What Bloody Man Is That (5 page)

Charles tried to curb the uncharitable thoughts that the sight of George Birkitt always prompted. He knew that to think the actor's success was the product of a very moderate talent and a great deal of luck was probably only a sour grapes reaction.

And yet, he could never quite believe in George. He had watched the man who was about to give his Macbeth gradually gather the trappings of stardom, but he could never see the inward spark of genius that should irradiate a star. To Charles Paris, George Birkitt remained a perfectly amiable but rather dull actor, who had had a few lucky breaks and who was now too famous for anyone actually to observe that he wasn't particularly talented. Certainly, Charles allowed himself the bitchy thought, if Gavin Scholes saw Macbeth as a man devoid of imagination, it had been type-casting.

The other figure who had gathered a little coterie around him was, it went without saying, Warnock Belvedere. Like most self-appointed ‘characters', the old actor's reputation preceded him, and there was no one in the company who had not heard of him and was intrigued to meet the reality. There was a tendency in the theatre, which Charles disliked, for perfectly repellent people to be tolerated – and even lionised – simply on the basis of being ‘a character'. Wamock fitted this role with relish, and was determined very deliberately to live up to his image. As Charles looked at him, he could hear the old actor once more name-dropping and pontificating. ‘Well, of course, I knew Larry back in the days when he was still with Vivien. Goodness, the two of them together were . . .' Russ Lavery, Charles noticed with interest, was not in Wamock's circle of sycophants. He had joined the group around George Birkitt, exchanging the anecdotage of classical theatre for that of television Light Entertainment.

Only one member of the company sat alone, on an aisle seat halfway up the auditorium. She was strikingly pretty, small, with wispy blond hair scraped back into an artless knot. She wore a grey and purple designer jogging suit of the kind marketed to housewives who pretend to do aerobics. She was reading studiously, and the book was a copy of
Macbeth
.

By a process of elimination, Charles concluded that this must be the recent darling of the Royal Shakespeare Company, Felicia Chatterton, taking her first tentative step out of the womb of subsidised theatre into what Charles Paris thought of as the real world.

She looked intense, rather than tense. And she appeared to be reading the script, not as a pretence of having something to do, but because it interested her deeply.

Gavin Scholes appeared on stage and clapped his hands. The flamboyant chatter subsided raggedly, and over its end Warnock Belvedere's voice, in a well-judged stage whisper, was heard to say, ‘Oh Christ, it's that prat of a director.'

Gavin joined in the little ripple of laughter which greeted this, but it clearly didn't make him any less nervous. He started in a voice of exaggerated bonhomie.

‘Erm . . . yes, here I am, the prat of a director himself. Ha. First, I'd like to welcome you all to the Pinero Theatre, Warminster, for the first production of a new season, which is always exciting for all of us who work here. And also, it being the first production has a great practical advantage – namely, that we can rehearse from Day One on the stage, so we don't have all those hassles of suddenly discovering that the dimensions of the set as laid out in the rehearsal room are totally different from what we're faced with in the theatre. And let me tell you, with only three and a half weeks' rehearsal, we need all the advantages we can get!'

‘Three and a half weeks?' echoed a thrillingly husky voice from the auditorium.

‘Yes.'

‘But you can't do a Shakespeare in three and a half weeks . . .'

‘Of course you can,' said Gavin cheerfully. ‘I once put on
The Merchant
in ten days.'

‘Oh.' From her tone, Felicia Chatterton did not seem to find this a very admirable achievement.

‘But surely, Felicia love, your agent told you the schedule . . .?'

‘Well, yes he did,' she admitted, ‘but I didn't believe him.'

‘Oh, well, he got it right. Three and a half weeks. Don't worry, it's going to be a great production,' Gavin Scholes asserted with emphatic but diminishing confidence. ‘Now, I'd like to introduce our Company Manager, who's going to tell you a few things about how we run the Pinero . . .'

