The Scottish Play Murder (13 page)

*

T
HE
following Monday The New Globe Players switched out
Macbeth
with an afternoon of commedia dell’arte improvisation led by Arturo’s mummers, so Suzanne accompanied Ramsay to the new theatre in Lincoln’s Inn Fields, across the river and to the west of old London. It was a pleasant drive in a hired coach, and Suzanne enjoyed the nippy late fall air. She breathed deeply of it, and the chill made the warmth of Ramsay sitting next to her pleasant indeed. Though he was much younger than Daniel, it occurred to her he wasn’t so much younger than herself. His body radiated heat, and she basked in it. Ramsay chatted pleasantly about the famous French playwright Molière, and the new theatre built to accommodate the innovative French stagecraft.

“You’ve been to this theatre before?” Suzanne asked as she watched the less familiar bits of London pass the coach window.

“It opened only a few months ago. June, I believe. One of the first things I did when I came here was to see
Hamlet
.”

“Did you like it?”

“It was . . . odd. Very odd.”

“How so?”

He had to think about that for a moment, then admitted, “I’m at a loss to say. You’ll see for yourself, of course, but all I can tell you just now is that I cannae say whether I like it so very much. ’Tis at once interesting and annoying. Curious in a way that is a mite unsettling.”

“I can hardly wait to see it.” Unsettling? That wasn’t what she looked for in entertainment.

“You’ll know what I mean when you do.”

“Will I come away with new ideas for our own theatre?”

He shook his head. “For a number of reasons, these things are nae for us.”

Us
, he’d said, and that struck Suzanne. Ramsay had only been with The New Globe Players for a few weeks, and had not been well accepted by the troupe, yet he felt part of it. Suzanne wondered whether he was thick, or determined. She couldn’t help a secret smile.

The new theatre had been built only a few months ago, in a converted tennis court in Lincoln’s Inn Fields near Portugal Street. Lisle’s Tennis Court was a long, broad building that had already contained three-tiered galleries for spectators, and so was a natural venue for performing acts. It held slightly fewer people than did the Globe, and was oblong rather than round. At one end a stage had been built, and the pit was as rectangular as the building itself. The stage appeared very strange to Suzanne, and she urged Ramsay to find a seat near the extraordinarily small apron, at the front of the first-floor gallery, so she could see it all up close without having to actually stand in the pit. They settled into folding chairs just behind the railing, Suzanne wide-eyed at the sight before her.

It astonished her. The stage seemed terribly short, though it was just as wide as the one at the Globe, and instead of entrance doors upstage there hung a curtain. That curtain was framed in brightly painted wood, with a carving of cherubim playing harps and trumpets, after the heavens of a traditional theatre. The curtain itself was of heavy, red velvet, of a height and breadth that made Suzanne marvel at the sheer weight of the material. She thought there must be tons of it, hung from the top of the frame.

Like the Globe, the stage could be accessed from either side of the pit by small sets of steps. Suzanne also thought she could detect a trapdoor in the middle of it. She was glad to see that this much had not changed.

As the galleries filled, and orange girls plied their wares from the pit, catching coins and tossing fruit with the skill and panache of long experience, Suzanne looked around at her fellow theatergoers. The pit, of course, welcomed the hoi polloi of western London. She ignored them, for the underclasses were in abundance in her own neighborhood and they were the same all over. These were nothing new to her. It was the well-dressed folks in the galleries opposite who caught her attention.

Over the past year and a half fashion in London had changed, and the new mode of dress was as day to night. During Cromwell’s rule colors tended to the dull, dark, and plain. Brown and black wool were rarely decorated, and when there had been adornment it was plain silver or even pewter. Now, after many months of example from the king, those with money wore rich, colorful velvets, brocades, satins, and jewelry to make a Puritan blanch. Which surely was the point. Everywhere Suzanne looked in the galleries were glints of silver and gold, and colors of emerald, sapphire, and ruby. Enormous plumes drifted in the breeze of movement as the audience visited amongst themselves, seeing and being seen, and never mind the play.

