Every year at least one of the students complained about the Theater of Cruelty exercise. The lesson fell into the Head of
Acting’s domain and mostly it was he who took the distressed
student into his office and soothed any lasting damage. Some
years, as with this one, he contrived a reason to leave the class at the last minute, scuttling up the back staircase to the
lighting booth above the gymnasium to watch the students from behind the darkened glass. The view was always different. One
year the victim-student had been able to wrestle free and fight back, and several of the students on stage had been seriously
hurt; another year, the watching students stormed the stage in a mass rescue. But lately, year by year, the acting students
had been losing something—a readiness to
act
, he thought, without irony. Take this year—a shirt, a bit of hair and the water-trough, and one student crying into his shirtsleeve
afterward from the pain of it.
Sometimes the Head of Movement wanted to strike them, to rush down on to the gymnasium floor and slap them and shake them
until they stirred and snapped and fought back; sometimes he felt almost driven mad by this cling-film sheet of apathy that
smothered them and parceled them and stopped their breath until they were like dolls in shrinkwrap, trademarked and mass produced.
He tossed his head. They were cushioned, that was all. They needed a wakeup.
Down on the floor Stanley had invisibly passed the leadership to his partner, who was now drawing away from him and fanning
out, the two of them black-tee-shirted against the wooden floor like a symmetrical inkblot on an aged card. Not quite symmetrical.
The male movements could never quite match the female, and vice versa: there was always something missing, some bright edge
that gave the deception away. The Head of Movement sighed and looked at them all in panorama for a second, the silken apathetic
crowd of sleepwalkers who had watched their classmate get stripped and shorn and nearly drowned, and had done nothing. He
thought, How can I possibly wake them up? And then he thought, Who will awaken me?
“I am here to tell you about the end-of-year devised theater project,” the Head of Acting said briskly, “which is by far the
most important event in the first-year calendar.”
The Head of Acting always commanded a fearful unmoving silence whenever he spoke. He did not need to raise his voice.
“First of all I must stress that you will be completely on your own. The tutors will not oversee rehearsals, scripts, lighting
rigs, costume designs or concept discussions. This is your project. When we arrive in the auditorium at eight in the evening
on the first of October, we want to be surprised. And shocked. We want to see why we chose
you
out of the two hundred hopefuls who auditioned. We want to leave feeling proud of our own good taste.
“I might add that this project has an impressive legacy at the Institute: the work that has been dreamed up as part of this
project has many times been later reworked into greater productions, some of which have toured internationally. You have big
shoes to fill.”
The Head of Acting brightened now, as he always brightened when talking about past students. His admiration and approval was
only ever retrospectively bestowed, a fact which these first-year students did not yet know. In their ignorance they gazed
fiercely up at him and champed at this new and shining chance to prove themselves.
“It is a tradition at the Institute,” the Head of Acting continued, “that on closing night the cast will choose one prop from
their production to be handed on. The prop they choose will serve as the driving stimulus for the production the following
year. Last year’s production, titled
The Beautiful Machine
, received from the previous year’s students a large iron wheel. In the original production the wheel had been part of a working
rickshaw. In
Beautiful Machine
the wheel was redressed as the
Wheel of Fate and became a central visual component of the beautiful machine itself.”
One of the boys was nodding vigorously to show he had seen
The Beautiful Machine
in production and remembered the wheel very well. The Head of Acting smiled faintly. He said, “The cast of
Beautiful Machine
, last year’s first-year students, have chosen a prop from their production that will become the locus of yours. I have it
here in my pocket.”
He paused for a long moment, enjoying the tension.
“Does anyone have any questions, before I leave you all to conduct your first meeting?” he asked.
Nobody could think of a question. The Head of Acting reached into his pocket and withdrew a playing card. It was a card from
an ordinary deck, thinly striped on the reverse side, pinkish and round edged. He held it up for them all to see and turned
it over in his fingers to show the King of Diamonds, bearded and thin lipped and pensive, holding his axe behind his head
with a thick hammy hand. The Head of Acting tossed the card on the ground, inclined his head politely, and left the room.
