Lovers Make Moan

Chapter 6

Last Performance

“First, Pyramus must draw a sword to kill himself.”

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On Saturday evening the cast assembled in high spirits. It was obvious that the adrenalin was flowing and Brian Yorke had more than a suspicion that in some cases the alcohol had flowed fairly freely, too.

“I think we’re a bit above ourselves,” he said to Jonathan. “I hope the show is going to be all right. It’s not that I give a hoot for the mayor and corporation and all the rest of them, but we’ve done so well the last two nights that it would be a pity to spoil things now.”

“Don’t worry. We’re well-rehearsed. As soon as we open, everything will be all right. Has everybody turned up?”

“Oh, yes, I’ve checked and the signora has counted her chicks and is busy getting them dressed and is screaming at them like a parrot turned sergeant-major. One thing—they’re used to it. That old lady is a tower of strength. I’d back her to control a caravan of camels if she had to teach them to dance.”

“So the mayor and corporation are to honour us.”

“Complete with the mayoress, the president of the golf club, the commodore of the yacht club, the head of the Chamber of Commerce, representatives of the local bench as well as the mayor, and there’s an even chance that the High Sheriff may turn up with the Chairman of Quarter Sessions. The Crossforest M.F.H. is bringing his wife and daughters and a whole bevy of Lynn’s business associates are coming. Emma Lynn is a bit worried in case she lets Marcus down in front of them, but she won’t. Oh, I was asked to tell you that either Dr Fitzroy-Delahague or the gorgeous Jeanne-Marie is going to cut evening surgery and come along before we’ve finished, so that Ganymede and Lucien can be taken home. You and Deborah won’t be sorry, I guess.”

“We shall, as a matter of fact. They’re charming little chaps. One thing: I don’t suppose the evening surgery will be overcrowded. On Saturdays I expect most people find something infinitely better to do than waste a non-working day in a doctor’s waiting-room. It’s weekdays—that is to say, work-days—which produce the pitiful patients.”

“Is it a cynic that I see before me? Well, we’d better get changed, I suppose. We’re both on in the first scene, worse luck. I like to get the house warmed up a bit before I tread the boards. Talking of which, I do hope Lynn’s work-people haven’t ruined your lawn.”

“Not mine, thank heaven; my cousin’s, and there will be time to smooth things over before he gets back from holiday. In any case, I don’t think much damage has been done.”

At this point Deborah appeared.

“I’m doing the children first,” she said. “Then I’ll dump them on Signora Moretti and get myself dressed. You had better get a move on, darling, hadn’t you? Peter Woolidge is tubbing Lucien and Ganymede, and while he’s drying them and dressing them I’ll tub Rosamund and Edmund.”

“I’ll nip up to my dressing-room and get ready, then, and leave our bedroom all clear for you and the kids. What a help young Peter is. Are the kids behaving themselves?—ours, I mean.”

“Wildly excited, of course. They’ve caught the general infection. Everybody is excited. By the way, Rosamund has made up her mind that she is to receive a bouquet, so what do we do about that?”

“She’ll get one at the end of her scene with Puck. Lynn has laid it all on. I say! I hope the weather cools down a bit. What with the heat and the excitement, we don’t want bilious attacks. You know what kids are!”

“Don’t worry. Ice-cream and sweets have been taboo since three o’clock this afternoon. When I’ve done the children I’ll push them along to the signora and have a look at you in your costume, shall I?”

“You haven’t done that on the other two nights. Why this sudden thusness?”

“I don’t know. I’ve got a funny feeling that I don’t want to be far away from you this evening.”

“There’s thunder in the air, perhaps.”

“There can’t be. The air’s as clear as clear. It is hot, though. Do skip, darling. We’ve got to start on time, or nobody will get to bed tonight.”

The evening certainly was warm, but not with the oppressiveness which presages thunder. As Deborah had indicated, there was none of the brooding tension which precedes a coming storm. In fact, as Valerie Yorke said to her husband, it was the kind of beautiful midsummer evening which must have given Shakespeare the urge to write the play.

