The Rehearsal: A Novel

by Eleanor Catton

  The audience watched him regain his breath in silence. They met his gaze with a kind of wary suspicion, all of them thinking that he was probably a plant, a prearranged assistant who any moment now was going to leap up and laugh and cuff them on the shoulder and say, “I got you good.” They regarded him doubtfully. They were not yet convinced. A few of the students looked around to measure the approval or affirmation of the tutor, but the Head of Acting had gone and they were alone, a baffled motley patch of black in the middle of the gymnasium floor.

  On stage the masked boy was standing impassively, his legs apart, his hands together behind his back. Then in one fluid motion he raised his arm, and two other masked boys ran forward, grabbed the gasping volunteer by his arms, and hauled him to his feet. The first boy ran forward and there was a flurried snipping shoving movement, and then the volunteer boy was shoved to his knees once more and slapped hard across his face. The two boys who were holding him began to tug at his shirt, and Stanley realized that the boy’s clothes had been cut off him, sliced from the hem to the collar up the length of his spine. The masked boys tore away the ragged shirt and jumper, and then darted back, leaving him pale and shirtless and shivering in the middle of the floor.

  The masked boy looked directly at the audience now, as if in challenge. The first-years looked back in bewilderment.

  “That sucks, man,” the volunteer boy said suddenly, looking at the torn remains of his jersey and his shirt wadded in a ragged pile in front of him. His voice was thin. “That’s my favorite shirt.”

  The masked boy didn’t flinch. He kept looking at the audience, as if waiting for somebody to speak. Nobody did. He leaped forward, and the scissors flashed out again, and in a swift careful movement he grabbed a fistful of the volunteer boy’s hair from the top of his head and cut it off with a thick silver snip.

  There was a collective intake of breath from the students on the floor. The masked boy stood holding the clump of brown fur aloft like it was a trophy scalp. Nobody moved. There was a long and horrible pause, and then all of a sudden the volunteer boy jumped up and bolted. The masked boys tried too late to grab him—they missed. He jumped off the edge of the stage and ran out of the gymnasium without looking back.

  The masked boy watched him leave and drew himself up a little higher.

  “This is an exercise in the Theater of Cruelty,” he said. “We are here to show you what it means to really feel something.” He gave an odd little bow and then the curtain fell, whistling swiftly down like a blade. The bottom folds hit the stage floor with a thump and then the first-years were alone in the gymnasium. They could hear the soft apologetic patter of the actors’ feet as on the other side of the curtain they dispersed and then finally disappeared.

  May

  “Come with me,” was all the Head of Movement said when Stanley found him, and Stanley followed his sloping barefoot tread all the way from the courtyard to the office upstairs, both of them silent, Stanley falling back as he tried to swallow and mask his tears. He was surprised at the violence of his feelings.

  “I’ve come to complain,” was all he’d said, standing with his bony knees together and squeezing the blood from his hands. “I can’t find the Head of Acting. I want to complain.”

  Through his distress Stanley found himself a little relieved that he had found the Head of Acting’s office locked and the staffroom empty. The Head of Movement was infinitely more approachable than the older man, who peered through his glasses at the students with a kind of impassive chill and wore short sleeves even in winter, as if he were cold-blooded and felt no difference.

  Now, in the still of the office, the Head of Movement placed his palms together in an entreating way. “Stanley,” he said. “Stanley, what do you think you would do if you paid to go and see a play which included a rape scene, and during this rape scene the assailant began to really rape his victim?”

  “I’d say something,” Stanley said. His voice quavered a little and he reached up to rub his cheek with the heel of his hand.

  “You would not,” said the Head of Movement. He laced his fingers together. “You would shift in your chair and you would think that this was terribly avant-garde but still it really wasn’t your thing and you would marvel at how realistic everything was looking and maybe if you were very uncomfortable you would look around you to see what everyone else was making of it. And then if you really started to feel like something was amiss, maybe if the victim was obviously crying out for help, or if everybody in the audience was clearly feeling uncomfortable, then you might stand up and shout something out. But it would take you a very long time. Most likely by the time you got the courage to fight back, the scene would be over.”

  Stanley was at a loss for what to say.

  “I know it’s a horrible thing to have to imagine,” the Head of Movement said, “but I’m trying to make a point. I’m just trying to point out that if a person is standing onstage in front of an auditorium full of people then ‘real’ is a useless word. ‘Real’ describes nothing on stage. The stage only cares whether something looks real. If it looks real, then whether it is real or not is immaterial. It doesn’t matter. That’s the heart of it.”

  “That’s not what you told us in Movement class,” Stanley said, with rising anger. “You said what was important was truth and not sincerity. All that stuff you said about mime. I believed all that.”

  The Head of Movement sighed and pressed his fingers to his lips. “No,” he said, and paused for a moment, shaking his head and gathering his thoughts together. He drew a weary breath. “No. We’re talking about two different things now.

  “Stanley,” he said, “think how you would feel if you acted in a play in which your character had to die, and after the performance everybody came up to you and said I really believed you, I really honestly believed that you had died. I saw you dead onstage and I felt myself thinking, Oh my God, he’s actually dead. You would be rapt. It would be the best possible compliment anybody could give you: that your pretence, your big game of let’s-pretend, looked so real that somebody actually thought it was real.”

