the play.
“Yes,” agreed Brian. “It’s a nuisance we’re on stage as soon as the play opens because, before that, we’ve got to be on hand, with Lynn and Emma and the Bradleys, to receive the Duke of Plaza Toro and suite—i.e. the mayor, mayoress
“It’s a pity local notables have to see us in costume before the play begins.”
“Never mind. It can’t be helped. You look stunning and so does everybody else. Even Emma looks beautiful tonight. By the way, I see that Narayan Rao has turned up with his kid. I had better go out there and greet him. It’s all good for race relations.”
Narayan had been given a chair on the O.P. side from which he could get a view of the stage. Sharma was asleep at his feet on a ground-sheet covered by a blanket. He wore a wreath of flowers and looked angelic.
“If he wakes when he is picked up, he will not cry,” said Narayan. “As soon as you have finished with him, I will take him home. My good friend Bourton was anxious that he should appear, but I do not want him to stay up too long.”
“When you’ve taken him home, why don’t you come back and see the rest of the play? There is a seat reserved in the auditorium.”
“Thank you, but I think not.”
The last performance was heralded, as the others had been, by an excerpt from Mendelssohn rendered by the Ladies’ Orchestra, and then on came Theseus and his party to open the play. The first performance had been better than might be expected from amateurs, the second, although sagging a little, had been adequate, but this last performance began by being spectacular and ended in a way which, although the audience did not know it at the time, was sensational.
The opening scene, set against a painted background oflonian columns which purported to represent the palace of Theseus, went exceptionally well. Brian Yorke, in the snowy tunic, gold sandals and belt, gilded sword and purple cloak of Theseus, looked and sounded like a true duke of Athens, and his wife Valerie made a handsome appearance as Hippolyta, although she had little to say. Their leggy nine-year-old, young Yolanda as Philostrate, made the briefest of appearances, having been sent off early in the scene on being commanded to ‘stir up the Athenian youth to merriments’, and although, at the first rehearsal, she had sneaked back on stage, this had been vetoed and her big moment was when she led in the pedigree bloodhounds (by kind permission of their breeder, Tom Woolidge, who hoped to sell them to Marcus Lynn after the show), so, off-stage, Yolanda spent much of her time with them, especially after their kidnapping by Rosamund.
Emma Lynn, reassured by the compliments of the High Sheriff at the reception given before the show and by the encouragement she received from her husband and Deborah, spoke Helena’s lines with a passion and a confidence which surprised everybody, and when she made her exit on the line, ‘To have his sight thither and back again’, there was spontaneous applause.
In the workmen’s scene which followed, Robina Lester began by reverting to the over-acting which the company hoped had been quashed at rehearsals, but she was soon called to order by receiving a sharp kick on the ankle from Susan Hythe, who was standing next to her. In fact, by the time, in the second act, that Peter Woolidge as Puck had performed his preliminary acrobatics and Rosamund had faultlessly enunciated the fairy’s speech, the audience had fallen under the spell of the night, the garden, the woodland setting, and the play itself.
Little Sharma Rao was released into Deborah’s charge at the appropriate time and toddled hand-in-hand with her while she delivered her rebellious speech to Oberon. The child, fat, brown and solemn, wore a golden tunic and on his head was a charmingly lop-sided chaplet of yellow flowers. He was on stage for a very short time and then Deborah took him back to his father in the wings. Narayan vacated the chair he had been given and, so far as anybody knew, took the baby boy home as soon as he had dressed him. At any rate, that is what everybody assumed, supposing that anybody thought anything about it at all.
Narayan must have seen Rinkley in the first scene in which the workmen appeared, and Rinkley must have known that Narayan was there because nobody could have been unaware of the presence of the baby boy who so trustingly committed himself to Deborah’s care for the short time that he was on stage, but nobody saw or heard any exchange between the two former litigants and it came out later that when Narayan took his child home he certainly did not return to see the rest of the play and could have had no hand in what happened before it ended.
Meanwhile the play romped on and reached the point where Theseus and his train find the lovers asleep in the woods. Young Yolanda, slim and looking tall in her doublet and hose, and permitted, for this one scene, to wear her dagger (one of the prize pieces of Marcus Lynn’s collection) proudly led in the dogs. Her father, magnificent boots and all, praised them in the most beautiful description of hounds ever penned:
‘My hounds are bred out of the Spartan kind,
So flew’d, so sanded; and their heads are hung
With ears that sweep away the morning dew;
Crook-knee’d and dew-lapp’d like Thessalian bulls;
Slow in pursuit, but match’d in mouth like bells,
Each under each,’
Brian Yorke declaimed thus, while his daughter, determined that on this occasion the dogs should receive their due meed of applause, paraded them across the front of the stage. It was against orders, but to good effect.
What was less effective was the exit of Bottom from the wood. After the huntsmen had been bidden to blow their horns and wake the lovers and these had gone off with Theseus and the rest, Bottom scrambled dizzily to his feet. Awakened and not at all sure of what had been happening to him among the woodland sprites, Rinkley was supposed to have communed with himself, planned to have Quince write a ballad about the amazing dream he thought he had had in the wood, and then crossed the stage to the prompt side ready to come on again when the workmen meet in Quince’s house.
Instead of this, as soon as the stage was clear, Rinkley, having got unsteadily to his feet, went off on the O.P. side in the wake of the hunting-party.
To the majority of the audience this deviation from the rehearsed procedure made no difference at all. Even those who were familiar with the full text of the play probably thought that the producer was responsible for the innovation. As for Rinkley himself, he staggered away and when he reached the trestle tables which held the
