to, but he doesn’t actually need to be among those present,” explained Yorke. “Still, it would be marvellous to have him. The only trouble is that he will steal the scene. You know what the professionals say: never play a scene with a child or an animal. I’m sorry for you,” he added, turning to Deborah. “First you will get Sharma and then you will get Ganymede, Lucien, Edmund and tiny Sarah, the new Peasblossom. You’ll be upstaged the whole blinking time.”
“You don’t want Narayan Rao should bring Sharma?” asked Jeanne-Marie.
“Good heavens, of course we want Sharma! ‘A little Indian boy to be my henchman’,” said Donald Bourton, the Oberon, who, with Barbara, had come up to thank Deborah and say goodnight. “We shall love to have him. How old is he?”
“Almost two, and a lovely, fat, heavy boy. You need not hold him in your arms, he walks well,” said Jeanne- Marie, looking at Deborah’s slim body. “Mr Yorke, you must arrange for one of your actors to collect him from his father who will be seated, with your permission, on the stage at the edge of the woods. You provide them with chairs, please?”
“Of course. Only too glad. Thanks a lot, Dr Delahague. Oh, damn! Oh, damn!” he added softly when Jeanne- Marie, all beaming smiles, had gone with Deborah upstairs to collect her sons. “That’s the sort of complication I’ve been dreading. I knew something like this would happen when the dress-rehearsal went so well. Rao can’t know Rinkley’s in the cast, so what do I say to him?”
“Well,” said Donald Bourton, “can’t you plead the lateness of the hour, the cold night air—that sort of thing—if you want to put Rao off?”
“A highly-educated, sensitive and very intelligent Hindu would see through those sort of reasons before they were out of my mouth. After all, we’ve got other kids in the show who aren’t all that much older than Sharma. Narayan would simply think I didn’t want him and his son—and you know what Indians think about sons, particularly the first-born.”
“What is the trouble about Rinkley?” asked Jonathan.
“A law-suit about a car-accident. Nothing much, but judgment was given against Rao and in Rinkley’s favour.”
“Tell Rao simply and straightforwardly that Rinkley is in the play, then. Make no comment, and leave the rest to Rao. Look here, I know the chap personally, and a very charming fellow he is. Would you like
“I say! Would you?”
“Well, you know, I don’t think Rao would come within a mile of the play if he knew Rinkley was in it,” said Bourton. “If he
“It wouldn’t end the play,” said Yorke, with a nervous smile. “It ends with Puck making friends with the audience.”
“Yes, but in Puck’s last speech it says that the midnight owl puts the wretch that lies in woe in remembrance of a tomb. A lot of that last speech is macabre in the extreme.”
“Anyway,” said Yorke, “to talk a different kind of shop, that retractable dagger worked a treat, didn’t it? I know it worked in the other rehearsals, so I betted something would go wrong with it tonight. What did you think of that scene now it’s in costume, Donald?”
“Don’t know. I was up here for nature’s purposes while that bit was being played. I galloped back only just in time to go on for the ending of the play. How did Rinkley’s new bit of business go?”
“I still think it’s a mistake, but Lynn, as Quince, seems to like it and what pleases him has to please the rest of us. They bring a stretcher on and plant Pyramus on it. I wonder whether that’s rather inartistic. If the scene has to be done their way, I’m sure it would be better to have Quince take the shoulders and Lion the feet, and lug the body off that way.”
“Why did they change the scene, anyway?” asked Bourton.
“They both wanted more ‘business’ attached to that bit. Quince, after that idiotically punctuated speech as Prologue, doesn’t get much of a look-in, and, of course, Rinkley dearly likes being put on the stretcher and carried off in stately fashion. He has even contrived to add to the comedy by modestly straightening his tunic as his supposed corpse is being carried off to the sound of the
“Oh? What’s that?”
“Well, in the earlier rehearsals it hadn’t crossed my mind or, I’m sure, Rinkley’s, that, as Pyramus, he would be wearing body armour and the dagger couldn’t be expected to pierce it.”
“All part of the fun to pretend it could, I should have thought.”
“Well, perhaps, but it seems the dagger itself didn’t take to the idea. Rinkley told me that he had experimented by laying the armour on the table and striking it with the dagger, but apparently the thing wouldn’t work on metal. It folded back into itself all right, but then, he said, it just fell over. On the wooden table-top it was all right and when he tried it (rather gingerly) on himself without the armour it worked like a charm, and so it did at the dress rehearsal itself, although I’ve told him to put still more force behind it—or, at least, pretend to.”
“So I suppose he came on in the armour and when he found Thisbe’s ‘mantle good, all stained with blood’, he made a great business of divesting himself of the armour before committing suicide.”
“Oh, my word, yes. He and Lynn between them made almost an extra scene for themselves and I must say it was quite amusing. Lynn is so pleased with his share in it that I can’t very well tell them to cut it shorter.”
“Oh, well, if it amuses the audience, I suppose it’s all right to let them get away with it.”
“The play takes quite long enough as it is. We don’t want people slipping away before the end because they have trains to catch or something of that sort. Nothing is more unnerving than to see your audience sneaking off before the end of the show.”
“Not to worry. They won’t. In these days of the ubiquitous automobile, very few people have trains to catch and
