Fault in the Structure

‘One of your students having a bit of a game, eh, sir?’ asked the town hall porter.

‘Possibly. Well, now you’ve found them, you might put the wheels in the principal dressing-room and lock the door, would you? The students who will call at about half-past one to put the wheels on again will show you my visiting-card. That will prove their bona fides. All right?’

‘Very good, sir.’

‘And perhaps you’ll just keep an eye on the cart when the students have re-affixed the wheels?’

‘I’ll do that, sir. In fact, I’ll do better than that, sir. If that prop – we call ’em props, sir, these gadgets and things as are needed on stage, sir – if that prop, when the wheels is on, will go up that ramp what covers the steps on to the stage, sir, that prop will go in my cubby ’ole. Suppose I was to wheel it in there when the young gents have put the wheels on it again, sir – it’s no height, so it won’t catch the top of my door – and lock the door on it when I ain’t in there, sir? How would that be?’

‘That would be excellent, but what if you go off duty?’

‘There’ll be somebody here with a key, sir. If it isn’t me, it will be my mate. I’ll give him the tip-off as nobody ain’t to touch that prop without they can perdooce your card.’

‘Fine. I’ll leave the whole thing in your hands, then, and, of course, I’ll see you – er—’

‘Thank you very much, sir.’

‘Funny thing about that hangman’s cart,’ said Laura to Sybil and Melanie, with whom she shared a dressing- room. ‘Who would play a daft trick like taking the wheels off it?’

‘One of those beetle-brained students, of course,’ said Melanie. ‘Thought it funny, I suppose. All boys of that age have a warped sense of humour. Personally, I’m glad there are wedges under those wheels as an extra precaution. The stage slopes forward quite a lot. It would scare me silly if I was blindfolded and that cart began to move.’

‘I never could abide Blind Man’s Buff myself,’ said Sybil. ‘You feel so helpless when you can’t see.’

‘But he can see,’ said Laura. ‘I tried the hood on to find out what it was like, and I could see through it quite easily. It’s only made of thin gauze. Anyway, thank goodness we don’t have to be made up just yet.’

Laura’s make-up took some time; Sybil’s was simpler; Melanie was not to be made up until the beginning of Act Two, when, during the interval, Laura would have removed her own make-up, or most of it, and changed out of Mrs Peachum’s costume in order to take over the prompter’s stool and Sybil would have her face expertly touched-up, ready for her next appearance. Melanie, therefore, was supposed to be alone in the dressing-room, or wherever else she chose to be, for the whole of the first Act.

This was because she had rebelled against assuming the office of prompter for that Act, asserting, with vehemence, that the versatile Laura could prompt, whether she was on or off the stage and that she herself was prone to catch cold if she sat in a draught. As there was no doubt, as had been pointed out when the choice of a play was under discussion, that the wings of the town hall stage were definitely – some said fiendishly – draughty, Denbigh had given the job to Hamilton Haynings who, like Sybil, did not come on until Act Two and was well upholstered in Lockit’s heavy costume.

Hamilton, whatever his private feelings about this particular chore, performed it faithfully for two nights, but on the Saturday evening nobody prompted at all, and as it became important, later on, to establish where everybody was and what he or she was doing at the beginning of the last scene of the play on the third and last night of the performance, these were Denbigh’s arrangements for all three nights of the show.

The Player and the Beggar, that is to say one of the students and Ernest Farrow, would be on stage in front of the curtain. Behind the curtain would be Macheath, in the person of Rodney Crashaw (alias Thaddeus E. Lawrence) already mounted on the hangman’s cart. Waiting in the wings would be the highwayman’s gang, mostly students but also including two members of the society, Geoffrey Channing and Robert Eames, who had the parts of Ben Budge and Matt o’ the Mint. On the other side of the stage and also waiting in the wings, would be Polly and Lucy (Sybil Gartner and Melanie Cardew), Filch (Mrs Blaine’s son Tom), the drawer (from the inn scene), the turnkey and the second jailer (Lockit’s assistants) and also the ladies of the town who included the blonde wardrobe mistress and Stella Walker, she who combined the parts of Jenny Diver and Diana Trapes. She had decided to revert to the costume of the former when she took her curtain calls, as she thought it far more attractive than that of the disposer of stolen property. The rest of the ‘ladies’ were students who had appeared also in the third Act as the women prisoners in Newgate gaol. These, having had their trial referred to the next sessions, were to celebrate this temporary reprieve with a dance, an activity in which the men students had declined to take part.

Behind all this rabble would be Peachum, in the person of James Hunty, and Laura, as Mrs Peachum, both waiting merely for curtain calls and both loitering in a short corridor on the O.P. side to be out of the draught which whistled on to the stage from the wings. Up to the end of the previous scene Laura would have been acting as prompter except on the third and last night, when she had announced her intention of abandoning this office after changing out of her stage costume, but retaining Mrs Peachum’s rather startling make-up so that she could change back again quickly for the curtain calls. Until then she was to join Dame Beatrice, where a seat had been kept for her in the auditorium.

Provided that no prompting had been required during the performances on the Thursday and Friday, Denbigh had agreed to this arrangement, and it was not until the Beggar and the Player were actually on stage in front of the curtain that she needed to slip away to get back into the Mrs Peachum costume and join James Hunty in the corridor. She expected to find Hamilton Haynings with him and, as the ‘rabble’ erupted on to the stage to perform the last dance before the final curtain, Laura supposed – rightly, as it turned out – that the three of them would retreat a little further into the confines of the sheltering corridor to be out of the way of the exits through which the rabble would pour when the curtain came down on the last Act.

Denbigh’s original arrangement had been that the hangman’s cart should be only just in view on stage to leave room for the dance when the reprieve should have been called and Macheath, in the words of the Beggar, ‘be brought back to his wives in triumph’.

Crashaw, however, would have none of this arrangement. He insisted upon having the cart trundled to the centre-back of the stage. From here, before he was reprieved, he was to make the speech which belonged somewhat earlier in the Act. The duet between Polly and Lucy, ‘Would I might be hang’d – and I would so, too! – to be hang’d with you – my dear, with you’, was to precede this speech instead of coming after it – another slight alteration to the text.

‘Like his damned conceit!’ growled Hamilton Haynings when, at the unsuccessful pre-dress rehearsal, this