Shadowplay

by Joseph O'Connor

  What this means, in effect, is that many of the younger players are in the habit of wandering about gaily in a state of not inconsiderable déshabillé, the girls in undergarments and sometimes rather revealing bodices, the muscular boys in hosiery or waist-wrapped towels, without shirts. And, since a certain amount of pulchritude is expected in a theatre, the backstage has a particular atmosphere, like a hothouse.

  What is odd is that none of the orchids seem to notice the steam but blithely saunter about the wings, or in and out of each other’s dressing rooms or the Green Room for a smoke, whistling, jabbering, eating sandwiches, mullarking, modesty protected by only the flimsiest of robes. In addition, they are in the custom of administering massages to each other, sometimes with oils or unguents, and of helping each other with stretching and bending exercises.

  ‘Be not righteous overmuch,’ Ecclesiastes counsels. Wisely.

  It is not that these youngsters’ innocence is not delightful, in its way, but even in Eden there were limits. And we do have such a frequency of visitors to backstage – locksmiths, delivery boys, master joiners, so on – and they are not accustomed to unselfconscious eccentricity in the middle of the day, although one boiler cleaner quipped that he was. ‘Having worked in the House of Lords.’

  This afternoon, for example, Miss Bowe, Miss Hughes and Miss Blennerhassett were onstage running through the opening scene of the three witches – ‘when shall we three meet again, in thunder lightning or in rain’ – the wardrobe mistress on her knees measuring them for their expensive and somewhat scanty costumes as they did so. Her measuring-tape was attracting a number of envious looks from a Mancunian upholsterer who had come in to fix the Royal Box and almost stabbed himself through the hand with his needle. I myself was thinking a different but not unrelated thought: So much money for so little silk.

  Young Harker was stood upstage, his pink face rapt. He looked like an accordion someone had recently played hard. I believe he has eyes for Miss Blennerhassett. I wandered over to him and attempted tactfully to distract his attention by showing him a conjuring trick I have learned with playing cards and a sixpence, but he did not seem to be as interested in my conjuring as he was in Miss Blennerhasset’s. I remarked that while she was undoubtedly a pleasant and sprightly girl, I myself did not reckon her among the leading players we have in the company.

  ‘I believe she has hidden qualities, sir,’ he said, with a stressed smile.

  She was not quite hiding them at that moment.

  It is good to be of an age when these silly distractions come and go but do not preoccupy one at all.

  16th February, 1879

  Have resolved to stop scribbling notes on the frontispieces of books. Bad, slovenly habit.

  Awoke in a mood of great joy, breakfasted with Flo. Read to her, Petrarch’s sonnet Aura che quelle chiome bionde et crespe. My Dubbalin Italian made her laugh.

  Walked to work flooded with a strange magnanimity of spirit, wished there was some acquaintance that had done me a wrong and needed forgiveness. But I could not think of anyone.

  Good hard day. Macbeth coming well. The Chief utterly enthralling at rehearsal.

  Afterwards he asked to see me a moment. Offered congratulations about Flo, said he wished to pay all doctoring expenses, his man was the best in London. I said I could not accept this offer, generous though it was, and he said Flo and I were to bear it in mind all the same. I said we would.

  This evening I was in my office writing letters for our forthcoming New York tour, when Patrick ‘Pigeon’ O’Shaughnessy, the Stagehand Captain, came in like a bad smell from a drain in August. He is not a sort I like, indeed I should wish to be rid of him, for he drinks and I suspect steals and makes a nuisance of himself with some of the girls but one must be careful as to what one shows. When Pigeon is in the room, one would need eyes in one’s arse.

  Asked me if I had done anything about ‘that other matter, sor’ and I said that I had not as yet. He meant the fact that we have an urgent requirement for more storage rooms for our scenery. He is one of those Irishmen who enjoy making you reach conclusions.

  An hour later, I was smoking a cigarette in the street behind the dock and looking up at the stars when along came young Harker, a pleasant sight. He was wearing his blue suit, which I always like to see him in, and a rakish cap like a pretend fisherman’s. We passed the time together with my pointing out Orion and the Great Bear to him – he said to me, a little flirtatiously, ‘you are a great bear yourself, sir’ and I said I should have to put him across my knee and give him a paddling if he spoke to me so naughtily and we shared a brief laugh and a manly clap about the shoulders – and then I said we would have to think in a more purposeful manner on how to solve the storage conundrum.