  “But I’m real,” Stanley said, realizing to his displeasure that he was again on the verge of tears. “My performance might be pretend, but I’m not.”

  “That’s exactly it,” said the Head of Movement swiftly. “If you are a good actor, you will be using your emotions, displaying your laughter, your tears, your sexuality, your insecurities. There’s always this doubleness at play. You and the character you are playing both have to be transparent. You have to look through the one to see the other. That is why being an actor is such a difficult job. It really is you up there.”

  “But there wasn’t any doubleness today,” Stanley cried out. His voice was high and tight and choked. “It was just him. It was his shirt they ruined. It was his breath. It was his hair. They were hurting him.”

  “You’re angry because they betrayed you,” the Head of Movement said simply. “They lured you into feeling something truthful and real, and then they destroyed it in front of you.”

  “They betrayed him!” Stanley shouted.

  The Head of Movement sighed and looked down at his hands.

  “Why is this not a problem for you?” Stanley said after a moment, still breathing quickly. “How can it be okay by you that something like this is able to happen?”

  “I understand your anger,” the Head of Movement said. “Please believe that it wasn’t meant to happen in the way that it happened. In fact I don’t think the boys properly understood what they were doing. The manifesto of the Theater of Cruelty is really a lot more complicated and interesting and life-affirming than its name suggests.” He closed his eyes, recalling a loved passage to his mind, and said, “ ‘I have therefore said “cruelty” as I might have said “life” or “necessity” because I want to indicate that there is nothing congealed about it, that I turn it into a true act, hence living, hence magical.’ ” He opened his eyes and smiled sadly at Stanley. “
Artaud,” he said, “in his own words.”

  Stanley sat for a moment, breathing heavily and feeling stalemated. He tried to remember what they had been talking about a few minutes earlier, to renew his argument and try to force the Head of Movement out of this tired apologetic apathy.

  “I like that you had the courage to talk to me,” the Head of Movement said now. “I’ll be speaking to each of those students very seriously so they really understand the emotional impact of what they did.” He blinked at Stanley and waited. The minute hand moved forward with a solemn thock.

  When the Head of Movement was younger he acted for the Free Theater, a mothy ragged band of minstrels and failed gypsies who squatted in derelict houses and camped in parking lots and traveled around the country each year to perform at prisons and rural schools. On the wall above his head were a few snapshots from those days showing greasepaint and street-side juggling and oil-drum fires and scratched guitars. Now he sat bowed with age and a clinging fatigue, reaching up to stroke his thin hair with a dry wrinkled palm, crisp and graying and faded like a piece of parchment left too long in the light.

  “Has it ever happened to you?” Stanley said suddenly. “Like the rape thing. Have you ever gone to see a play where something real happens and everyone just watches and thinks it’s part of the play?”

  “Yes,” the Head of Movement said. “A long time ago. I saw a man die of a heart attack. He was old. The curtain came down, that’s all. They asked us to leave. Everyone left very quietly.”

  “Who was he playing when he died?” Stanley asked.

  “Oh, it was an obscure little play that didn’t do especially well, as I recall,” the Head of Movement said, leaning back in his chair and looking at the ceiling to better conjure up the memory. He was relieved not to have to look at Stanley anymore. “Everything was rather beautiful, in a funny kind of way. He died in the last scene of the play and on closing night. We didn’t know at the time that he was dead—we thought perhaps a stroke. It didn’t look fatal from where I was sitting. But we read about it the next day in the papers.”

  The Head of Movement was rarely asked to recall scenes from his life in this way, and he savored the feeling.

  “The character he was playing was a man who has become rich by impersonating people and forging things and lying. Late in his life he returns home and finds that his family have no memory of him. It was as if he had never existed as a real man. That was roughly the way the story went.

  “I suspect that his character was going to die anyway,” the Head of Movement said, “in the final few pages. But of course I never saw the ending.”

  SEVEN

  Saturday

  The saxophone teacher is waiting for them by the Coke machine. At first Isolde cannot make her out: the Coke machine is the only really memorable landmark in the Town Hall foyer and so it is typically besieged by a throng of waiting strangers who have also arranged to meet friends and family there. Then the crowd thins and Isolde sees her, tall and angular in a brown leather jacket, her hands folded in front of her, studying the people around her with a calm critical up-and-down gaze that Isolde has come to know very well.

  “Hi, Isolde,” the saxophone teacher says when she sees her, and smiles. “Did your mum drop you off?”

  “Yeah,” Isolde says, feeling strange. She has never seen the sax teacher outside her attic studio, and (the thought registers oddly) never at night. She accepts a program and bends her head to read it, affecting more interest than she feels.

  “There she is!” the sax teacher says, waving across the crowd at somebody. “That makes three of us.”

  A group of young musicians jostle past, edging between the sax teacher and Isolde so for a brief moment they are separately marooned in the crowd. The musicians sweep by in a cloud of cigarette smoke and perfume, nebulous and bubbling and clutching each other at the elbow with their slender musician fingers.