The Company Manager was like all company managers, and his spiel was the same as that of all company managers – details of the allocation of dressing rooms, places to eat (inside the theatre and out), where his office was, when those whose money didn't go directly to their agents would get paid, etc., etc.

Charles switched off. He'd heard it many times before. But he was amused to see that Russ Lavery was drinking in every word. For the boy, just being there was magical, the consummation of all his dreams. He was a professional actor, embarking on his first professional job. The enthusiasm was almost embarrassing in its intensity.

Cynically, Charles Paris tried to remember if he had been so raw and callow when he had been in the same position at the end of the forties. Rather sheepishly, he concluded that he had been. Exactly the same, ecstatic with excitement just at the prospect of being paid to do what he'd always wanted to do. Oh dear, he wondered, how long did it take for my attitude to change . . .?

After the Company Manager, other members of the Pinero resident staff were introduced. The Stage Manager, dour in the manner of all stage managers. The Assistant Stage Managers, bright-eyed and bushy-tailed. The Lighting Director, introverted and technical. The Wardrobe Mistress, a symphony in hand-woven fabrics (which didn't fill Charles with confidence – if there was one thing he hated on stage, it was a costume that tickled).

Then the Catering Manager, Norman Phipps, and the Box Office Manager, Sandra, were introduced. She put in the customary plea that the cast give her as much notice as possible for any complimentary or first night tickets they wanted, and made the customary complaint that if they left it to the last minute it not only made her job very difficult, but also caused disappointment and bad feeling.

She had dressed up more for the occasion than for the previous Saturday, but her clothes were again just on the decent side of tarty. This time it was black leather trousers and a cotton loose-knit sleeveless sweater.

And again it wasn't just her dress that was sexy. She also peppered her talk with a few innuendoes, and reacted flirtatiously to questions from the actors. Again, as he had on the Saturday, Charles wondered how much of this was just talk and how much of it she might put into action. Of course, with a constant supply of actors through the theatre, most of whom were enduring long separations from wives and girlfriends, she was in a good position to have plenty of little flings if she wanted them. And, if her relationship with her husband was as bad as she implied, then she might be tempted to indulge herself.

And yet something in Charles doubted it. Her sexuality was so upfront, so aggressively emphatic, that he couldn't believe in it. He felt it was probably all talk, just part of her manner, her personal way of facing the world around her.

The next person to be introduced was the Designer, who spoke at great length about the totally new concept of theatre represented by his set, but whose description of it sounded to Charles exactly like 90 per cent of the sets on which he had strutted in doublet, hose, toga and armour, giving voice to the words of the immortal Bard.

When you cut through the exotic description, all there was going to be onstage was, as usual, a set of battlements at the back, and a pair of mobile towers which could be wheeled on and off for relevant scenes. The outlines of all the crenellations would be sufficiently vague, so that, with a few lighting changes, they could represent A Desert Heath, A Camp Near Forres, Inverness – A Court Within the Castle, The Same – Another Room in the Palace, A Cavern, Fife – Macduff's Castle, Dunsinane, Birnham Wood, The Same – Another Part of the Plain, and so on. Charles felt infinitely old, a Struldbrug of the theatre, who had seen everything and heard everything an infinite number of times before.

‘But now,' said Gavin Scholes, once everyone down to the Stage Doorman had been introduced, ‘the play itself . . .'

A little murmur of excitement went round the cast. It wasn't that they were necessarily excited; it was just that Gavin delivered his words in a manner that demanded a little murmur of excitement.

‘Now, as I see it,
Macbeth
is the tragedy of a man without imagination, whose life is suddenly shaken to the core by the introduction of an imaginative dimension.'

‘Ah,' said George Birkitt blankly. ‘That sounds very interesting.'

Encouraged, Gavin went on, ‘Lady Macbeth, of course, from the start, has had this imaginative dimension. She is the more intuitive of the pair. She reacts instinctively, whereas Macbeth's reactions are more intellectual . . .'

‘But surely,' objected the deeply vibrant voice of Felicia Chatterton, ‘hers is the intellectual approach. I mean, she has the detachment, the cold-bloodedness if you like, to take an overall view, while Macbeth only responds minute by minute.'