  I asked how he was coming along with a task I have given him, which is to sort out and systemise the keys. The Lyceum has, by my reckoning, approximately one hundred and fifty doors, and the score or so of massive iron rings we possess, each of several dozen keys, long, short, thick, rusted, make no sense that I can see, if ever they did. Easier to unravel the Gordian knot. But my Harks is a determined boy.

  He led me into the nook in backstage that he has made his own, a little L-shaped cubbyhole that he has shelved and fitted out ingeniously with all his paints, sketchbooks, fabrics, so on, even a hammock, and there, on his workbench, I was delighted to see the fruits of his toiling. He has labelled every last key and bought new hoops, one for each floor, and so now we may see what we have.

  As he went through them, explaining, he came to an uncommonly large black cast-iron key, approximately nine inches long, which, he said, was for ‘Mina’s Lair’. I did not know to what his queer phrase adverted, and he smiled at me puckishly. There is something quite kissable about him at such moments.

  ‘Mina’s Lair’ was the name given by the older stagehands to an ancient warren of cellars located beneath the north-eastern end of the dock. I asked if this might provide a solution to our difficulty, if the cellar-system might be cleaned out and employed as the scenery store. Even if it took some considerable work to do it, the site would have the twin advantages of adjacency and inexpensiveness. He shook his head with great gravity and said the men would not go down there.

  I asked why not.

  ‘Mina was a maidservant what was murdered there, Mr Stoker, sir, in the old queen’s time. Was once a row of fine mansions where the docks is now, see, but they burned. Scottish girl, in service, fell in with a viscount and then a baby come along and he strangled the both of them and walled ’em up in the cellar. Bad luck to disturb her.’

  ‘Superstitious ruddy nonsense,’ I chuckled. ‘Hand me that key, you silly flapdoodle.’

  ‘I should really rather not, sir.’

  ‘Oh, rot me, lad, do it now.’

  He did as I had requested but looked so apprehensive that he made me laugh. Indeed he grew green as an old pork pie. He was a man of the world, he insisted (which made me chuckle, he being so young), but the backstage lads would have their stories. It was said that, last time the door had been opened, thirty years ago now, the charwoman who turned the key had burst into flameand run screaming through a closed window. An upside-down cross had been daubed on her tombstone. Weird cries, whimpers and ‘scratchings’ had been reported from behind the door, not by any of the lads themselves but by others who delivered to us intermittently or were on the premises to perform some service or another. A Roman Catholic priest from St Patrick’s, Soho Square, had once come in to attend an actor who had fallen ill and was approaching his end. The good Father had pleaded with the stagehands to take the man out of ‘this accursed place’ and had been seen to sprinkle the door with holy water, uttering the rite of exorcism as he did so. I told Harker not to be ridiculous but he would not be commanded. Indeed, he made an excuse when I asked him to accompany me, pleading an appointment with the curtain-makers (which I know he did not have). So, off I moseyed alone.

  It took a while to locate the door to whic
h he was referring – truly we ought to number them all – but finally, after some error and trial, there it was: small, of black-stained oak, one would need to stoop to go through it, in a narrow brick corridor at the very back of the loading-dock, a gap one would pass without noticing. It amused me to see, when I looked closely at the spy-hole, that some wag had carved a capital ‘M’ and a skull-and-crossbones into one of the planks, many years ago, presumably.

  It was clear to me, as I ventured to turn the long key without snapping it, that the door had indeed not been opened in quite some time. Spiders had nested in the architrave. The door itself felt massively heavy. But then I saw that it had slipped its top hinges and was in fact resting on the floor slates. With strenuous effort I managed to lift it back on to its bolts, pushing it open at the same time.

