The Rehearsal

SIX

“Masks or faces? That’s what I keep asking myself. Masks or faces.”

The Head of Movement was leaning against the radiator in the staffroom, his thin hands wrapped around his mug, frowning in a glassy sort of way at a faint stain on the linoleum floor. “The tall girl,” he said. “Today. Doing that… that piece from… The piece she did today—oh, start me off?”

The Head of Acting dipped his newspaper and looked at him over the top of his glasses. “Come, you spirits…”

“Come, you spirits, that tend on mortal thoughts, unsex me here, and fill me, from the crown to the toe, top-full of direst cruelty. Yes.” The Head of Movement stood quivering for a moment. “She will never convincingly play that part. She is trapped inside her little round eyes and inside the smooth perfect symmetry of her face. All I could think while I was watching was that she would never think those lines. Not her. Not that face. That face would never dare. If I went and saw her in performance I would walk out and say, Lady Macbeth was all wrong.” The Head of Movement tossed his head in frustration. “I look at them all,” he said, “and I see so much hope and vigor and determination, all trapped inside faces that will never sell, that will never be remarkable—modern, pampered, silken faces that have never known tragedy or hardship or extremity, or even… God, most of them have spent nearly their whole lives inside. That girl—Lady Macbeth, today. It is like she’s made of plastic. She is too smooth and round to be real. She will never escape that smoothness and that roundness. She will never escape her face.”

“You’re in a very bleak mood, Martin,” the Head of Acting said, unwrapping an aspirin and dropping it neatly into his coffee. “I didn’t think she was that bad. I rather liked her freshness. ‘Come to my woman’s breasts, and take my milk for gall’—I thought that was marvelously seductive. She wasn’t trying to be evil.”

“She wasn’t trying to be evil because she didn’t understand a damn word of what she was saying,” the Head of Movement snapped.

There was a silence. The Head of Movement bent his head and gulped from his mug in an indelicate snatching way, gasping between each hot mouthful, his throat contracting like a reptile’s when he swallowed. The Head of Acting thought, That’s a bachelor’s habit, bred of always eating alone. He felt sorry for the Head of Movement suddenly, and put his paper down.

His dissatisfaction with the world always has such a terribly personal quality, the Head of Acting thought; he is freshly disappointed each time anything falls short of an ideal, and he wears his disappointment like a child. It showed a curious kind of innocence for a man of his age—a foolish self-sabotaging kind of innocence, for he knew that he was going to be disappointed, and still he believed.

The Head of Movement’s instinct inclined toward simplicity and scruple, and yet he was not a scrupulous man: instead he was anxious and undecided and complaining, suspended between points of view. He was forever in the shadow of a principle, forever in the shadow of some floodlit cathedral swarming with bats in the dark, and while he might admire it and worship it and fear its massive contour, he could never bring himself to truly touch it; he would never knock and enter.

The Head of Acting watched him wince and scowl into his coffee and draw his shoulder blades together and toss his head as if his skin had shrunk. The Head of Acting thought, It is as if, in some deep recess of him, he is still a teenager who has not yet lost that selfish blind capacity to fall in love, and fall badly. He wondered if he was jealous of the man’s anxiety, jealous of the agony of his choices, jealous of his tortured sense of failure and the failed justice in the world.

“Is it a bad batch this year?” the Head of Acting said. “Is that what’s getting you down?”

The younger man flopped into a chair like a punctured balloon. “No,” he said, drawing out the word in a doubtful way.

“You were asking yourself, masks or faces.”

“Yes,” the Head of Movement said, and sighed. “I used to believe in faces. All my life I believed in faces. I think I might have finally changed my mind.”

Whenever a door was closed at the Institute another always opened, popping gently forth, invisibly nudged by a draught that could never be contained. The shifty current gave the buildings a muttering, ghostly feel. If Stanley closed a door behind him, he always listened to hear another click open, like a faithful echo, out of the shadows further up the hall. All the doorknobs rattled. Hairline cracks webbed the enamel like dirty lace.

The academic year began with a lavish production of King Lear, directed by the graduating students and starring all the tutors, proud and flashing in burgundy and gray. The title role was played by the Institute’s previous Head of Acting, long since retired, a sinewy man with long teeth and thin white hair scraped neatly forward over his forehead like a monk. About a month after closing night a costume, freshly flattened, was mounted on the peeling corridor wall. The collar was still stained black from the blood that ran down from empty eye-sockets and dripped sticky and scarlet off the Head of Movement’s gray unshaven chin.

