Read by Sarah Feathers
Lucy ran through the grey breeze-block corridors. ‘Where is Mr Eldon?’ she asked everyone she met. In the green room they were watching football with the volume low. ‘Is Mr Eldon here?’
Two Tommies – one fat, one languorous and handsome – turned towards her with concerned faces. They shook their heads, shrugged with their mouths.
The tannoy came alive. ‘Mr Eldon, this is your one minute call.’
‘Cutting it a bit fine,’ said the fat Tommy.
Lucy found Mr Eldon inside the toilet cubicle, slumped against the door. She had to reach in and push his body back. ‘I’m all right,’ he said slowly. It didn’t sound like him.
‘You feeling okay?’
He staggered to his feet and opened the door. The button on his khaki trousers was undone.
‘I’m due on stage.’ The words slushed together.
‘Are you drunk?’ she said.
He was tall but stooped. His grey hair was slicked back, ruffled, scraped across his sweating head. His jaw was twisted, his mouth sucked in: thick and round at one end, thin at the other, the shape of a silverfish. He watched her with a queasy, limp eye.
‘Drunk, no. God. I don’t . . .’ He stared about him.
The Tommies crossed at the end of the corridor. ‘Mr Eldon to stage, immediately,’ said the tannoy.
‘Which theatre?’ Mr Eldon asked.
‘The Lyric,’ Lucy said.
He drew himself up to full height. ‘Am I on? Take me, please.’ His voice seemed to come from far away; he was like a child asking for a sweet. ‘There isn’t a much of . . .’
He didn’t smell of drink. Lucy buttoned his trousers. She took his arm and led him between the grey breeze blocks. ‘We’re at act four, scene six. Will you be all right?’
‘Of course,’ he said.
The door to the stage was covered with heavy black felt to deaden the noise of it opening and closing. A sign said, ‘Stage: Silence.’ The running order was written on a sheet of paper gaffer-taped to the wall. Beyond this door, the theatre changed: first there was the dark cubbyhole of the stage manager’s desk, then the cavernous stage with bare breeze-block walls, the set swaddled in black drapes, then the old auditorium, a Victorian original, all plaster curls and bulges and plush red velvet, a rococo palace transported to a breeze-block cave, then the audience, rapt faces reflecting the light – the whole effect a sudden and brilliant transformation, a magic trick of architecture and theatre, a world within a world.
It was another type of transformation that Lucy wanted to bring about by passing through the black-felt door. If she could get Mr Eldon into the wings, his frame might bend and fold itself into the rehearsed shape, his head might tilt as the brigadier’s cane was thrust into his hand, he might step boldly onto the stage, his body possessed of a strange energy, that of a man who has lost all worldly and precious things yet is in the process of finding a new truth, an old man become vibrant and raucous.
The door opened, and the stage manager came through, a round woman dressed in black, her hair tied up in a knot. She had a pen tucked behind her ear. ‘He’s on,’ she said. ‘Right now.’
Over the stage relay, a voice said, ‘But who comes here?’ A pause stretched into a gaping silence, a concentrated expectation.
The stage manager peered at Mr Eldon. ‘What’s the matter with him?’
‘I don’t think he’s drunk,’ said Lucy.
The stage manager turned to the handsome Tommy, who had poked his head around the black door. ‘Mr Smith, would you go to the production office and call an ambulance? Tell them one of our actors may be having a stroke.’ Her tone was high and even; her eyebrows were raised; she blew air through lips drawn into a pinched circle. ‘Stay with him, Lucy,’ she said. ‘I’m going to cancel the show.’
Lucy fetched a chair from one of the dressing rooms and helped Mr Eldon to sit. ‘Who are you?’ he asked.
‘The assistant stage manager.’
‘Oh, that’s right.’ It was almost melodic: a high, light lilt, a drop.
Over the relay, they heard the stage manager explain to the audience that due to unforeseen circumstances – the indisposition of an actor – it would not be possible to continue with the evening’s performance. There was a muffled swell of speech, voices rising together, a communal and almost co-ordinated sigh of disappointment, which held its shape for a moment before breaking into a hubbub of chatter and complaint.
A crowd of actors had gathered.
‘Get away,’ Lucy said. ‘He needs air, give him some air.’ They clucked back to their dressing rooms.
‘What’s the play?’ Mr Eldon asked.