  The source of the infamous scrabbling was soon revealed. Our old London friend, Rattus norvegicus, was much in evidence. We, his fellow citizens, always seem so afraid of this nuzzler, and disgusted by his rummaging, rapacious curiosity, but, while I would not claim to love him and crave his guesthood in my house I am content enough to share the world with him. He must do as he must, and did not ask to be here. Unlike Man, he does not murder the females of his race, nor ever is he cruel to his own.

  Before me I had expected to see a staircase descending into the cellars but what I discerned through the murk was in fact the precise opposite. In a small vestibule, a simple, unvarnished, steep wooden stairs without banister led not downward but up. Like an idiot, I found myself calling out ‘hello up there?’ Unsurprisingly (indeed happily), no reply came back. Lighting my lamp, I began to climb.

  This soon led to a second flight, then a third and fourth, each course reversing over the one preceding it. The woodwork was rudimentary, here and there quite splintery, and the odour of old dust, while not unpleasant, was intense, even though (strange) it did not interfere with my breathing, in fact the air tasted cold and vivifying. At ten flights, I lost count. Several times during my climb I was but inches from the old roof-slates and could hear, from as it seemed very far below me, the cries of a glue boiler and a berry seller down in the street, and the warble of nesting pigeons on the ledges and gutters outside.

  O strange and magical country! One felt a veritable Gulliver-on-the-Strand. Spread before me were a number of lengthy connected attics, perhaps two hundred yards long in total, divided here and there by chimney-stacks and pillars, illuminated by shafts of dull daylight from dirty windows in the roof. Here and about lay old trunks, broken caskets, lengths of carpet, and everywhere great curtain-like sheaths of inch-thick spider-web which I had to employ my penknife to slash through as I made my way along. It was evident that no human had set foot here in decades.

  Many alcoves of crumbling masonry gave the eyrie the atmosphere of a queer sort of catacomb and, in some of these, boxes of old mildewed books and other trash had been dumped. The effect of my lamp’s red-yellow flame refracted in the curtains of spider-web was remarkable, seeming to spread itself like a miasma of dancing silhouettes and penumbras. Near a chimney-stack I happened across the ruins of what I presently recognised as a large harp, wrenched, as it seemed, into three distinct parts but its rusted thicket of strings yet knotting the poor trinity together. It made me sad to see that. I said a prayer of my own sort for fallen brother harp, the emblem of my country, after all is said and done, and for whoever’s hands had long ago made him sing.

  Onward I pressed into the strange-lit murk, through the cooing of the pigeons and the drip of ancient pipes, treading with no small caution for, here and about, there were holes or loose boards in the floor so that one could see the skeletal cross-beams and joists underfoot. Again, one heard many scuttlings and sudden scratchings from the darkness as I disturbed it, but those did not bother me much.

  From a rafter dangled a family of leering marionettes, the king, queen and one-eyed jack of spades, but so splattered with bird dirt that I did not want to cut them down, every part of their paint faded and powdered away, leaving them pale as the ash or willow from which they were hewn but for their cheeks still red as the cold.

  More trunks, then, in stacks, and oh – macabre sound – a string of jester’s bells twisting dully in the breeze. An overturned old throne was my next discovery, its cushions and backrest quite gnawed away to tatters. I set it up on its legs and it seemed to peer at me forlornly, but not without a smidgeon of regal grace, as I pushed on. Rain was making its pleasant sussuration on the ancient slates above me but then suddenly it stopped. My Lilliput fell silent.

  I had by then made my way to the furthest end of what I had thought the main attic’s extent, but now, to my surprise, I saw that it turned a corner. Into the short limb of the capital L, I pressed.

  Here it was darker, for there were no roof windows or mullions. The odour was different, like old straw, but my lamp found out nicely made stone walls – small, black stones like little cobbles or pieces of anthracite – which admitted no moisture I could see.

  Near me, I noticed a length of yard-knotted hemp-rope dangling from what appeared to be a hatch-door in the ceiling. Placing my lamp on a crate, I tried the line with my hands. My tugs told me it was fast and, in probability, sound. It took little enough effort (though I was glad of my gymnasium days) to shin-and-knee up its length, and when I pushed at the hatch door it opened backwards with a slam.