The year began in earnest. The production of King Lear had been in part a challenge, presented to frighten the first-years and to show them an inheritance they would have to fight to earn. For a time it worked. In the beginning the first-years looked up at the tutors and older students with a kind of meek reverence, but as the weeks wore on they slowly began to inflate, growing ever larger with purpose and self-belief.

“I’m an actor,” Stanley was surprised to hear himself say, and after an initial pause he found that the definition pleased and even empowered him. “At the Drama Institute,” he then added, and waited confidently for his interlocutor to say, “Oh, the Institute. That’s supposed to be very hard to get into, isn’t it? You must be rather good.”

The first few weeks of the year seemed to pass in a flurry. Initially the first-year batch appeared tentative and apologetic and bashful with each other, but in fact each student was carefully carving out a place within the context of the group: those who variously wanted to be thought of as comic or tragic or eccentric or profound began to mark out their territory, fashioning little shorthand epithets for themselves and staking claim to a particular personality type so that none of the others would have a chance. One of the girls might drape herself over her classmates as they walked from Movement down the hall to Voice and say, “God, I love you guys! I love you all!,” just to secure her place as someone who was indubitably sweet. With that place occupied, the others scurried to make known their social or musical or intellectual talents, each defining a little space for themselves that no one else would be able to touch. The other students all said, “Esther is so funny!” and “Michael is so bad!,” and just like that each won the double security of becoming both a person and a type.

Stanley wasn’t sure what marked him out as a person. He hung back at the beginning of the year and let the other boys claim the roles of the leader and the player and the clown, watching with a kind of uncertain awe as they worked to recruit admirers and an audience. He guessed he wanted to be thought of as sensitive and thoughtful, but he didn’t pursue the branding actively enough and soon those positions were taken. He found himself thoroughly eclipsed by several of the more ambitiously moody boys, boys who were studied in the way they tossed their hair off their forehead, thin boys with paperback copies of Nietzsche nosing out of their satchels, boys wearing self-conscious forlorn looks, permanently anxious and always slightly underfed. Whenever these boys began to speak, the class would peel back respectfully to listen.

Stanley found himself quietly shepherded into the middling drift of the unremarkable students in the class. Like the rest of them he nursed a small hope that one day he would come into his own and surpass them all, but the hope was half-buried, and in his lessons Stanley rarely bloomed.

“We’ll make something of you yet,” the Head of Improvisation said to Stanley one morning, reaching over and tapping his chest with her finger. “There’s something in there,” she said, “that one of these days is going to just ripen, overnight. You’ll see.”

She walked away and left Stanley with the hot echo of her touch on his sternum and a feeling of joyful arrival that stayed with him for the days and weeks following. He applied himself more vigorously to his technique, spurred on by this germ of confidence that swelled his chest to bursting. He began to believe in his own ripening, waiting for it with a pious kind of expectation like a cleric awaiting a response to prayer. He became more patient with his own failures, safe and confident in the knowledge that one day soon he would surely succeed.

“It’s a strange thing,” the Head of Improvisation said later in the staffroom, pausing to count stitches with the pearly edge of her fingernail and tug the woollen square out flat to check her progress. “It’s a strange thing, how we caress their egos like we do. I see how much it affects them, lights them up, and I feel so responsible, even guilty, like I am handing a loaded pistol to a child.”

“All actors are perverted by their profession,” the Head of Acting replied, shaking out his newspaper and folding it crisply along the existing seam. “We inflate their egos to make up for everything about them that gets trampled and broken. You’re not damaging them, Glenda. You’re just softening the blow.”

Most of Stanley’s friends from school had now dispersed, swallowed up by the local university and the polytechnic or packed off overseas to pursue better chances somewhere else. Stanley buried himself at the Institute. The first-years were required for long hours each day, and more and more often Stanley found reason to come into the buildings on the weekends, nosing around the script library or taking a book up to the viewing gallery above the dance hall, where he could watch the weekend school groups take classes in ballet and rope work and basic tissue. He found a flat with two other first-year actors, thin solemn figures who, like him, had let all the other bones of their lives fall away. He became consumed by the Institute so totally and wholeheartedly that he sometimes thought about the sour-faced boy from Wardrobe with the ancient gramophone in his arms. He had seen the boy several times on his way to and from the art department, always hauling cans of paint and bags of fabric scraps and half-finished puppets stuck with pins.