Lucy leaned in towards him. ‘King Lear.’
‘And I . . .’
‘Lear.’
‘Why am I dressed like this?’
‘It’s set in World War One.’
‘What’s up . . . the . . . up?’ he said.
Lucy put her hands between her legs, clamped them with her knees and rubbed them together slowly. ‘There’ll be people here soon.’
‘Where are we up to?’
‘The mad scene,’ she said. ‘Four six. It doesn’t matter now.’
He looked at the breeze-block wall opposite. ‘Have I played it before?’
‘Often,’ she said, and she rubbed her hands again. ‘You’re famous for it.’
After a moment, Mr Eldon started. ‘When we are born, we cry that we are come to this great stage of fools.’ His voice was more like his own now, or rather, the voice he had found for this part. He ran the lines under his breath and stood up.
‘Watch him there,’ said the fat Tommy.
Mr Eldon pushed through the black-felt door and limped onto stage, still running his lines, looking into the bright auditorium, where ushers bent along empty rows, picking up discarded ice-cream cartons, torn tickets, forgotten programmes.
‘Come back, please,’ said Lucy.
Mr Eldon seemed confused. He looked at the empty seats, at the ushers in plum waistcoats. He started to speak, but his jaw clamped shut. He shambled centre stage, out of place – an old man in fancy dress, like an escapee from a nursing home. He glared at the set, at a lonely dying tree, leafless and gnarled, its branches blasted away. The rake of the stage was difficult for him, so he sat, his legs bent like a grasshopper’s.
‘It were a delicate stratagem, to shoe a troop of horse with felt. I’ll put it in proof. And when I have stolen upon these sons-in-law . . .’ The words came out distant and weak, a jumble of syllables, his memory serving up the lines without inflexion or gesture.
Some members of the audience, the last to leave, those who had forgotten umbrellas or were too long putting on coats, turned back, thinking that the performance was not over. They bunched in the stalls entrance and watched.
Lucy sat beside Mr Eldon. She put a hand on his back. ‘You can stop,’ she said.
He leaned forward like a drunk; his eyes rolled in his head. He wagged his finger, beating out a tempo. ‘Then, kill, kill, kill, kill, kill, kill!’
The black-felt door opened.
Mr Eldon turned to Lucy. ‘Your line.’
The stage manager shouted, ‘Here he is!’
The fat Tommy, in the wings, spoke. ‘Sir, your most dear daughter.’
Mr Eldon stared at Lucy as if she were a strange creature. ‘I am even the natural fool of fortune.’
Boots marched towards them. Voices cried out – thin weak voices that were eaten by the air of the stage. ‘Hello there. Is this him?’ A man and a woman in leaf green jumpsuits with yellow high-vis patches. They carried rucksacks, shiny green with glittering crosses.
Mr Eldon spun round. ‘Let me have surgeons; I am cut to the brains.’
#
Perhaps Lucy told it differently, that last speech, later, when she recounted the story, broadened the differences with each telling, altered details to suit the listener. Perhaps she painted in some pauses, hunched the old king up a little, made his voice crackle with a hidden knowledge. To claim that it was perfect would have been a straightforward lie. But the tale told better if the performance unearthed subtleties, some truths that Richard Eldon had never found in the part before, grainy truths maybe, opaque meanings, but still something to grasp on to; as if, under attack, the brain had found a new interpretation, the truths of the play being not absolute but freshly minted from those circumstances, and the old actor finding his way instinctively through it, able to interpret again after a lifetime on stage; some small clarity in his voice, some authority, Lear re-imagined in the dying of brain cells, in the starvation of oxygen and glucose.
And perhaps Lucy needed it to be this way as well, needed the black-felt door to retain its magic, its power to transform.
(c) Tom Heaton, 2016
Tom Heaton is working on his first novel: a literary/historical/slasher-movie mash up. He is also writing a series of short stories about characters undergoing transformation. In his day job, he designs videogames and was design director on the BAFTA-winning Until Dawn for PS4.
Sarah Feathers trained at East 15. Theatre work includes All You Ever Needed (Hampstead Theatre), A Hard Day’s Month (Rose Theatre, Kingston), 26 (BAC), Moll Flanders (Southwark Playhouse) and The Winter's Tale (Courtyard Theatre). Film includes Coulda Woulda Shoulda, Feeling Lucky and More Than Words. TV: The Real King Herod.
Comments