Eleanor Catton - The Rehearsal

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.”