At home the boys talked nothing but acting, film and theater, and street performance and revolution, snug in the shell of their own irrelevance but all of them giddy as if they were standing together and alone on the edge of a new uncharted world. They talked long into the night and drafted plays on greasy scraps of newsprint and imagined what marvelous lies they might one day be paid to tell.

“When they write our biographies,” his housemates said, “when they write our biographies, all this will be in the opening chapter, the chapter before the big break, before we get famous, before everything starts happening. And this is the chapter that everyone will find really interesting and inspiring, because it will show that we are just people like everyone else, people who started from an ordinary beginning, people who were once poor and struggling and earning an ordinary wage. In that way, this chapter will be the most interesting chapter of the whole book.”

Stanley began to look at himself differently, cherishing the parts of himself that he might be able to use, delicately prodding himself for weaknesses, both fearful and hopeful that he might cause himself to bruise or break. His father, who had never before figured very prominently in his daily life, began to surface as a source of tragedy to be mined and exploited and spent. In class he talked about his father more and more. Gradually and unconsciously Stanley began to regard himself as a tragic figure—not a victim of the ordinary lash of adolescence, but a person more profoundly wronged, a kingly figure, an emotional hero. At night he sighed and pounded his pillow and sometimes cried.

“Always the arriviste,” the Head of Acting said in the staff-room, with a kind of paternal amusement. “We get them too late. That’s the problem. We should have a school for sixteen-year-olds. They’d get their degree at nineteen. They’d have to drop out of high school to audition. It’d do them good.”

“They’re already formed by the time they enroll,” said the Head of Voice. “Psychically formed. Morally formed. Everything happens so early now.”

“And they love themselves so dearly,” the Head of Improvisation said. She tugged sharply at her wool and sent the ball rolling away under the table. “That’s the hardest thing to break.”

In the students’ cafeteria on the floor below, the first-years were clumped together in a similar debate. Stanley picked thoughtfully at his gray slip of pork as he listened.

“You have to admire people that come here,” one of them was saying, “people that choose to put themselves on display, people that choose to play with the very aspects of themselves that make them the most vulnerable. These people are the bravest people in the world.”

A fine mist of slanting rain was falling, darkening the slate and beading the swollen moss with a thin film like a silver dew. Stanley was sprawled on one of the vinyl couches that lined the corridors of the technical wing, lying on his back with his legs wrapped around the radiator pipe and reading, his thumb spread over the top edge of the spine to hold it open.

“Are you doing your reading for Early Modern?” said one of the first-year girls, coming up beside him and flopping down on to the floor.

“Yeah,” Stanley said, shifting his thumb slightly to hold his place on the page. “I’ve got The Revenger’s Tragedy. What have you got?”

“The Alchemist,” the girl said, pulling her bag open and taking out a dog-eared copy of the play. “I haven’t started. What’s yours about?”

Stanley thought for a second, and then said, “It’s about a man who puts on a disguise in order to avenge the death of someone he loves, but after his revenge is complete he finds out that he can’t take the disguise off. He’s become this person he’s pretended to be for so long.” He flipped the book around to take another look at the cover, which showed a cloaked man attempting to ravish a skeleton. The skull was brightly painted in peach and scarlet, the cheekbones rouged and the eye sockets ringed in glossy black.

“Cool,” the girl said, thoroughly unmoved. She sighed and stretched out her legs, reaching down to grip her toes with both hands. “Dance class yesterday actually annihilated me,” she said. “I hobbled all the way home. Like actually hobbled.”

“Yeah,” Stanley said. He stalled a second, trying to think of something to say next. He almost began to say how much the dance class had made him sweat, but stopped himself with the words already in his throat. He almost began to chatter in a self-deprecating way about his fitness, but stalled again and instead cast around for something to say about the dance tutor or the class itself, but he took too long to come up with something and at all once he froze in the compounded panic of realizing he had paused for too long. The girl shifted and began to stretch her other leg. The rough-edged copy of The Alchemist fell sideways off her lap and on to the floor.

“All the dance tutors at this place are sadists,” she said. “Look at that bruise.”