“Yes,” agreed Brian. “It’s a nuisance we’re on stage as soon as the play opens because, before that, we’ve got to be on hand, with Lynn and Emma and the Bradleys, to receive the Duke of Plaza Toro and suite—i.e. the mayor, mayoress et al. I hope to goodness they’ll get here on time. We must open at half-past seven if any of the cast are ever going to get home tonight.”

“It’s a pity local notables have to see us in costume before the play begins.”

“Never mind. It can’t be helped. You look stunning and so does everybody else. Even Emma looks beautiful tonight. By the way, I see that Narayan Rao has turned up with his kid. I had better go out there and greet him. It’s all good for race relations.”

Narayan had been given a chair on the O.P. side from which he could get a view of the stage. Sharma was asleep at his feet on a ground-sheet covered by a blanket. He wore a wreath of flowers and looked angelic.

“If he wakes when he is picked up, he will not cry,” said Narayan. “As soon as you have finished with him, I will take him home. My good friend Bourton was anxious that he should appear, but I do not want him to stay up too long.”

“When you’ve taken him home, why don’t you come back and see the rest of the play? There is a seat reserved in the auditorium.”

“Thank you, but I think not.”

The last performance was heralded, as the others had been, by an excerpt from Mendelssohn rendered by the Ladies’ Orchestra, and then on came Theseus and his party to open the play. The first performance had been better than might be expected from amateurs, the second, although sagging a little, had been adequate, but this last performance began by being spectacular and ended in a way which, although the audience did not know it at the time, was sensational.

The opening scene, set against a painted background oflonian columns which purported to represent the palace of Theseus, went exceptionally well. Brian Yorke, in the snowy tunic, gold sandals and belt, gilded sword and purple cloak of Theseus, looked and sounded like a true duke of Athens, and his wife Valerie made a handsome appearance as Hippolyta, although she had little to say. Their leggy nine-year-old, young Yolanda as Philostrate, made the briefest of appearances, having been sent off early in the scene on being commanded to ‘stir up the Athenian youth to merriments’, and although, at the first rehearsal, she had sneaked back on stage, this had been vetoed and her big moment was when she led in the pedigree bloodhounds (by kind permission of their breeder, Tom Woolidge, who hoped to sell them to Marcus Lynn after the show), so, off-stage, Yolanda spent much of her time with them, especially after their kidnapping by Rosamund.

Emma Lynn, reassured by the compliments of the High Sheriff at the reception given before the show and by the encouragement she received from her husband and Deborah, spoke Helena’s lines with a passion and a confidence which surprised everybody, and when she made her exit on the line, ‘To have his sight thither and back again’, there was spontaneous applause.

In the workmen’s scene which followed, Robina Lester began by reverting to the over-acting which the company hoped had been quashed at rehearsals, but she was soon called to order by receiving a sharp kick on the ankle from Susan Hythe, who was standing next to her. In fact, by the time, in the second act, that Peter Woolidge as Puck had performed his preliminary acrobatics and Rosamund had faultlessly enunciated the fairy’s speech, the audience had fallen under the spell of the night, the garden, the woodland setting, and the play itself.

Little Sharma Rao was released into Deborah’s charge at the appropriate time and toddled hand-in-hand with her while she delivered her rebellious speech to Oberon. The child, fat, brown and solemn, wore a golden tunic and on his head was a charmingly lop-sided chaplet of yellow flowers. He was on stage for a very short time and then Deborah took him back to his father in the wings. Narayan vacated the chair he had been given and, so far as anybody knew, took the baby boy home as soon as he had dressed him. At any rate, that is what everybody assumed, supposing that anybody thought anything about it at all.

Narayan must have seen Rinkley in the first scene in which the workmen appeared, and Rinkley must have known that Narayan was there because nobody could have been unaware of the presence of the baby boy who so trustingly committed himself to Deborah’s care for the short time that he was on stage, but nobody saw or heard any exchange between the two former litigants and it came out later that when Narayan took his child home he certainly did not return to see the rest of the play and could have had no hand in what happened before it ended.