  Out I clambered. Down a short length of fixed iron ladder and – marvellous! – I found myself standing on the breeze-blown roof of the theatre, with the most splendid and inspiriting vista imaginable before me, of London and the river, all the way south-easterly to the domes of what I think must be the naval college at Greenwich, beyond that the farmlands and forests of north Kent.

  Wind-slapped, still not satisfied, I eased my way gingerly up the slates of the very apex of the nearest point and perched there a while, exhausted, happy, the Lyceum Theatre between my thighs as it might be, the weathercocks spinning on many a rooftop around me, gusts of river breeze smacking vivacity back into my face, the stern, magisterial beauty of the steeples and chimney pots in the smoky distance and the mountainous turrets of black and russet clouds.

  Already a crescent moon like a phantom’s grin was visible thousands of miles above Piccadilly. Below me, in the windows of offices, I could see clerks and other poor drudges at their work, hurrying to and fro, but none of them knew I was there. It occurred to me that, at this moment, not one solitary person on this planet was aware of where I was, an odd thought but for some reason intensely pleasing. Indeed I found myself overcome, tearful for the joy of such a solitude. I do not know why that should be.

  Presently, I must descend from my roost. This I did going slowly, with care, across the dampened mossy slates, and down through the hatch-door, closing it after me. The light of the attic seemed somehow to have changed, refreshed by the air, or perhaps it was merely that now I saw it differently.

  On the raked floor of a narrow alcove or declivity sat a long wooden box, in some ways resembling a coffin but longer, wider, of humbler wood than we use for that purpose. Say a packing chest. It was nothing extraordinary yet there was some aura the object transmitted, a queer magnetism that refused to let me leave. On the lid, strange figures were carved, with proportion and precision, so that they must mean something, but I did not know what.

  I made a note of them.

  Alas, poor humankind. The wellspring of all troubles is that, once seen, a box must be opened.

  But my schoolyard spooks were misplaced. There had been no need for alarm. The box contained nothing but earth – rich, loamy and black – which clearly had been employed at one time as ballast.

  I sank my fingers in and as quickly recoiled, seeing the dirt was wriggling with pale white slugs, fat as Weymouth oysters and almost as horrid. But then I reflected that these, too, like Friend Rat, must live. We can cross the oceans by steam, build tremendous bridges, dredge tunnels, construct terrible machines of war, cure sicknesses, crush ignoran
ce, and we can redden the map of the world with the scarlet of royal England, but we cannot make life. Except on the page.

  It was at this moment, or soon thereafter, that I happened to glance at my watch, assuming forty minutes or so to have passed. To my astonishment, I had been in the upperworld more than three and a half hours. Far below me, the play was about to begin.

  THE VOICE OF ELLEN TERRY

  … But a dreadful lot has been made of how changeable Harry could be. It’s true, he had moods and dark humours by the bucketload. To be fair to him, which people who didn’t know him sometimes aren’t, he was actually rather human in that way. Just wasn’t as good at hiding it.

  What’s that?

  No, Harry wasn’t discourteous, dear, I don’t think that’s quite fair. In some ways he was uncommonly decent and fair-minded. Small thing: it was always the case in London theatre that the backstage was governed by the Chief Stagehand, it was he who set the rules and generally ran how everyday things were done and employed the casuals and so on. Home Rule, if you like. It’s an important tradition. Well, the men working backstage would pin up postcards of a certain sort, you know, from Paris. Some were innocent enough, I suppose one might term them a little risqué, but others were too frank, like something out of a ruddy medical textbook. Tiresome, but it was permitted in every theatre in England. You looked the other way or got used to it.

  Wouldn’t put up with it nowadays, darling. Burn their theatre down for them first. It’s in every contract I sign, ‘the backstage will be suitable, by Miss Terry’s standards’. Well, you have to let them know who’s the talent.

  They’re not paying to see you, chum. They are paying to see me. So I’d better not be inconvenienced. Or it’s curtains.

  To his credit, Harry wouldn’t have it at the Lyceum, he let it be known. Famously, he said to the Chief Stagehand or someone: ‘What they look at on their own shilling is none of my affair, but my backstage is a workplace, not a gin-shop, and we have women working here. The men may pin up anything that would not upset my mother. And my mother is a damn sensitive lady, I warn you.’