Stanley looked. Slender fingers of gray and purple carved across her hip and melted into a reddish cloud above the bone. She stroked the bruise impressively with one finger, her other hand peeling back the waistband of her tracksuit to expose the skin.

“Wow,” Stanley said.

“But I do bruise really easily,” the girl said. She tucked the bruise back under her waistband and resumed stretching her leg.

“Hey, this play is actually really good,” Stanley said, loosening his tongue and trying for a second time. He flapped his copy of The Revenger’s Tragedy half-heartedly against his leg. “It’s so grisly and sick.”

The girl glanced at the cover briefly. “Is that the one where the guy nails the other guy’s tongue to the floor with his dagger?”

“Yeah!” Stanley said. “And while he’s dying he’s forced to watch his wife having sex with his bastard son.”

“Yeah, I know that scene,” the girl said.

Her indifference seemed to close the conversation completely, slamming it shut with a slap that left no echo. She sighed. Stanley tapped his fingers and wondered briefly if he should reopen his book and keep reading. He compromised by turning the book over and rereading the blurb on the back.

“Did you bruise after yesterday?” the girl said after a moment, looking at Stanley with a narrow-eyed interest and flicking her eyes over him, up and down.

“I just sweated a lot,” Stanley said, feeling as he said it a wash of resignation, as if he had known he would say it all along. “Dance class makes me sweat.”

“Gross,” the girl said, and touched her bruise again through the fabric of her waistband, cupping her fingers carefully around her hip.

“Let’s see some chemistry,” said the Head of Acting, and nodded at them both to begin.

This time Stanley was sitting on a park bench with his feet tucked underneath him, drawing his shoulders up to his ears against the cold. The air was crisp and ginkgo-smelling.

“I’ve seen you here before,” Stanley said, “on your way to your music lesson, stepping around the leaves.”

The girl halted a little way off. She slung her music case down from her shoulder and placed it on its end in front of her, resting her wrists upon it like a teller at a tollbooth. Stanley spoke again.

“I thought,” he said, “that maybe I could make you feel like you were worth something. If you were interested. Maybe this weekend. I’d kiss you only once you were very sure that you could trust me. I’d look out for you. I promise.”

“Why?” the girl said.

“I think you’re interesting,” Stanley said. “I want to know you better.”

The wind caught the edge of the girl’s skirt and tugged at it gently. She moved her knees closer together against the draught.

“Last year,” she said, “I was standing at the bus stop after netball and one of the boys showed up on his bicycle, and I smiled at him and we talked about the people we knew and then he said, Guess what I got my girlfriend for Valentine’s Day? Pregnant. So I smiled and said, Congratulations. And then he scowled at me and he said, Jesus, we went to the doctor. She’s sixteen.”

“I don’t understand,” Stanley said.

“There’s no such thing as innocence any more,” the girl said, “there’s only ignorance. You think you are holding on to something pure, but you aren’t. You’re just ignorant. You are handicapped by everything you don’t yet know.”

“But I see something pure in you,” Stanley said quietly. “I see something in you that is different from all the others. I see a purity in you.”

“The only difference between me and any of the others,” the girl said, flatly but with a kind of relish, “is at what price and under what circumstances I am prepared to yield.”

“Stage fighting,” the Head of Movement said, “is also known as combat mime.”

Everyone was upright and alert today, hopping up and down on the balls of their feet and shaking out their fingertips. This was the class they had all been looking forward to, underlined on their timetables in red ink and attempted in advance in the secret of their bedrooms at home.

“Stage fighting is not a form of violence,” the Head of Movement said. “It is a form of dance, a controlled dance that is rehearsed very slowly until it is perfected, and then brought up to speed. Next year you learn basic fencing, épée and sabre and foil. This year we focus simply on how to slap, punch and kick, drawing on the arts of kickboxing, capoeira and basic acrobatics. By the end of this year you should be able to choreograph and perform a fight that simulates punching, kicking and throwing your opponent, as well as being punched, kicked and thrown yourself.”

He smiled at their eagerness and added, “You’ll learn that losing a stage fight is just as difficult and demanding a task as winning one. Now. Who can give me the definition of a special effect?” He looked around, but the students were blank and distracted, hopping from foot to foot and aching to begin. “A special effect,” the Head of Movement said patiently, “is something that does not happen, it only seems to happen. Stage fighting is a special effect. The violence that you simulate does not happen on stage. Anybody who doesn’t understand this will fail this section of the course. In previous years we have had students removed from this class because they do not understand the definition of a special effect.”