It was the same as at the New Globe, for going to a play was a community event, and half the enjoyment was in being part of the audience. For the afternoon they were all brothers and sisters in entertainment. For a good half hour after the seats were filled, the action was all in the galleries and none on the stage.

Finally a plainly dressed man emerged from between the red curtains and slowly walked downstage to the edge of the apron, his face turned upward, toward those in the upper galleries, an attitude that appeared to also take in the lower galleries and even the groundlings in the pit. The resulting impression was that he could see and address every individual in the audience. His progress was a deliberate stroll, and gave plenty of time for the crowd to notice him and go quiet in anticipation. Everyone wanted to hear what he had to say, since they’d had enough of each other for the moment. Some patrons slipped into their seats, others simply stopped talking and would make their way to chairs if and when something more interesting happened. Every actor knew it was his job to hold the attention of each member of the audience, and some crowds were tougher than others.

The announcer informed them all that the first offering that day would be a commedia dell’arte skit called
The Love of Three Oranges
, which was well familiar to Suzanne, a story of a man sent on a quest for the woman he would marry. In the familiar
commedia
tradition, this performance was filled with improvisation, slapstick, and bawdy asides.

But it was also too familiar to the rest of this audience, for most of them talked all through it. The actors were hard put to be heard above the noise, and Suzanne gave up straining to hear them as Ramsay leaned down to talk into her ear. “Are you enjoying yourself?”

“Immensely.” She would have liked to have heard this play, but she was nevertheless having some fun and was dying to see what was behind that enormous curtain.

“They do well, I think.”

“Arturo’s family does better.” Arturo would have been mortified to have this ruckus during a performance, he so prided himself on capturing an audience and riveting their attention. Suzanne thought this troupe would have done well to address the groundlings more, and engage them. Giving the audience in the pit a vested interest in the performance made everyone more focused on the play, because nobody knew what the groundlings would do or say. Arturo had a talent for getting a rise out of an audience.

Ramsay straightened in his chair and made no reply. So the animosity between him and Arturo went both ways. Suzanne was sure she didn’t like that.

Once the short performance was over, and limply applauded by a crowd who hadn’t really heard it, the main attraction was heralded by the same fellow as before. Once he’d retreated, the red curtain parted slightly in the middle to let through the opening four boys dressed as harlequins in tights of red, green, and black, with horned headdresses adorned with little bells that tinkled faintly in the large theatre. The curtain then dropped into place behind them. The boys carried between them a large wooden arbor covered in roses. It was quite a piece, obviously terribly expensive, for the paper roses even close up looked almost real. The boys set it down near the bottom of the stage apron, then ran and tumbled back upstage and through the curtain opening, which fell shut behind them once more.

Suzanne wondered what would be done with the arbor, for it occupied nearly the entire downstage area, leaving only a small patch of board in view of the audience. Horatio’s traditional theatre had used small set pieces in the past, but rarely, and never anything this large, and nothing to block such a large part of the stage. Her brow creased with puzzlement, and she could hardly wait for the play to begin.

It wasn’t long before she learned the answer to her question. The first several scenes of the play appeared to take place just outside of the house of a middle-class Frenchman, who had just come to Paris from one of the provinces. There were conversations involving two suitors disgusted with the householder’s daughter and niece for putting on the airs of the upper classes. The behavior was deemed ridiculous in itself, and even more ridiculous when pretended to by
la bourgeoisie
. In other scenes the girls demonstrated their silliness and pretension by their chatter talking on and on about how mundane and unsophisticated they found everyone around them. Suzanne sat back in her seat and thoroughly enjoyed the fun Molière poked at upper-class Frenchwomen, for she’d seen enough supercilious Englishwomen to know the type.