Meanwhile the play romped on and reached the point where Theseus and his train find the lovers asleep in the woods. Young Yolanda, slim and looking tall in her doublet and hose, and permitted, for this one scene, to wear her dagger (one of the prize pieces of Marcus Lynn’s collection) proudly led in the dogs. Her father, magnificent boots and all, praised them in the most beautiful description of hounds ever penned:

‘My hounds are bred out of the Spartan kind,

So flew’d, so sanded; and their heads are hung

With ears that sweep away the morning dew;

Crook-knee’d and dew-lapp’d like Thessalian bulls;

Slow in pursuit, but match’d in mouth like bells,

Each under each,’

Brian Yorke declaimed thus, while his daughter, determined that on this occasion the dogs should receive their due meed of applause, paraded them across the front of the stage. It was against orders, but to good effect.

What was less effective was the exit of Bottom from the wood. After the huntsmen had been bidden to blow their horns and wake the lovers and these had gone off with Theseus and the rest, Bottom scrambled dizzily to his feet. Awakened and not at all sure of what had been happening to him among the woodland sprites, Rinkley was supposed to have communed with himself, planned to have Quince write a ballad about the amazing dream he thought he had had in the wood, and then crossed the stage to the prompt side ready to come on again when the workmen meet in Quince’s house.

Instead of this, as soon as the stage was clear, Rinkley, having got unsteadily to his feet, went off on the O.P. side in the wake of the hunting-party.

To the majority of the audience this deviation from the rehearsed procedure made no difference at all. Even those who were familiar with the full text of the play probably thought that the producer was responsible for the innovation. As for Rinkley himself, he staggered away and when he reached the trestle tables which held the ‘props’, among the trees, was violently sick.

Yorke, who was taken aback by the actor’s unscripted and unrehearsed exit, hastened after him. All questions were obviously unnecessary and Yorke asked only one. “I say,” he said, “what’s come over you?”

“Those damned mussels. I should never have eaten them.” Another indescribable upheaval followed and then Rinkley zigzagged blindly away and lay on a patch of grass shivering and sweating. Yorke went off to look for assistance.

“What is it?” asked Robina Lester, who was picking up her bits and pieces for the workmen’s play and had witnessed Rinkley’s unrehearsed exit.

“Food poisoning. Dr Jeanne-Marie is in the audience. I’ll stay with him if you’ll go and get her. Be as quick as you can.”

Deborah came up. Yorke said, “I don’t think he can go on again tonight. Go in front and beg the indulgence of the audience for a few minutes, would you, while we get the understudy changed and briefed?”

“Mussels?” said Dr Jeanne-Marie. “He had better go to hospital, although it seems there can be little left in his stomach. He may have an allergy to shellfish, but one thinks also of myelotoxin, so to get the stomach washed out is precautionary.” Some of the men carried the sweating, trembling, mottled Rinkley up the slope to the house, ready for the ambulance to pick him up, using the stretcher which was in readiness for carrying Pyramus off the stage in the workmen’s play. While, accompanied by Deborah, who was not needed again until the very end of the show, and Dr Jeanne-Marie who was to do the telephoning, the bearers carried the feebly protesting man up through the woods, Brian Yorke went to find Donald Bourton and urge him to change as quickly as he could from the Fairy King’s fantastic trappings into the tunic and armour of Pyramus.

He found his Oberon in a little clearing, but was perturbed to note a half-empty bottle of whisky at Bourton’s side and Bourton seated on the ground.

“Here!” he said urgently. “On your feet, Don, and make it slippy.”

“Ur?”

“Rinkley has passed out on us. Get into the Pyramus outfit. You’ll have to stand in.”

“Can’t. Got to go on again as Oberon.” He was slightly glassy-eyed, but his speech was clear and when he rose to his feet he was quite steady.

“Never mind about Oberon. Look, I’m cutting out the little scene where Bottom turns up again at Quince’s house and I’ve told the scene-shifters to put on the palace back-drop. We’ll go straight into the workmen’s play.”

As he talked he had Bourton by the arm and was urging him towards the table on which the armour, sword-belt and helmet were laid out. An anxious Marcus Lynn was standing there and received their advent with relief.

“Oh, good man, Donald!” he said. “Come on. I’ll help you.”