  And then the sax teacher says, “Isolde, do you know my student Julia? Julia has been my student for three years now.”

  Isolde looks up. She suffers a sick abdominal jolt of recognition as their eyes meet. Julia’s eyes widen very slightly and her cheeks flush pink.

  “Hi,” Isolde says quickly, struggling to mask a dawning bewildered embarrassment, and Julia nods hello, pressing her lips together in a brief and complicated smile.

  Out of her school uniform Julia looks older. She is wearing a black cardigan and long black skirt, her hair piled casually at the back of her head and coming loose in wisps around her temples. The dour and surly and willful Julia that Isolde saw in the counseling room is all but gone: somehow now she seems more fragile, as if the care she has taken with her appearance has exposed a sensitivity that she had no cause to exhibit before. Isolde’s heart is beating fast.

  “Do you two know each other from school?” the saxophone teacher says curiously, looking from one to the other with new eyes, as if the juxtaposition of the two of them together is making her see elements of each girl that she has never seen before.

  “Sort of,” Julia says quickly. “I’ve seen you around anyway.”

  “Yeah,” says Isolde. “But I didn’t know you played sax.” For some reason the thought of Julia as the saxophone teacher’s comfortable old-time student is strange to her. She startles herself with the realization that the private confidences and successes and failures that she has shared in her lessons each Friday were, for the saxophone teacher, only one recurring episode in weeks and months and years of shared confidences and successes and failures—that she herself is only one among many. Isolde wonders what Julia tells the saxophone teacher when they are alone.

  “Why aren’t you in jazz band?” Isolde asks quickly. Her shyness makes the question sound accusatory. She is aware of the saxophone teacher’s eyes flicking from her to Julia and back again, as if Isolde is the final piece of a puzzle that will enable her to understand Julia, and Julia is the final piece of a puzzle that will enable her to understand Isolde. It makes Isolde hot and uncomfortable, and inside her shoes she squeezes her toes together in frustration.

  “I don’t really have school spirit,” Julia says. “I’m not that kind of person, I guess. If there was something smaller and more underground I might give it a go. I’ve thought about starting a band.”

  “Oh,” Isolde says, wondering at this new concept that you might be good at something but not have to prove it by playing for the school.

  “I played in a band in my first year of university,” the saxophone teacher says. “We had some dreadful name. I can’t even remember what we called ourselves now.”

  “Was it the Sax Kittens?” Julia asks. “Was it Sax, Drums and Rock ’n’ Roll?”

  “We weren’t nearly that clever,” the saxophone teacher says. “God, we were awful. We used to do this thing at the end of each gig that was really easy but it always got the crowd going. I’d stand next to the guy who played tenor and at the end of the song he’d flip his sax around so I’d blow into it while he was still fingering the notes, so we were both playing the one instrument. I suppose it must have looked quite difficult—people always screamed like we were doing something amazing.”

  Julia is grinning now. “You’ve got a dark jazz past,” she says. “You’ve played gigs.”

  “I’ve done some things in my time,” the saxophone teacher says, pretending to be haughty.

  They both turn to Isolde to let her share in their joke, and Isolde smiles quickly.

  “Oh, I remember,” the saxophone teacher says. “We were called the Travesty Players.”

  “What does the Travesty Players mean?” says Isolde.

  “It’s a term from the theater,” the sax teacher says. “A travesty role is a part which is meant to be played by a person of the opposite sex. So if you were going to play Hamlet, the program would say, ‘Isolde in the travesty role of Hamlet.’ ”

  “Oh,” says Isolde.

  “Why did you choose it for your band name?” says Julia.


  “We were all into gender back then,” the saxophone teacher says cheerfully. “Ask your mother.”

  She is lively tonight, but Isolde finds herself shrinking back, finding the intimacy too forceful and defiant, as if the saxophone teacher is a prisoner released for this night only, drawing the girls close to her in a hard and glittering pincer-grip and demanding they share a part in her slender lonely joy. Julia seems at ease, smiling and pressing the saxophone teacher for more details about her dark jazz past, and Isolde regards her jealously.

  Her cardigan is buttoned with gold dome buttons and is unraveling slightly at the hem, giving her a careless scholarly look that makes Isolde feel young and clumsy and naïve. She is wearing a silver turquoise ring on her ink-stained nail-bitten fingers, and tight-knit fishnet stockings underneath her skirt. Isolde drinks it all in and then feels oddly disappointed, looking at this newer, more complete version of Julia who is a whole person and not just an idea of a person. She feels jealous and excluded and even betrayed, as if Julia has no right to exist beyond Isolde’s experience of her.

  Isolde turns her attention back to the program. The soloist is a foreigner, photographed in black and white with his chin on his fist and his saxophone gleaming against his cheek. He looks moody and implacable and gifted. He is playing in front of the symphony orchestra tonight, and pictured opposite is the conductor, a plump jolly man with his baton loose in his hand like an idle dagger.

  “A great soloist,” the saxophone teacher is saying, “is never some perfect airtight freeze-dried package who has studied and studied and studied. A great soloist is always born out of a partnership or a group. A great soloist is always someone who has had something to feed on.”