Then, once the preliminary scenes were accomplished, the arbor was spirited offstage by the harlequin boys, and here Suzanne leaned forward so she might see better. The curtain opened fully, drawn across a rod behind the arch over the stage, to reveal a fully dressed set representing the sitting room of a modest French home. Suzanne’s mouth dropped quite open at the sight, for the complexity of it was boggling. A sofa, a virginal, and even paintings hung on the backdrop behind. That backdrop had two doorways, just as a real house and not like the upstage doors at the Globe. She tried to imagine changing this for a new scene, and couldn’t do it. She puzzled over the logistics of it, but just couldn’t work it out. The fluidity of a story would be gone as the audience waited for things to be carried off and on.

“It looks like a picture frame, that arch,” she murmured. “As if the room were a painting, with people moving in it.”

“Doesn’t it, though? I knew you’d be surprised.”

She sat back and tilted her head, trying to see it differently. “But there’s something wrong.”

“Do you know what it is, yet? For I cannae figure it for myself.”

“It’s not quite . . .” She sighed, impatient with herself for not being able to put her finger on it. “It’s . . . it’s not the room I would have imagined myself, if it were only actors on an empty stage.”

“Right. That’s it. I keep wanting to see my own view, but this isnae letting me.”

“It feels like I’m being forced.”

“Aye. Forced.”

But then Suzanne sat back to enjoy the play, and found herself forgetting the intrusive set pieces and furniture. She laughed at the sedan chair carriers’ straightforward method of collecting their fee from penniless young men posing as wealthy scions. She howled at the silly, stupid young girls’ idea of how courtship should be, and their idea of the supreme importance of fashion. She snickered and giggled at the antics of the two new suitors who so impressed the girls with their exaggerated fashion sense and absurd behavior. She applauded when their fashionably dressed—and therefore highly valued—suitors were revealed to be a lackey and a cook. This was the first play she’d seen by Molière, and she decided he was quite amusing for a Frenchman.

And it was only when the curtain was once again drawn that Suzanne realized the entire story had taken place in only two locations: just outside the house before the arbor, and inside the sitting room of that same house. No others. The set hadn’t needed to be changed at all. She tucked that away for future contemplation. Perhaps she could use the idea in her own writing.

On the ride back across the river to Southwark, she and Ramsay talked of what they’d seen. Suzanne was eager to hear what he had to say about this new stagecraft.

“Are all the plays like that? Written so everything takes place in one spot?”

Ramsay wagged his head,
comme ci, comme ça
. “Many of the newer ones are. Particularly the French. Some plays use more locations, and I’ve seen one or two that were so busy changing set pieces that one forgot what the play was about by waiting for the backdrop to move back and forth. That is the foremost reason I am not certain I care for the new style. It seems a mite boring to have the scene never change, and also the backdrop entirely imagined by someone else. I think it takes away from the actors and playwright, and makes them lazy. They don’t have to create the scene; it’s already there to be seen and no effort in it.”

Suzanne nodded. “I know what you mean. How much richer would the story have been if it had been able to move out of that sitting room?” She thought about it for a moment, and added, “However, I do admire the cleverness of fitting all of that into but two backdrops. Having attempted to write some plays, I know what discipline it takes to contain great drama on a small stage.”

“You write?”

“After a fashion.”

“Are you willing to show your writing?”

She chuckled. “No. I can barely read the plays myself.”

“I should like to see one of them, once you’ve decided they’re fit to show a friend.”

Friend?
She looked up at him to see whether he was teasing, and found no evidence of it. Then she looked out the window, wondering whether he might be serious or not.

She replied, “I’ll keep you posted on my progress.” Which might be never. She would be mortified to show one of her plays to anyone and be laughed at. Ramsay wasn’t such a friend that she trusted him not to laugh.

Yet.

Clearly to change the subject since they both had gone silent, Ramsay said, “I wonder what Horatio would have to say about this production.”

Suzanne laughed. “Oh! Poor Horatio would think the world had come to an end! On sight of that fully dressed sitting room he would leap from his seat and run, screaming, into the street, crying out that the devil had possessed the theatre and everyone within was doomed!”

Ramsay laughed long and hard at that image.

She continued, “No, Horatio is quite happy where he is, basking in the glory of Shakespeare’s own theatre and gladly producing performances that are purely true to the bard’s own vision.”