Murder Unprompted

But, after the first scene, the performance weakened. The power of the acting remained, but its flow was constantly interrupted. The actor just did not know the lines and, though he could manage the exchanges of dialogue quite well, every time he came to a big speech, he would dry.

‘Sorry, old boy. Sorry, loves. Prompt,’ he would say. The Stage Manager would give him the line, he’d be all right for a couple more sentences, then, ‘Sorry, it’s gone again.’

The play tottered on like this for a quarter of an hour. Charles was sitting at the back of the hall with Malcolm Harris, and kept feeling the author tense as another of his speeches was chopped up and destroyed. Eventually, Michael Banks just stopped, looked out at the director, and said, ‘Look, sorry, Peter old boy, I’d better use the book. Not getting anywhere like this.’

‘I did want to do this run without books.’

‘So did I, dear boy, so did I,’ said the star lugubriously, and got a good laugh from the cast. He had managed to endear himself to all of them within the week, and they shared his agony as he groped for the lines.

‘We open in less than a fortnight,’ Peter Hickton continued to argue.

‘Don’t think I don’t know it. But, honestly, I think we’ll just be wasting time if I go on like this.’

‘You’ve got to come off the book sometime.’

‘I will, I will, love. I promise. Look, don’t worry about it. I’m usually pretty good on lines. Once, when I was in rep. I learned lago in three days. So it will come, just hasn’t come yet. So I think for this run I’d better press on with the book.’

Michael Banks’s charm didn’t prevent him from being forceful, and Peter Hickton had to concede defeat. The play continued. With the support of the printed lines, Michael Banks’s performance regained the stature it had shown in the first scene and left no doubt that he was going to add a new excellence to The Hooded Owl. Charles found he was watching much of the play as if seeing it for the first time.

Towards the end of the second act, the door beside him opened and a woman slipped in to the back of the hall. She was in her forties, smartly dressed in white trousers, eau-de-nil silk shirt and long camel-coloured cardigan. Very well-preserved. She flashed a well-crowned smile at Charles.

‘Hi,’ she whispered. ‘I’m Dottie, Micky’s wife.’

‘Charles Paris.’

‘How’s it going?’

‘Pretty good.’

She nodded and her alert hazel eyes flickered around the room, taking everyone in. They lingered on Lesley- Jane Decker. ‘Who’s that?’ she hissed.

Charles gave the girl’s name.

‘Micky made a play for her yet?’

He was surprised. ‘I don’t know. I haven’t been round much this week.’ Then, curious, ‘Why? Has he got a roving eye?’

‘Haven’t we all?’ she said. Her tone was mocking, but she was fully aware of the sexual nature of her remark.

The play ended. Malcolm Harris started to applaud and some of the others joined in. Michael Banks grinned and went across to have a word with Lesley-Jane. After Dottie’s remark, Charles couldn’t help thinking that the two of them did look rather intimate.

Peter Hickton clapped his hands again. ‘O.K., thank you all very much. We really are getting somewhere. There are a few scenes I’d just like to run through before we break and — ’

‘Sorry, love,’ said Michael Banks gently. ‘Got to go. Off for the weekend, as I said, old boy.’ He waved vaguely to Dottie.

‘But I really think we should — ’ the director began.

‘Sorry. No can do.’

‘Are you sure you can’t just stay for — ’

Michael Banks shook his head charmingly. ‘Sorry, love.’

‘Oh. Oh, well. . You will have a look at the lines over the weekend, won’t you? I mean, the performance is coming fine, but the lines are. .’

‘Course I will, old boy, course I will. Scout’s honour. Cross my heart.’

‘Oh, and I have got a note on — ’

‘Got to go.’ Michael Banks went across to get his coat and brief-case.

‘Lines a problem?’ Dottie whispered to Charles.

‘Seem to be.’

She nodded knowingly.

‘He starts all right,’ said Charles, ‘but he can’t keep it up.’

‘You can say that again.’

Once again, there was no doubt of the sexual overtone in Dottie Banks’s words.

CHAPTER SIX

The weekend with chums in Chichester did not seem, on the Monday’s showing, to have left Micky Banks much time to look at his lines. If anything, he was worse after the break; even the words he had remembered the week before were now coming out jumbled and confused.

‘Don’t worry,’ he kept saying. ‘Don’t worry, Peter old boy. They will come. Just out of practice learning, you know. That’s the trouble with doing all these films and tellies — you just have to remember a little bit for a short take. Forget what it’s like learning a long part. But don’t worry — be all right on the night. I once got up lago in three days when I was in rep. If we just press on with the rehearsal, it’ll come.’

But it didn’t. And indeed it was very difficult to press on with the rehearsal. In every production there comes an awkward jerky stage when the cast abandon their books for the first time, but for The Hooded Owl it seemed to be going on longer than usual.

And it had a knock-on effect. George Birkitt got lazy about learning his lines too. Charles remembered from working on The Strutters with him that George had always had an approximate approach to the text, relying, as did so many television actors, on a sort of paraphrase of the speeches which homed in on the right cue. Strong direction could make him more disciplined and accurate, but Peter Hickton was not well placed to bully George Birkitt. The latter could always turn round — and indeed did turn round-and say, ‘Sorry, love, I don’t mind working on them, but there doesn’t seem a lot of point in my giving up my free evenings when the star is unwilling to do the same.’

He couldn’t resist putting a sneer into the words. In spite of the success of Fly- Buttons, George Birkitt was not yet a star — and quite possibly never would be. He lacked the necessary effortless dominance of character. Deep down he was aware of this fact, and it hurt.

Charles hoped that George’s assumption was right, that Michael Banks’s difficulty in retaining the lines was just the product of laziness. If that were the case, then atavistic professional instincts and the terrifying imminence of the first night would ensure that he knew the part by the time they opened. But Charles had a nagging fear that it wasn’t that, that Michael Banks really was trying, that he did go through the lines time after time in the evenings, but that his mind could no longer retain them. If that was the situation, it was very serious. And through the star’s casual bonhomie at rehearsals, Charles thought he could detect a growing panic as the awful realisation dawned.

They were making so little progress on the Monday that Peter Hickton took the sensible decision and dismissed most of the cast at lunchtime; he would sit down with Michael Banks and George Birkitt all afternoon and just go through the lines. It was a ploy that often worked. Apart from the shame of being kept in like a naughty schoolboy, the constant automatic repetition of the lines taken out of the context of the play could often lodge them in the leakiest actor’s mind.

And on the Tuesday morning it was seen to have had some effect. George Birkitt, whose main problem with the lines had been an unwillingness to look at them, showed a marked improvement. Michael Banks, too, started with renewed confidence and got further into the text than he ever had before without error. Relief settled on the