Fault in the Structure

innovation was actually staged. Hamilton had never quite got over his resentful disappointment at having been passed over for the principal role, any more than Marigold Tench had ceased to regret her precipitate action in walking herself out of a part when the opera was first under consideration. Marigold had attended every rehearsal (which, as a fully paid-up member of the society and its one-time leading lady, she had every right to do) in the sick hope that one of the three principal women players would either fall down on the part or give it up, but this had not happened.

She spent the actual performances behind the scenes acting as unsolicited dresser and assistant wardrobe mistress. Nobody wanted or needed Marigold’s ministrations, but all accepted them in good part, sensing the frustration and disappointment which lay behind the seemingly kind actions.

The point of all this was that, as Laura pointed out later to Dame Beatrice, when the thing actually happened Marigold had been in as good a position as anybody else to overhear what Denbigh had said about the position of the hangman’s cart on the stage.

‘Apart from leaving more space for the last dance,’ he had said, ‘there’s the safety aspect. I had not realised until Saturday—’ (groans from the company which underlined their feelings about the long-drawn-out nightmare of that fiasco) ‘—I had not remembered that there is a rake on the stage down towards the footlights. By having the cart (it’s on wheels, remember!) sideways on and almost pushed into the wings, however, the rake of the stage will hardly matter. If anything did go wrong, the wheels would only run the cart slantingly towards the prompt side, where there are plenty of people waiting in the wings.’

‘Oh, rot!’ said Melanie, looking adoringly at Crashaw. “What can go wrong? He is the chief character! It would be absurd for him to make his last speech from the side of the stage and almost stuck out in the wings. He must be centre-stage. Stick those wedges under the wheels. That should fix them.’

Denbigh reluctantly gave in, only adjuring the students who were to act as stage-hands to make sure that the cart, as soon as it had been trundled up the ramp on to the stage, was securely anchored and the front wheels firmly wedged so that they could not revolve.

There was one other uncommitted person besides Marigold Tench who, at some point in the proceedings, was to be present. This was Mrs Blaine’s William Caxton. She had insisted that at each performance he was to be brought to the front of the stage by Denbigh and introduced to the audience in one of the intervals as the leader and chief protagonist in the Caxton procession which was to take place in the following week. As there were to be street collections, all the proceeds of which would be devoted to charity, Denbigh could hardly refuse to do as she wished.

CHAPTER 17

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Broke violence, madness, fear

In most amateur productions the first night is one of nerves and misgivings.

‘Do I look all right?’

‘I can’t remember my first lines!’

‘Will the press be here?’

‘Oh, doesn’t anyone know what’s happened to the box of safety pins?’

‘Who’s pinched my Number Six?’

‘Suppose they don’t laugh?’

‘I bet somebody’s brought some ghastly infant who’ll howl the place down in my first solo.’

‘How’s the house filling up?’

‘Sybil isn’t here yet. We’re not really covered by understudies, you know.’

‘I wouldn’t put it past Ma Blaine to bring in a bunch of her Guild and bust up the show. They’re all Women’s Libbers, that lot.’

‘Laura, you will give me a clear prompt if I dry up, won’t you?’

The second night is apt to find the entire cast, even the principals, feeling slightly flat, but the third and last night sees everybody keyed up to the highest pitch, chattering, excited, confident, peeping from behind the curtain to watch the audience coming in, trying to find out how many bouquets will be presented and to whom they will go (although the second and third leads among the ladies are apt to make certain that each will receive at least one bouquet because she will have ordered and paid for it herself) and altogether the atmosphere will be noisily electric. The whole cast, assured of the success of the show, will love everybody with almost excessive fervour and the actors will even praise one another’s performances, hoping, of course, for reciprocity on the lines of ‘I’ll scratch your back if you’ll scratch mine’.

No doubt all this would have been the case on the third and final night of the Chardle and District dramatic, operatic and literary society’s production of The Beggar’s Opera, but for the presence behind the scenes of a diabolus or diabola ex machina. It became, later on, the self-imposed task of Dame Beatrice to expose this cuckoo in the nest.

However, it was not until the end, or almost the end, of the last Act that the Beggar’s original thought was transformed into drastic and unrehearsed action and, as the poet says, ‘violence, madness, fear’ broke out and the opera ended in confusion.

With no suspicion, in spite of Dame Beatrice’s dire prediction that the past was in process of raking itself up, that anything more untoward than, without a prompter, somebody in the last Act was going to dry up, or that the stage manager (the meek, devoted, hardworking Ernest Farrow who, as the Beggar, had only a few lines at the beginning and end of the piece) might mislay the bottle of ratsbane or some other important prop, Laura drove herself in her own small car to the town hall in good time to assume her costume and make-up, leaving Dame Beatrice to be piloted, a little later on, by George, for whom a seat had been booked in the front row of the balcony. From where he sat he had not only an excellent view of the stage, but of his employer in her seat near the O.P. end