Fault in the Structure

have order and method.’

‘Quite so,’ agreed Mrs Blaine. ‘I suggest that all who have anything to put forward should occupy the front of the room. I will write up all the suggestions on the blackboard and then we can vote upon them.’

Without waiting for any reply, she took her place at the blackboard, picked up a piece of chalk from a box which was on the teacher’s (now the chairman’s) table and prepared to do as she had said.

‘An excellent suggestion, Clarice,’ said the chairman, annoyed at this blatant usurpation of his rights, ‘except that I think the meeting had better be left in my hands and that any writing had better be left to the secretary.’

‘I still don’t see why we can’t do Blithe Spirit,’ said Melanie Cardew, resting her haggard gaze upon the chairman. She was proud of her ravaged looks and thought of herself as a femme fatale.

‘That’s been answered,’ said Haynings. ‘The effects would be impossible to manage.’

‘Only so far. I mean, nobody is going to expect a London production. A lot of tulle, or even butter-muslin, could be draped around Elvira and somebody could agitate the backcloth…’

Mrs Blaine, refusing to resume her seat, wrote Blithe Spirit on the blackboard and, to signify her own opinion of the suggestion, placed a large, almost insolent question mark against it. This started the ball rolling. Suggestions came fast and furious and so did the objections to them.

‘The Importance of Being Ernest,’ said a member.

‘Far too elegant and mannered. We’d never pull it off after people have seen Dame Edith and Sir Laurence and all that lot,’ said another.

‘What about The Dover Road?’

‘Only six characters, apart from the footmen and chambermaids. Besides, there’s no body to it. Nothing to get your teeth into.’

‘Body? Yes, what about a thriller? Murder always goes down well,’ said a young man.

‘A comedy-thriller! The Cat and the Canary?’ shouted his friend.

‘Night Must Fall?’

‘We’d never pull it off. That’s a play for professionals. Where would we find an Emlyn Williams?’

‘Why don’t we do another pantomime?’ asked a large blonde who claimed that before her retirement from it, she had been on the professional stage. ‘Aladdin would be nice. I could do the name part, with a bit of song and dance thrown in, and Tad —’

‘You shouldn’t use pet names in public, Miss Mabelle,’ said Othello hastily. ‘When we were kids in the States,’ he explained unnecessarily to the company at large, ‘I was called by my second name, Frederick, Freddy for short. Well, I couldn’t say Freddie when I was a tiny tot, so it got distorted.’

‘Sorry, love,’ said the blonde. ‘All I meant was that you could play Abanazar, the wicked uncle. You’d do that grand.’

‘We couldn’t put on a pantomime in the middle of summer,’ said Mrs Blaine firmly. ‘I shall not write that suggestion on the board.’

‘Sorry I spoke,’ said the blonde disagreeably. She was the wardrobe and make-up mistress and seldom got a part.

‘If we’re calling it the Caxton Festival,’ said a solidly-built man named James Hunty, a local house-agent and a close friend of the president, ‘I think, Hamilton, we ought to do something more or less in the Caxton period. What’s wrong with Saint Joan? I could take the Earl of Warwick and…’

‘Far too expensive a production,’ said Ernest Farrow. ‘Our finances would never run to it. Think of all those fifteenth-century costumes and the armour and all that.’

‘Besides,’ put in the youth who was responsible for the stage effects, ‘think of that scene on the bank of the Loire when, by a miracle, the wind changes. Remember that pennon on the lance? If anything goes wrong with that pennon the whole point of the scene is lost and you all know what a damned draught there is on that town hall stage.’

‘I do. I went all gooseflesh when I had to play Titania in the Dream,’ said one of the girls.

‘Well, you would play it all diaphanous,’ said Melanie. ‘Actually, you were hardly decent with the light behind you.’

‘Some are more fortunate in their figures than others.’

‘I heard some remarks passed that you wouldn’t have cared for, I can tell you.’

‘Please, ladies!’ said the chairman.

‘I remember that draught,’ said young Tom Blaine. ‘I had to play Puck stripped to the waist…’

‘Which I had forbidden you to do,’ said his mother, pointing her piece of blackboard chalk at him in a menacing manner.

‘Please!’ reiterated the chairman desperately. ‘If you all go on like this we shall get nothing settled. Are there any further suggestions before we take the vote?’

‘Bags I Saint Joan,’ said Stella Walker, ‘but, if you settle for that, you’ll have to cut quite a lot of it. There’s that boring scene in Warwick’s tent between him and Cauchon, for example. Our sort of audience could never be expected to sit through that.’

‘Shaw knew nothing about the Middle Ages, anyway,’ said a young man named Robert Eames.

‘If there are no more suggestions,’ said the president desperately, ‘I really think…’