‘Erm . . .' said the director.

‘I mean, the first time we see Lady Macbeth, when she's reading the letter, she refers back to conversations about Macbeth's chances of becoming King . . .'

‘Yes, yes . . . but –'

‘So she is the one who's doing the long-term planning. She is the one who thinks things out intellectually. It's only when Macbeth becomes King that he starts doing things off his own bat.'

‘Erm . . .'

‘You know, the murder of Banquo, the massacre of the Macduff family . . .'

‘Yah . . . but –'

‘But he's still only reacting minute by minute. Like an animal, covering his tracks. He doesn't think the murder through. Each crime is just a cover-up for the previous one. I think there are very valid parallels with Watergate, you know.'

‘Yes, yes, I'm sure. But if you could just let me spell out in a bit more detail the way I see the play . . .'

‘But I do think it's important that we all see the play the same way. I mean, we really should find its intellectual pivot before we get into rehearsals.'

‘Oh, I do agree, Felicia. I do agree. But I think what we've got to –'

‘Oh, for Christ's sake,' boomed Warnock Belvedere. ‘Let's just bloody get on with it. Acting's nothing to do with bloody talking about the words, it's just standing still, being audible and not bumping into the furniture.'

This paraphrase of another of the late Sir Ralph Richardson's dicta was greeted by relieved laughter, and Gavin Scholes took the opportunity to redirect the conversation. ‘Look, actually, Felicia, I think you've raised some very valid points there, which we certainly must discuss . . . if we have time. But I think if I could start by giving you all my views on the play, and, you know, if you could hear me out, then we could make the discussion more general once I've finished. How do you feel about that?'

‘Absolutely fine,' Felicia Chatterton agreed very reasonably. ‘I hope you don't mind if I take notes . . .?'

‘Erm, no, no.' Gavin cleared his throat. ‘Well, er . . . Macbeth, as I say, is a play about imagination – or rather, perhaps I should say, it's a play about lack of imagination. Or perhaps both imagination and the lack of it . . .'

Mentally, Charles switched off again. In his experience, directors' theories of plays soon got abandoned in the face of the purely logistical problems of rehearsal. Getting the cast on and off stage quickly took priority over the overall concept of the piece.

He'd only been in one production in his life where a director had followed a single interpretation through from first read-through to first night, and that had been a disaster.

The director in question had seen
The Tempest
as a fantasy taking place inside Prospero's mind. There was nothing wrong with the idea itself; indeed many directors have moved towards that kind of interpretation. Nor was there anything inherently wrong with having a set in the shape of a hollowed-out cranium. Charles really only began to part company with the concept when he saw the costume designs, and realised that all the characters except for Prospero himself were to be dressed as brain-cells.

The director's ideas then got even more convoluted, and he started dividing the cast into different kinds of brain cells, according to which of Prospero's functions they controlled. Ariel was deemed to control the Visual Area, Caliban the Taste Area, Miranda the Sensory Speech Area, and so on. At the play's climax, the lines, ‘But this rough magic I here abjure', Prospero was instructed by the director to have a stroke, thus killing off certain of the other characters (in their roles as brain-cells), and making the principal actor play the rest of the action with slurred speech and one side of his body paralysed.

It was grotesque, it ran counter to Shakespeare's text at almost every point, but at least the director stuck to his guns and saw it through.

And Charles Paris hadn't done too badly out of it. From press notices of universal condemnation, he, by the good fortune of having one of the smallest parts (that of the Shipmaster) had culled the following review:

‘Charles Paris was easily the most effective performer on the stage, chiefly because we saw least of him.'

It was one of those notices which, if you snip off the second half of the sentence, looks very good in a scrap-book.

Gavin Scholes concluded his exposition of the way he saw Macbeth and announced, ‘Well, now I think we'd better get straight on with the reading, don't you?'

‘Surely we're going to discuss the interpretation first?' Needless to say, this bewildered objection came from Felicia Chatterton.