The gymnasium door closed softly in his wake and sent the King of Diamonds scudding sideways. The card was ever so slightly
convex, shivering on its slim bowed back like a small unmasted ship lost at sea. For a moment there was only silence. Then
one of the girls said, tentatively, “The King of Diamonds is one of the Suicide Kings. In case anybody didn’t know.” She spoke
in an apologetic way, as if meaning to excuse herself for breaking the silence and speaking first.
“The King of Hearts is holding his sword so it looks like it goes into the side of his head—” she demonstrated “—and the King
of Diamonds is shown with the blade of his axe facing toward him. It’s the same on every pack. The two red kings are always
called the Suicide Kings.”
Everyone craned to look, and saw that she was right. There was another silence, a different sort of silence this time, a silence
ringing with the last words spoken:
the Suicide Kings
. It’s always a different sort of silence once the first idea has been cast, Stanley thought.
After a few moments more the collective concentration broke. They looked up and grinned sheepishly, and laughed and stretched
and shifted and began to chatter and looked around for a leader who would guide them on from there.
“Do we get to a stage, do you think, as teachers,” the Head of Movement said, “when the only students who can really affect
us are the ones who most remind us of a young version of ourselves?”
The Head of Acting laughed. “And always a very flattering version, too,” he said. “Only ever the vigor and the ideals. And
the bodies. The supple, fit young bodies that we all imagine we must once have had, before everything else set in.”
The Head of Acting was some ten years older than the Head of Movement, and he had not aged well: his pale eyes were rimmed
on their undersides by a wet pink rind that always made him look rather ill.
“I think it’s sadly true for me,” the Head of Movement said. “There’s this one acting student this year—a boy. He’s very much
like how I was, I suppose. How I imagine I must have been. When I’m teaching his class I forget all my doubts about… about
everything, really. I watch him so closely and I really delight in his progress—I mean
really
—I keep seeking him out and watching him change, little by little, and I feel excited and generous and all the things that
teachers are supposed to feel.”
As a teacher the Head of Acting had always maintained a deliberate distance from his students, but his withdrawn and profoundly
unmoved manner seemed to cause them, strangely,
to worship him the more. It was the Head of Acting who most of the students
sought to impress, and it was the Head of Acting who most of them remembered in the years that followed. His coldness and
his deadness attracted them somehow, like puppies to a master with a whip. The Head of Movement did not possess this gift
of indifference, the Head of Acting thought now: he showed too much of himself, wore his skin too plainly; he was too contemptuous
of his students when they let him down.
“The illusion of depth in a character,” the Head of Acting had said only this morning to his second-year class, “is created
simply by withholding information from an audience. A character will seem complex and intriguing only if we
don’t
know the reasons why.”
The Head of Movement was stroking his knuckles with his fingertips. He shook his head.
“And I keep reminding myself that in all probability it’s just
vanity
,” he said, “my seeking out a younger version of myself and watching so greedily, like someone in a fairy tale bewitched.
It’s a sad thing. I don’t think I can connect in the same way with the other students. I just don’t—” He spread his arms and
shrugged. “I just don’t
care
enough,” he said. “I don’t care enough in what makes them different. They’d never know. I get up in front of them and teach
and it’s like any stage performance, knowing the role back to front and getting on and doing it. But underneath it all it’s
just an act.”
“Maybe you’re being too hard on yourself,” the Head of Acting said. “Putting too much of an expectation on yourself that you
actually
have
to care. Maybe you don’t have to care. Maybe you can not care and still be a great teacher.”
“Maybe,” the Head of Movement said.
“Who is the student who captures you?” the Head of Acting said. “The younger version of you.”
