genius to his foundations; after that he never seemed to be able to do anything right. And the people who had been all over him before were much cooler after that slight incident. It was the mention of the word ‘shop’. I don’t think actors are particularly snobbish, but I suppose Audrey Sevenhowes and the others had seen him as a gilded undergraduate; all of a sudden he was just a clumsy actor who had come from some sort of shop, and he never quite regained his former lustre. When we dress-rehearsed The Master it was apparent that he knew nothing about make-up; he appeared with a horrible red face and a huge pair of false red eyebrows. ‘Good God, m’boy,’ Sir John called from the front of the house, when this spook appeared, ‘what have you been doing to your face?’ The genius walked to the footlights—inexcusable, he should have spoken from his place on the stage—and began to explain that as he was playing a Scots servant he thought he should have a very fresh complexion to suggest a peasant ancestry, a childhood spent on the moors, and a good deal more along the same lines. Sir John shut him up, and told Darton Flesher, a good, useful actor, to show the boy how to put on a decent, unobtrusive face, suited to chair-lifting.

  “The genius was huffy, backstage, and talked about throwing up the whole business of Jekyll and Hyde and leaving Sir John to stew in his own juice. But Audrey Sevenhowes said, ‘Oh, don’t be so silly; everybody has to learn,’ and that cooled him down. Audrey also threw him a kind word about how she couldn’t spare him because he was going to write a lovely part for her in the new play, and gave him a smile that would have melted—well, I mustn’t be extreme—that would have melted a lad down from Cambridge whose self-esteem had been wounded. It wouldn’t have melted me; I had taken Miss Sevenhowes’ number long before. But then, I was a hard case.

  “Not so hard that I hadn’t a little sympathy for Adele Chesterton, whose nose was out of joint. She was still playing in Scaramouche, but she had not been cast in The Master; an actress called Felicity Larcombe had been brought in for the second leading female role in that. She was one of the most beautiful women I have ever seen anywhere: very dark brown hair, splendid eyes, a superb slim figure, and that air of enduring a secret sorrow bravely which so many men find irresistible. What was more, she could act, which poor Adele Chesterton, who was the Persian-kitten type, could only do by fits and starts. But she was a decent kid, and I was sorry for her, because the company, without meaning it unkindly, neglected her. You know how theatre companies are: if you’re working with them, you’re real, and if you aren’t, you have only a half-life in their estimation. Adele was the waning, and Felicity the waxing, moon.

  “As usual, Audrey Sevenhowes had a comment. ‘Nobody to blame but herself,’ said she; ‘made a Horlicks—an utter Horlicks—of her part. I could have shown them, but—’ Her shrug showed what she thought of the management’s taste. ‘Horlicks’ was a word she used a lot; it suggested ‘ballocks’ but avoided a direct indecency. Charlton and Woulds loved to hear her say it; it seemed delightfully daring, and sexy, and knowing. It was my first encounter with this sort of allurement, and I disliked it.

  “I mentioned to Macgregor that Miss Larcombe seemed a very good, and probably expensive, actress for her small part in The Master. ‘Ah, she’ll have a great deal to do on the tour,’ he replied, and I pricked up my ears. But there was nothing more to be got out of him about the tour.

  “It was all clear before we opened The Master, however; Sir John was engaging a company to make a longish winter tour in Canada, with a repertoire of some of his most successful old pieces, and Scaramouche as a novelty. Holroyd was asking people to drop into his office and talk about contracts.

  “Of course the company buzzed about it. For the established actors a decision had to be made: would they absent themselves from London for the best part of a winter season? All actors under a certain age are hoping for some wonderful chance that will carry them into the front rank of their profession, and a tour in Sir John’s repertoire wasn’t exactly it. On the other hand, a tour of Canada could be a lark, because Sir John was known to be a great favourite there and they would play to big audiences, and see a new country while they did it.

  “For the middle-aged actors it was attractive. Jim Hailey and his wife Gwenda Lewis jumped at it, because they had a boy to educate and it was important to them to keep in work. Frank Moore was an enthusiastic sightseer and traveller, and had toured Australia and South Africa but had not been to Canada since 1924. Grover Paskin and C. Pengelly Spickernell were old standbys of Sir John’s, and would cheerfully have toured Hell with him. Emilia Pauncefort wasn’t likely to get other offers, because stately old women and picturesque hags were not frequent in West End shows that season, and the Old Vic, where she had staked out quite a little claim in cursing queens, had a new director who didn’t fancy her.

  “But why Gordon Barnard, who was a very good leading man, or Felicity Larcombe, who was certain to go to the top of the profession? Macgregor explained to me that Barnard hadn’t the ambition that should have gone with his talent, and Miss Larcombe, wise girl, wanted to get as much varied experience as she could before descending on the West End and making it hers forever. There was no trouble at all in recruiting a good company, and I was glad to sign my own contract, to be assisttant to Mac and play doubles without having my name on the programme. And to everybody’s astonishment, the genius was offered a job on the tour, and took it. So eighteen actors were recruited, not counting Sir John and Mi
lady, and with Holroyd and some necessary technical staff, the final number of the company was to be twenty-eight.

  “The work was unrelenting. We opened The Master of Ballantrae, and although the other critics were not warm about it Agate gave it a push and we played a successful six weeks in London. God, what audiences! People came out of the woodwork to see it, and it seemed they had all seen it before and couldn’t get enough of it. ‘It’s like peeping into the dark backward and abysm of time,’ the genius said, and even I felt that in some way the theatre had been put back thirty years when we appeared in that powerful, thrilling, but strangely antique piece.

  “Every day we were called for rehearsal, in order to get the plays ready for the tour. And what plays they were! The Lyons Mail and The Corsican Brothers, in both of which I doubled for Sir John, and Rosemary, a small play with a minimum of scenery, which was needed to round out a repertoire in which all the other plays were big ones, with cartloads of scenery and dozens of costumes. I liked Rosemary especially, because I didn’t double in it but I had a showy appearance as a stilt walker. How we sweated! It was rough on the younger people, who had to learn several new parts during days when they were working a full eight hours, but Moore and Spickernell and Paskin and Miss Pauncefort seemed to have been playing these melodramas for years, and the lines rolled off their tongues like grave old music. As for Sir John and Milady, they couldn’t have been happier, and there is nothing so indestructibly demanding and tireless as a happy actor.

  “Did I say we worked eight hours? Holroyd and Macgregor, with me as their slave, worked much longer than that, because the three plays we were adding to Scaramouche and The Master had to be retrieved from storage and brushed up and made smart for the tour. But it was all done at last, and we closed in London one Saturday night, with everything finished that would make it possible for us to sail for Canada the following Tuesday.