The first act ended with the betrayal Gage and I had learned about the previous May. Brock’s unscrupulous neighbor, Angus Douglas, had maneuvered to have him wrongfully imprisoned for stealing a costly pocket watch he coveted. A pocket watch that rightfully belonged to Brock. Brock was thrown into jail and Maggie was taken in by the Douglases, who in their benevolence forced the young girl to perform the meanest of chores in their inn and sleep in the frigid attic, rousing the audience’s anger and affront at such an injustice.
When the curtain fell after the first act, I knew I would be hard-pressed to find a single member of the audience who had not softened toward Brock. The playwright and the young actor playing the notorious criminal had managed to squirrel their way into the audience’s hearts in a way that even the book’s author hadn’t been able to. So much so that from the moment the adult actor playing Brock strode onto the stage at the start of the second act, our allegiance remained unswayed despite the fact that he was noticeably harder and more intense, but also possessed of his dashing persona.
Five years had passed, and Bonnie Brock had adopted his infamous sobriquet, been released from jail, collected his sister, and begun to build his criminal gang, using the contacts and skills he’d learned while imprisoned. I found it interesting that neither the book nor the play attempted to speculate on how exactly he’d come by his nickname, only that it had emerged during his first stint in jail. The closest the book came to addressing it was the inclusion of a scene where Brock had viciously wounded a man for daring to deride him for it. The play had wisely chosen to omit that.
Just as they had omitted almost any mention of the body snatching undertaken by Brock and his gang. At the start of his criminal career, stealing bodies from the graveyards in and around Edinburgh to sell to the anatomy schools had been some of his most lucrative trade. Theft, housebreaking, illegal whisky distilling, and smuggling had initially been smaller enterprises, though they were now the gang’s predominant sources of income.
The playwright was plainly attuned to the mood of the people and understood how unpopular resurrectionists had become, particularly given the crimes perpetrated in this very city three years prior by Burke and Hare—body snatchers turned murderers. Illegal whisky distilling, on the other hand, was practically viewed by the Scottish as a patriotic duty given the unpopular prohibition of all but the largest of Scottish stills from making whisky in 1814. Bonnie Brock’s gang’s ability to smuggle whisky from the illegal Highland distillers down into Edinburgh and other parts of Scotland had been part of what cemented his reputation as a Robin Hood–type figure.
That and his generosity to the lower classes in Old Town and his care for widows and children who would otherwise go without. I’d heard tell that none of his employees need fear for their family should they be killed or sent to jail, for Brock made sure they were cared for. Sergeant Maclean of the Edinburgh City Police had long complained that even when they were able to arrest him, they were never able to keep Bonnie Brock locked up for long. The citizens of Edinburgh would muddy the evidence against him or send someone else to take his place in the blame. They didn’t want Brock brought to justice, for it was a justice they didn’t believe in.
However, true or not, a jail scene in the second act proved to be one of the most exciting parts of the play. Where normally the action of the scene was set in one room or space, the stage had been divided into the cross-section of a jail, with compartments for four cells, two up and two down. At one climactic moment, Brock escaped from his shackles and scampered toward the fireplace, where he had earlier been seen scraping away at the brickwork. He dislodged the bars blocking the chimney flue and then clambered inside, disappearing from the audience’s view, only to emerge from a hole opening in the floor of the cell above. From this chamber, he busted through the door and then climbed out the window to emerge on the flat roof of the jail.
But one trip through this course of obstacles was not enough. Brock declared he’d forgotten his blanket, and my heart lodged in my throat as he proceeded to retrace his steps in reverse back to his original jail cell. He collected his blanket and then made the trek for a third time, to the audience’s gasps and exclamations. When he returned to the roof, he ripped the blanket into strips, tied them together, and climbed down the side of the building to freedom.
While impressed with the entire performance, including the novel staging, I was also disheartened. This was no slapdash melodrama. It was a rip-roarious success. And likely to run for weeks if not months on end. The book had already been popular, but this play would launch it to even greater heights.
When the second act ended, I wanted nothing more than to remain in Philip’s private box, such were the nerves swarming inside me. The third act would be where the
