Ngaio Marsh - Opening Night

‘Do you mean Mr Bennington?’ Martyn ventured.

‘Clark Bennington, the distinguished character actor, that’s right,’ said Cringle drily. Evidently he was not inclined to elaborate this theme. He entertained Martyn, instead, with a lively account of the eccentricities of Dr John Rutherford. ‘My oaff,’ he said, ‘what a daisy! Did you ’ear ’im chi-ikeing from the front this morning? Typical! We done three of ’is pieces up to date and never a dull moment. Rows and ructions, ructions and rows from the word go. The guvnor puts up with it on account he likes the pieces and what a time ’e has with ’im, oh, dear. It’s something shocking the way doctor cuts up. Dynamite! This time it’s the little lady and ’is nibs and Mr Parry Profile Percival ’e’s got it in for. Can’t do nothing to please ’im. You should ’ear ’im at rehearsals. “You’re bastardizing my play,” ’e ’owls. “Get the ’ell aht of it,” ’e shrieks. You never seen such an exhibition. Shocking! Then the guvnor shuts ’im up, ’e ’as an attack of the willies or what-have-you and keeps aht of the theaytre for a couple of days. Never longer, though, which is very unfortunate for all concerned.’

To Martyn, held as she was in a sort of emotional suspension, the lives and events enclosed within the stage walls and curtain of the Vulcan Theatre assumed a greater reality than her own immediate problem. Her existence since five o’clock the previous afternoon when she had walked into the theatre, had much of the character and substance of a dream with all the shifting values, the passages of confusion and extreme clarity which make up the texture of a dream. She was in a state of semi-trauma and found it vaguely agreeable. Her jobs would keep her busy all the afternoon and tonight there was the first dress-rehearsal.

She could, she thought, tread water indefinitely, half in and half out of her dreams, as long as she didn’t come face to face with Mr Adam Poole in any more looking-glasses.

CHAPTER 3

First Dress-Rehearsal

‘I wish,’ Martyn said, ‘I knew what the play was about. Is it really a modern morality and do you think it good?’

‘All good plays are moralities,’ said Jacko sententiously, and he leant so far back on the top of his step-ladder that Martyn hurriedly grasped it. ‘And this is a good play with a very old theme.’ He hesitated for a moment and she wondered if she only imagined that he looked worried. ‘Here is a selected man with new ideas in conflict with people who have very old ones. Adam plays the selected man. He has been brought up on an island by a community of idealists; he represents the value of environment. By his own wish he returns to his original habitat, and there he is confronted by his heredity, in the persons of his great uncle, who is played by J. G. Darcey, his brilliant but unstable cousin, who is played by Clark Bennington, this cousin’s wife, who is Helena, and with whom he falls in love, and their daughter who is freakishly like him, but vicious and who represents therefore his inescapable heredity. This wretched girl,’ Jacko continued with great relish, looking at Martyn out of the corner of his eyes, ‘is engaged to a nonentity but finds herself drawn by a terrible attraction to Adam himself. She is played by Gay Gainsford. Receive again from me the pink pot, and bestow upon me the brown. As I have recited it to you so baldly, without nuance and without detail, you will say perhaps if Ibsen or Kafka or Brecht or even Sartre had written this play it would have been a good one.’

Inexplicably, he again seemed to be in some sort of distress. ‘It has, in fact,’ he said, ‘a continental flavour. But for those who have ears to hear and eyes to see, it has a wider implication than I have suggested. It is a tale, in point of fact, about the struggle of the human being in the detestable situation in which from the beginning he has found himself. Now I descend.’ He climbed down his step-ladder, groaning lamentably. ‘And now,’ he said, ‘we have some light and we see if what I have done is good. Go out into the front of the house and in a moment I join you.’

By the time Martyn reached the sixth row of the stalls the stage was fully illuminated, and for the first time she saw the set for Act II as Jacko had intended it.

It was an interior, simple in design and execution, but with an air of being over-civilized and stale. ‘They are,’ Jacko explained, slumping into a seat beside her, ‘bad people who live in it. They are not bad of their own volition, but because they have been set down in this place by their heredity and cannot escape. And now you say, all this is pretentious nonsense, and nobody will notice my set except perhaps a few queers who come to first nights and in any case will get it all wrong. And now we wash ourselves and go out to a place where I am known, and we eat a little, and you tell me why you look like a puppy who has found his tail but dare not wag it. Come.’

The restaurant where Jacko was known turned out to be hard by the theatre, and situated in a basement. He insisted on paying for a surprisingly good meal, and Martyn’s two and fourpence remained in her pocket. Whereas the curiosity of Fred Badger and Bob Cringle, and in some degree of the actors, had been covert and indirect, Jacko’s was unblushing and persistent.

‘Now,’ he said, over their coffee, ‘I ask you my questions. If there is a secret you tell me so, and with difficulty I shut myself up. If not, you confide in me, because everybody in the Vulcan makes me their confidant and I am greatly flattered by this. In any case we remain friends, no bones broken, and we repeat our little outings. How old do you think I am?’

With some embarrassment, Martyn looked at his scrawny neck, at the thin lichen-like growth of fuzz on his head, and at his heavily scored and indented face. ‘Fifty-seven,’ she ventured.

‘Sixty-two,’ said Jacko complacently. ‘I am sixty-two years old, and a bit of a character. I have not the talent to make a character of myself for the people who sit in front, so instead I play to actors. A wheel within wheels. For twenty years I have built up my role of confidant and now, if I wanted to, I couldn’t leave off. For example I can speak perfect English, but my accent is a feature of the role of Papa Jacko, and must be sustained. Everybody knows it is a game and, amiably, everyone pretends with me. It is all rather ham and jejune , but I hope that you are going to play too.’

Martyn thought, ‘It would be pleasant to tell him: I’m sure he’s very nice and so why don’t I do it? I suppose it’s because he looks so very old.’ And whether with uncanny prescience or else by a queer coincidence, he said, ‘I’m not nearly as peculiar as I look.’

Martyn said tentatively, ‘But I honestly don’t know what you want me to tell you.’

On the opposite wall of the restaurant there was a tarnished looking-glass, upon the surface of which someone had half-heartedly painted a number of water-lilies and leaves. Among this growth, as if drowned in Edwardiana, Jacko’s and Martyn’s faces were reflected. He pointed to hers.

‘See,’ he said. ‘We rehearse a play for which it is necessary a secondary-part actress should resemble, strikingly, the leading man. We have auditions, and from the hundreds of anxious ingénues we select the one who is least unlike him, but she is still very unlike him. Incidentally,’ Jacko continued, looking Martyn very hard in the eye, ‘she is the niece of Clark Bennington. She is not very like him either which is neither here nor there and perhaps fortunate for her. It is her unlikeness to Adam that we must deplore. Moreover, although I am a genius with make-up, there is very little I can do about it. So we depend instead on reflected emotions and echoed mannerisms. But although she is a nice little actress with a nice small talent, she cannot do this very well either. In the meantime our author who is a person of unbridled passion where his art is in question, becomes incensed with her performance and makes scenes and everybody except her Uncle Bennington retires into corners and tears pieces of their hair out. The little actress also retires into corners and weeps and is comforted by her Uncle Bennington, who never the less knows she is no good.