The Head of Movement hesitated, squinting up at the light fitting above the Head of Acting’s head.
“I’d rather not say,” he said at last, a little shyly, as if the boy was a crush that he held still too close to his heart.
“All right,” the Head of Acting said. “But if you let me, I bet I could guess.”
“My dad has this theory,” Stanley said. “He reckons schools should take out insurance policies on the students they think
are most likely to die.”
There was a pause, then all six of them put down their forks and turned to look at Stanley properly.
“What?” they said.
“Because there’s always one kid who dies,” Stanley said. “In any high school, right? During your time at high school, any
school, you can always remember one kid who died.”
His smile was faltering now. He had intended the remark to be flippant and amusing and slightly shocking, but his classmates
were looking nauseated and confused. He tried to let a surprised and disappointed look flit across his face, as if to communicate
that his audience was not as debonair and outrageous as he had hoped, that the six of them had let him down somehow by this
pinched and prudish outlook, by their backward and unfashionable scope that left no room for wit or scandal. He tried to make
his eyebrows peak in the center and his smile turn down slightly, a worldly look that was contemptuous and cheerful and uncaring.
He tried not to care.
“That’s retarded,” one of the girls said.
Stanley smiled wider. He could not rightly retreat now. He was committed to voicing, and thus partly owning, a point of view
that wasn’t his own. He felt trapped, and so tried to redeem himself by becoming jolly and charming, like his father could
be, and amplifying his own part, his own sponsorship of the idea, until it seemed as if the idea really was his own.
“You can take out an insurance policy,” he said, “for something like two hundred a year. Insurance policies on kids are really,
really low. Making money is all about seeing something’s going to happen before it happens, right? So if you can get in there
and make something good of it—if you can pick the kid who’s most likely to die—”
He spread his hands and shrugged, as if the logic were self-evident.
“And you reckon the money should go to whoever takes out the policy,” a boy said. “Like, it should go to the school as a reward
for being clever enough to spot the kid that was likely to die?”
“What does it mean, ‘most likely to die?’ ” snapped the girl. “That’s retarded. How can you tell if a person’s likely to die?”
Stanley was feeling hot now. He started to feel resentful, not at his father, whom he was instinctively moving to protect,
but at this nauseated audience, who were scowling at him across the mirror-glaze of the linoleum tabletop as if he had mentioned
something truly dreadful. He forgot that he himself had met his father’s insurance idea with something a little like nausea;
he forgot that his father’s deliberate provocations often gave him a tight feeling in his chest and a helpless clenching anger
that lingered for days and weeks afterward. He glared back at the six of them and said, “Who’s to say something good can’t
come out of a death? Who’s to say it’s wrong to make something good out of something terrible like a death? To spot it before
it happens, and pounce?”
He was imperfectly paraphrasing, and the words were lopsided and unlikely in his mouth.
“Something good of it—like making a million dollars off some kid coming off his skateboard on the way home from school?”
“Maybe,” Stanley said. “Maybe, yeah.”
“That’s the stupidest idea I’ve ever heard of,” one of them said. “Life insurance is all about having a backup in case the
person you depend on dies. Like if my dad died, my mum would be screwed because she needs his salary to survive, to pay the
mortgage and the bills and all that. So life insurance would pay out if he died, just so she wouldn’t be screwed for a few
years until she found someone else. Why would they let you take out life insurance on a kid? It doesn’t even make sense. They’d
know you were up to something.”
“I’m just talking about the possibility, though,” Stanley said, slipping into first-person ownership after all. “I mean, the
idea’s possible. Something to think about. If you could pull it off.”
All in an instant he remembered a scene from two restaurants ago, La Vista, the two of them silhouetted against a wall of
frosted glass and ivy and an artful water fountain that dribbled and never ran dry. His father wiped his mouth on a bunched
handful of linen and said, “Want to hear the worst dirty joke I have ever come across in my entire life? I promise you won’t
have heard it.”