twenty-eighth Edinburgh Festival will be opened with a Service of Praise and Thanksgiving in St Giles’ Cathedral on Sunday 18th August at 3 p.m. Later, starting from the Castle Esplanade at 9.45 p.m., relays of torch-bearing runners will light a bonfire on Arthur’s Seat.’
And in the little halls of Edinburgh on that Sunday morning would-be cultural torch-bearers blew earnestly at the smoulderings of what was in many cases incombustible material. Experimental and university groups realised that their rehearsal time was running out and put on a spurt to justify the extravagant claims of their publicity. There were dress rehearsals for at least a dozen ‘funniest revues on the Fringe’, some twenty ‘revolutionary new plays’, and three or four ‘new artistic concepts which would flatten the accepted barriers of culture’. If all these ambitions were realised, British theatre would never be the same again.
In the Masonic Hall in Lauriston Street Charles Paris was trying to realise more humble ambitions and finding it hard work. The lighting technician he had been allocated was a fat and contemptuous youth, whose blue denim had faded and dirtied to the colour of sludge. He was known as Plug, and Charles found it difficult to call anyone ‘Plug’.
It had been made clear that, considering the exacting demands of creative amateur theatre, there was not going to be much time or effort left for him, a mere professional. ‘Um… Plug?’ he said exploratively, ‘I wonder about the chances of moving the back-projector round. If it stays there, I’m going to be masking the slides.’
‘That’d mean moving the screen too,’ Plug grunted accusingly.
‘Yes, it will.’
‘Can’t be done. Haven’t got the extension leads.’
‘Can’t you get them?’
‘Shouldn’t think so.’
Charles bit back his anger. It was difficult dealing with amateurs. In a professional context, no problem; he could have bawled the guy out, justified because a service that was being paid for was not being provided. But the amateur relies on goodwill and there did not seem to be much of it in evidence.
So he gritted his teeth and played stupid, apparently bowing to Plug’s technical expertise and working the youth round till he did what was required as a demonstration of his abilities. It was important, Charles had gone to considerable trouble to have slides made of Hood’s woodcuts. They had originally been printed with the poems and the crude humour of the pictures extended the range of the verse. In a one-man show it is important to give the audience as much varied stimulus as possible.
By application of simple child psychology he got the back-projector and screen moved and started a run. It was not easy. With only two stage areas in use, the lighting plot was simple. But Plug refused to rehearse the cues on their own, saying that he would pick them up on a full run. Then, in spite of the carefully marked-up script that Charles had given him, he proceeded to get every single effect wrong.
The one benefit of the run was that it tested Charles’ knowledge of his words, because whether he moved to the table or the lectern, there was a guarantee of total darkness on that area. And whenever he turned to the back-projection screen, he was confronted either by a blank or the wrong slide.
It was also a useful concentration exercise. In the darkness beyond the stage people kept wandering in and out. Plug greeted them all loudly and conducted irrelevant conversations at the top of his voice. Charles was ignored like a television in the corner of the room.
The show limped to its close. As he stood at the lectern to read the final Stanzas, ‘Farewell, Life! My senses swim…’, he was amazed to find the light was actually where it should be. It had taken the whole show to get one cue right, but at least it offered hope. Encouraged, he put more emotion into the poem. It approached its end with the dying fall he had intended.
‘O’er the earth there comes a bloom Sunny light for sullen gloom,
Warm perfume for vapour cold-’ then, before ‘I smell the Rose above the Mould’, the pause held long and dramatic.
Too long. Too dramatic. Plug snapped the lights out before the line was delivered.
Charles’ reserves cracked. ‘Oh, for Christ’s sake!’
‘What’s up?’ Plug grunted from the darkness.
‘That’s not the cue. There’s another line.’
Plug did not seem unduly concerned. He brought up the house lights. ‘Never mind.’
‘And then, after the last line, there’s supposed to be a three-second pause and a five-second fade down to black.’
‘Oh.’
‘It’s clearly marked in the script.’
‘Yes.’
Charles decided there was little point in concealing his feelings. ‘That was pretty abysmal.’
Plug nodded sympathetically, unaware that the comment referred to him. ‘Hmm. Perhaps you need more rehearsal.’
‘I think it’s you who needs more rehearsal. None of the cues were right.’
Plug’s silence indicated that this was an unworthy attack on his life work. Charles continued, ‘So let’s have one run-through of just the cues and then do the whole show again.’
‘There’s not much point.’
‘Why not? The show opens tomorrow.’
‘Yes, but I won’t be doing the lights then. I’m only here for the rehearsal.’
Charles tried to find out what would be happening about his lights in the actual show from the Company Manager, and Brian Cassells was confident that everything would be all right. Charles, who found Brian’s confidence increasingly unnerving, was not convinced.
‘Oh, incidentally, Charles, will you be going down to the Fringe reception?’
‘What’s that?’
‘At five o’clock. Royal Mile Centre. It’s sort of to launch everything. You know, Press’ll be there and all that.’
‘Then I’ll certainly come.’ Any chance of publicity must be taken. He was not too optimistic of the ‘DUDS of the Fringe’ poster bringing audiences flocking to see him.
Since the pubs were not open on Sunday, he had cabbage lunch with the rest of the group. The conversation was all of the coming shows. Willy Mariello’s death had been almost forgotten. Charles looked round the table. Anna was not there. He suddenly wished she was, or wished that he was with her somewhere keeping the blues at bay.
The loud T-shirted crowd joked and attitudinised. He felt old and envious. Their values were so simple. What they were doing on the Fringe was the most important thing that had ever happened; that was all there was to it. Their shows consumed all their thoughts and energies.
Except for the thoughts of one person-the murderer. He or she must be feeling regret or anxiety or something. But the lunch time crowd showed no signs of guilty conscience. They all seemed interchangeably brash and cheerful. Pam Northcliffe was up the far end of the table as nervously bright and giggly as the rest. Communal excitement had replaced the short tempers of earlier in the week.
Martin Warburton was not there. Charles wondered if he would be sharing in the group gaiety if he were. There was still a lot to be found out about Martin Warburton. That afternoon might be a good opportunity to read Who Now? — a Disturbing New Play.
It was disturbing. The language was good, there was some sense of structure, but the content was frightening. As the title implied, questions of identity figured large. None of the characters seemed to have a fixed personality; they were chameleons who took on the colour of different forms of violence. There was a woolly Leftish political message coming through the monologues that made up the play. Its main tenet seemed to be that, come the Revolution, the bourgeois would be destroyed. But it was the way in which they were going to be destroyed that was disturbing. Images of bombings, secret beatings and firing squads abounded. Continually blood welled, bones cracked, corpses twitched and entrails spilled. So much blood.
Under normal circumstances, Charles would have put it down to overwriting. Some of the extended metaphors even reminded him of his own adolescent literary excesses. But even so, and even given a young person’s insensitive ignorance of the real facts of death, there was something obsessive about the play. A morbid preoccupation with violence unbalanced the writer’s considerable natural talent.
