resemble some sort of eroto-religious self-flagellation ritual — and yet they also had enormous respect for their mentor’s refusal to let the convictions of his youth fall out along with his hair. The belief all three men shared was that Expressionism had not been pushed nearly far enough. ‘Expressionism is no more a form of theatre than revolution is a form of state,’ Fritz Kortner had written. Perhaps, but in that case the revolution had been botched. The New Objectivity that had replaced Expressionism in the middle of the 1920s was nothing but the old state with a new cabinet. In reply, the New Expressionism would be the old revolution with new bombs.
Klugweil, meanwhile, was a twenty-four-year-old so languid as to be almost liquid, except when he went on stage and broke open some inner asylum of shrieks and contortions, wild eyes and bared teeth — which made him perfectly suited to Expressionist acting and almost useless for any other type. He’d been at university with Loeser, who had always wondered what he was like during sex but had never quite had the cheek to make an enquiry with his dull girlfriend.
‘Is everyone ready?’ said Loeser, who stood in the wings with his hand on the lever. The Allien Theatre had been an old-fashioned music hall before Blumstein took it over, and renovations were still only half complete, so after a few hours backstage your clothes and hair were so thick with paint flakes, dust clumps, loose threads, cushion stuffing, cobwebs, and splinters that you felt like a veal cutlet rolled in breadcrumbs.
‘Yes, get on with it,’ said Blumstein, who sat in seat 3F of the empty auditorium.
‘This pinches under the armpits,’ said Klugweil, who stood on stage, strapped into a harness like a test pilot missing a plane.
Lavicini’s Extraordinary Mechanism for the Almost Instantaneous Transport of Persons from Place to Place was, as it turned out, genuinely extraordinary. Once, as many as sixteen stagehands communicating with whistles had been required to change a scene. Giacomo Torelli’s invention of a single rotating axle had since made possible the simultaneous movement of multiple flats, reducing that number from sixteen to one. But that leap forward was rendered instantly trivial by the magnificence of Lavicini’s Teleportation Device. At the end of the first scene, the audience gave a gasp so great you could have marked it on a barometer as the stage suddenly took flight like a flock of birds. A vast hidden assembly of ropes, cranes, cranks, wheels, springs, runners, gantries, pulleys, weights, and counterweights was lifting every part of the set into the air — was rearranging it in a flurry of swoops and swaps and spins — and was setting it down again with barely an audible bump. The Third Temple of the Lizards was replaced by a Dagonite slave-cove before anyone in the room even thought of breathing out. All the violinists missed their cues and one ballerina fainted, but the cheering afterwards was so loud that it didn’t matter. At the back of the theatre, Auguste de Gorge decided that, having gone to bed with eight whores after the last premiere and five whores after the premiere before that, he would go to bed tonight with thirteen. (Not long ago someone had told him about the Fibonacci sequence and he had construed it as a challenge.) In the wings, Adriano Lavicini stepped back from the controls with a temperate smile. A stagecraft machine so ambitious that it was indistinguishable from magic: that was painting the devil on the wall.
Loeser’s Teleportation Device, by contrast, was not supposed to be spectacular. It was just a means to an end. The first half of
At the Theatre des Encornets, by the time the second act drew to a close, the Teleportation Device was a novelty more than twelve minutes old, and yet the Paris upper crust weren’t quite bored to death with it yet. Montand’s lovely Dance of the Half-Fish came to an end, the dancers fluttered off stage to make way for an orchestral interlude, and the scenery began once again to lift into the air. And then there was a rumbling sound like thunder ground up with a pestle.
No two accounts quite agreed on what happened next. The confusion was understandable. Loeser knew only that the Theatre des Encornets began to crumble — not the entire building, fortunately, but only its south-east corner, which meant one side of the stage and several of the nearby private audience boxes. There was a stampede, and even after all those centuries it was perhaps with a moistness in the eye that one recalled the tragic and senseless sacrifice of some of the most deliriously beautiful couture in the early history of the medium. Most of the inhabitants of that couture, as it happened, were unharmed — as were the musicians, who were shielded from tumbling marble by the position of the orchestra pit, and the dancers, who by great good luck had just exited stage right rather than stage left. The dead, in the end, numbered about twenty-five audience members from the private boxes nearest the collapse, who were recovered from the rubble after the fires had been put out but were in every case too badly mashed to be identified; the swooned ballerina, who had not been in the wings with her sisters but rather languishing on a couch backstage; Monsieur Merde, the Theatre des Encornets’ cat; and Adriano Lavicini himself.
The Teleportation Device, meanwhile, had deleted itself along with the building. No part of it could be salvaged for an investigation into what might have gone wrong, and no plans or even sketches could be found in Lavicini’s workshop. Auguste de Gorge was, of course, ruined. And Louis XIV never went to the theatre again.
Two hundred and fifty years later, at the Allien Theatre, a spring sprang. A counterweight dropped. An actor shot across the stage. And a scream was heard.
The original Teleportation Accident was not notorious solely because it was the only time that a set designer was known to have inadvertently and suicidally wrecked a theatre and flattened sections of his audience. It was notorious also because of claims that appeared in certain reports of the cataclysm. Several reliable witnesses recalled that just before the end of the second act they had detected a stench somewhere between rotten metal and rusty meat. Others had felt an icy draught lunge through the theatre. And one (not very reliable) marquis insisted to friends that, as he fled, he had seen grey tentacles as thick as Doric columns slithering moistly out from behind the proscenium arch. Rumours began that — well, that an aforementioned German idiom was more literally applicable here than any post-Enlightenment historian would be willing to credit. Before his death, Lavicini had, after all, been nicknamed ‘the Sorceror’.
Whatever the truth, that was Lavicini’s Teleportation Accident. As for Loeser’s Teleportation Accident, that wasn’t nearly so bad. Nobody died. The Allien Theatre was not rended apart. Klugweil just dislocated a couple of arms.
They didn’t confirm that until later, though. All Loeser and Blumstein could see as they rushed over was that Klugweil was dangling half out of the harness, limbs twisted, face white, eyes abulge. The overall effect reminded Loeser of nothing so much as a set of large pallid male genitalia painfully mispositioned in an athlete’s thong.
‘Why in God’s name did you have to call it the Teleportation Device, you total prick?’ hissed Blumstein to Loeser as they struggled to untangle the actor. ‘I knew this would happen.’
‘Don’t be irrational,’ said Loeser. ‘It would have gone wrong whatever I called it.’ Which, judging by the head-butt he then received from the pendulant Klugweil, was not felt to be a very satisfactory reply.
Two hours later Loeser arrived at the Wild West Bar inside the Haus Vaterland on Potsdamer Platz to find his best friend already waiting for him.
‘What happened to your nose?’ said Achleitner.
‘To answer your question,’ said Loeser indistinctly, ‘I don’t think we’re going to be able to get all that coke
