The Rehearsal

The Head of Movement was leaning against the radiator in the staffroom, his thin hands wrapped around his mug, frowning in a glassy sort of way at a faint stain on the linoleum floor. “The tall girl,” he said. “Today. Doing that… that piece from… The piece she did today—oh, start me off?”

The Head of Acting dipped his newspaper and looked at him over the top of his glasses. “Come, you spirits…”

“Come, you spirits, that tend on mortal thoughts, unsex me here, and fill me, from the crown to the toe, top-full of direst cruelty. Yes.” The Head of Movement stood quivering for a moment. “She will never convincingly play that part. She is trapped inside her little round eyes and inside the smooth perfect symmetry of her face. All I could think while I was watching was that she would never think those lines. Not her. Not that face. That face would never dare. If I went and saw her in performance I would walk out and say, Lady Macbeth was all wrong.” The Head of Movement tossed his head in frustration. “I look at them all,” he said, “and I see so much hope and vigor and determination, all trapped inside faces that will never sell, that will never be remarkable—modern, pampered, silken faces that have never known tragedy or hardship or extremity, or even… God, most of them have spent nearly their whole lives inside. That girl—Lady Macbeth, today. It is like she’s made of plastic. She is too smooth and round to be real. She will never escape that smoothness and that roundness. She will never escape her face.”

“You’re in a very bleak mood, Martin,” the Head of Acting said, unwrapping an aspirin and dropping it neatly into his coffee. “I didn’t think she was that bad. I rather liked her freshness. ‘Come to my woman’s breasts, and take my milk for gall’—I thought that was marvelously seductive. She wasn’t trying to be evil.”

“She wasn’t trying to be evil because she didn’t understand a damn word of what she was saying,” the Head of Movement snapped.

There was a silence. The Head of Movement bent his head and gulped from his mug in an indelicate snatching way, gasping between each hot mouthful, his throat contracting like a reptile’s when he swallowed. The Head of Acting thought, That’s a bachelor’s habit, bred of always eating alone. He felt sorry for the Head of Movement suddenly, and put his paper down.

His dissatisfaction with the world always has such a terribly personal quality, the Head of Acting thought; he is freshly disappointed each time anything falls short of an ideal, and he wears his disappointment like a child. It showed a curious kind of innocence for a man of his age—a foolish self-sabotaging kind of innocence, for he knew that he was going to be disappointed, and still he believed.

The Head of Movement’s instinct inclined toward simplicity and scruple, and yet he was not a scrupulous man: instead he was anxious and undecided and complaining, suspended between points of view. He was forever in the shadow of a principle, forever in the shadow of some floodlit cathedral swarming with bats in the dark, and while he might admire it and worship it and fear its massive contour, he could never bring himself to truly touch it; he would never knock and enter.

The Head of Acting watched him wince and scowl into his coffee and draw his shoulder blades together and toss his head as if his skin had shrunk. The Head of Acting thought, It is as if, in some deep recess of him, he is still a teenager who has not yet lost that selfish blind capacity to fall in love, and fall badly. He wondered if he was jealous of the man’s anxiety, jealous of the agony of his choices, jealous of his tortured sense of failure and the failed justice in the world.

“Is it a bad batch this year?” the Head of Acting said. “Is that what’s getting you down?”

The younger man flopped into a chair like a punctured balloon. “No,” he said, drawing out the word in a doubtful way.

“You were asking yourself, masks or faces.”

“Yes,” the Head of Movement said, and sighed. “I used to believe in faces. All my life I believed in faces. I think I might have finally changed my mind.”

February

Whenever a door was closed at the Institute another always opened, popping gently forth, invisibly nudged by a draught that could never be contained. The shifty current gave the buildings a muttering, ghostly feel. If Stanley closed a door behind him, he always listened to hear another click open, like a faithful echo, out of the shadows further up the hall. All the doorknobs rattled. Hairline cracks webbed the enamel like dirty lace.

The academic year began with a lavish production of King Lear, directed by the graduating students and starring all the tutors, proud and flashing in burgundy and gray. The title role was played by the Institute’s previous Head of Acting, long since retired, a sinewy man with long teeth and thin white hair scraped neatly forward over his forehead like a monk. About a month after closing night a costume, freshly flattened, was mounted on the peeling corridor wall. The collar was still stained black from the blood that ran down from empty eye-sockets and dripped sticky and scarlet off the Head of Movement’s gray unshaven chin.

The year began in earnest. The production of King Lear had been in part a challenge, presented to frighten the first-years and to show them an inheritance they would have to fight to earn. For a time it worked. In the beginning the first-years looked up at the tutors and older students with a kind of meek reverence, but as the weeks wore on they slowly began to inflate, growing ever larger with purpose and self-belief.

“I’m an actor,” Stanley was surprised to hear himself say, and after an initial pause he found that the definition pleased and even empowered him. “At the Drama Institute,” he then added, and waited confidently for his interlocutor to say, “Oh, the Institute. That’s supposed to be very hard to get into, isn’t it? You must be rather good.”

The first few weeks of the year seemed to pass in a flurry. Initially the first-year batch appeared tentative and apologetic and bashful with each other, but in fact each student was carefully carving out a place within the context of the group: those who variously wanted to be thought of as comic or tragic or eccentric or profound began to mark out their territory, fashioning little shorthand epithets for themselves and staking claim to a particular personality type so that none of the others would have a chance. One of the girls might drape herself over her classmates as they walked from Movement down the hall to Voice and say, “God, I love you guys! I love you all!,” just to secure her place as someone who was indubitably sweet. With that place occupied, the others scurried to make known their social or musical or intellectual talents, each defining a little space for themselves that no one else would be able to touch. The other students all said, “Esther is so funny!” and “Michael is so bad!,” and just like that each won the double security of becoming both a person and a type.

Stanley wasn’t sure what marked him out as a person. He hung back at the beginning of the year and let the other boys claim the roles of the leader and the player and the clown, watching with a kind of uncertain awe as they worked to recruit admirers and an audience. He guessed he wanted to be thought of as sensitive and thoughtful, but he didn’t pursue the branding actively enough and soon those positions were taken. He found himself thoroughly eclipsed by several of the more ambitiously moody boys, boys who were studied in the way they tossed their hair off their forehead, thin boys with paperback copies of Nietzsche nosing out of their satchels, boys wearing self-conscious forlorn looks, permanently anxious and always slightly underfed. Whenever these boys began to speak, the class would peel back respectfully to listen.

Stanley found himself quietly shepherded into the middling drift of the unremarkable students in the class. Like the rest of them he nursed a small hope that one day he would come into his own and surpass them all, but the hope was half-buried, and in his lessons Stanley rarely bloomed.

“We’ll make something of you yet,” the Head of Improvisation said to Stanley one morning, reaching over and tapping his chest with her finger. “There’s something in there,” she said, “that one of these days is going to just ripen, overnight. You’ll see.”

She walked away and left Stanley with the hot echo of her touch on his sternum and a feeling of joyful arrival that stayed with him for the days and weeks following. He applied himself more vigorously to his technique, spurred on by this germ of confidence that swelled his chest to bursting. He began to believe in his own ripening, waiting for it with a pious kind of expectation like a cleric awaiting a response to prayer. He became more patient with his own failures, safe and confident in the knowledge that one day soon he would surely succeed.

“It’s a strange thing,” the Head of Improvisation said later in the staffroom, pausing to count stitches with the pearly edge of her fingernail and tug the woollen square out flat to check her progress. “It’s a strange thing, how we caress their egos like we do. I see how much it affects them, lights them up, and I feel so responsible,