“And I’ll go in front again and hold the audience for another few minutes,” said Yorke.

To release the men who had carried Rinkley up to the house and who were needed in the next scene, Deborah remained with the patient until the ambulance came for him and so she missed the extraordinary conclusion of the third night of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. As the play, in view of Rinkley’s retirement and the necessity to put on Bourton as his understudy, was to conclude with the burgomask dance, leaving out the fairy ending except for Puck’s last lines, she would not be required on stage again, for there was no time for Bourton to change back again from Pyramus to Oberon.

With him in Rinkley’s part, the workmen’s scene went even better than it had done at the two previous performances, and he, whether influenced or not by the whisky, appeared to be enjoying himself. The interruptions, essays of wit, ripostes and responses from the court party, sparkled and crackled as they had never done before. Then came the point at which Pyramus, believing that the lion had killed Thisbe and carried her off, decides to commit suicide.

Pyramus usually stands up to make his farewell speech before stabbing himself and falling to the ground, and Rinkley had played it this way. He did a particularly good theatrical fall and liked to show it off to the audience. Bourton changed this. He lay down with great care and a meticulous arrangement of his tunic after Quince had helped him to get out of his body-armour, and then, having declaimed that he was dead, fled and that his soul was in the sky, he raised himself slightly on one elbow, gave an unexpected hiccup, raised the dagger and plunged it into his body. Picking up her cue, Susan Hythe, as Thisbe, capered on to the centre of the stage and gazed concernedly down on him.

“ ‘What, dead, my dove?’ ” she enquired, and continued: “ ‘O Pyramus, arise! Speak, speak. Quite dumb? Dead, dead? A tomb must cover thy sweet eyes.’ ”

This was almost the cue for Quince and Lion to come in with their stretcher (which had been returned) and convey Pyramus into the wings, but before this happened Thisbe was supposed to pull out the dagger so that at the end of her speech she could commit suicide with it.

This she failed to do because the dagger remained stuck fast. The audience thought that this was all part of the fun, but Susan signalled to the pall-bearers to come on, and the rigid body of Pyramus was carried off with the dagger still fixed in position. Susan turned her back on the audience and mouthed at Yorke, who was looking truly ducal as Theseus, “No dagger! It won’t come unstuck. What shall I do?”

“Drop dead,” he said, in a voice the audience could hear. There was a roar of appreciative laughter at this unscripted addendum, and Thisbe, clutching her heart, dropped slowly, gracefully and without hurting herself, on to the turf. Quince, without Lion, came galloping back. He went up to Theseus and muttered, “Something’s happened. He can’t come on again. Passed out.”

“Oh, damn! We must play on, though. Do the dance,” said Yorke, “and we’ll finish.”

“Right,” said Marcus Lynn. “ ‘Will it please you to see the epilogue?’ ” he demanded loudly, “ ‘or to hear a burgomask dance between two of our company?’ ”

“ ‘No epilogue, but come, your burgomask,’ ” shouted Yorke, hoping that this truncated speech would indicate to the ladies of the orchestra that he had decided to cut the play short at this point. To make certain, however, that they would get the message, he murmured a word to Jonathan, who, as Demetrius, was standing behind him, and Jonathan slipped out. The orchestra produced some music from Capriole Suite, Quince and Lion performed their clodhoppers’ dance and, when this was over, they and the rest of the workmen retired into the wings. Theseus spoke the lines which took the court party off the stage and there was only a short pause (which, anyway, was covered by applause from the audience) before Puck came on and spoke the last few lines of the play.

When the bouquets to Valerie Yorke, Barbara Bourton, Emma Lynn and Deborah had been presented and, with some difficulty, the mayor had been prevented from making his threatened speech, Marcus Lynn alone saw the notables off as the audience drifted out. There was much revving-up of cars, Lynn’s business friends departed and then an appalled producer had to give the cast the news. The totally unexpected collapse of Donald Bourton which had prevented his return on stage was not due to drink or to natural causes. By some so-far unexplained mischance, he had been given the wrong dagger and, all-unwittingly, had stabbed himself to death with it.