He pointed at a chalked rectangle drawn on the gymnasium floor, and said, “All right. Everyone get inside the line, please.”

The students moved forward in a crush to get inside the rectangle. The area was small and they had to cluster tightly, shuffling together and clutching at each other to keep their balance and stay inside the line. The girls drew their shoulders together and became ever so slightly concave, carefully bringing their upper arms forward and together from an instinct to protect their breasts. The boys snickered and shoved each other with their shoulders and the backs of their wrists. Stanley found himself in the middle of the crush, uncomfortably pinned between a pair of girls both facing inward. The girl in front breathed into his collarbone and carefully shifted her feet so they were tucked inside his own. The rough edge of her foot touched his, and she quickly shifted her weight to twitch away.

“Before we begin fighting I want to start with a few exercises that will get us comfortable with touching each other,” the Head of Movement said. “This exercise is called The Raft of the Medusa. The aim of the exercise is to be the last person standing inside this rectangle. When I say you may begin, you must all start pushing each other. If any part of your body touches the floor outside the rectangle, you must leave the raft immediately. The last person to remain inside wins. Does everybody understand?”

There was a flurry of nodding from inside the cramped rectangle.

“Pushing only,” the Head of Movement said. “No punching. No kicking. Not yet.”

Everybody tensed their elbows and braced their legs, ready to fight. The students on the outer edge realized too late their disadvantage, and all at once they tried to angle themselves better to worm their way into the center.

“All right,” the Head of Movement said. “Go.”

The rectangular crowd immediately began to boil. A few of the students were shoved out of the rectangle within seconds; they skipped backward and retreated with a kind of rueful disappointment to watch. Stanley found himself surrounded by girls, and at first he shoved at them gingerly, careful with his hands lest he touch their breasts by accident, using mostly his shoulders and his hips. The girls were less polite. Little palms were shoving at the small of his back all of a sudden, pushing and pushing, and he found his feet slipping on the floor. He grabbed a fistful of somebody’s sweater in an effort to resist. The whole crowd lurched suddenly sideways; everybody’s bare feet arched and skidding over the floorboards, and half the class tumbled over the western chalked perimeter and off the raft. The disqualified students hopped neatly out of the way and left the rest of the group to fight.

With a large part of the class gone, the winning students could move more freely. The game became more tactical and more deliberately hostile. Stanley had one of the smaller girls in a clumsy underarm headlock and was trying to force her over the line when another student fell sideways on to him and sent all three of them staggering off the raft. The Head of Movement was standing calmly to the side. He checked his watch.

When the raft had been emptied of most of the students, the remainder formed a ring around the final fighters and began to chant and cheer. The winning three were locked in a sweaty embrace in the chalky center of the raft, skidding sideways and occasionally dropping painfully on to a knee or a hip and tugging the others down as they fell. Their legs were braced and bowed as they grappled with each other, two boys and a girl—a wiry muscular girl with the shapely and decided figure of a dancer.

Somebody on the perimeter set up a stamping rhythm, and soon all the students were stamping and stamping, their bare feet sending up tiny clouds of white dust, the steady beat filling the massive space, rising up to the lofty stippled ceiling where the hooded bulbs hung from their bluish rack unlit. The Head of Movement did not join in the stamping, but his long fingers tapped in time against his forearm and his eyes moved carefully from the ring of cheering watchers to the fighting three, and back again. Every time one of the winning fighters was shoved hard or forced closer to the chalk perimeter there was a whoop of appreciation from the crowd and an explosion of clapping and laughter. The beat got faster and faster. The Head of Movement nodded his head and sometimes smiled a tiny smile.

In a sudden fluent movement the dynamic of the struggling three abruptly changed, the boys turning upon the girl and moving to work in tandem for the first time. The tacit flare of cooperation made the Head of Movement inhale gravely and stroke the corners of his mouth with his finger and his thumb. The girl was finally ousted, hauled over the line by the boys shoving at her in a parallel surge. The boys then turned to face each other, skipping quickly away from the perimeter and back into the safety of the middle of the raft. The girl added her voice to the cheering and the stamping, and the boys were once again locked in a skidding headlock, a weary inching dance that finally ended when the two of them fell across the southern line in a tangled heap.

The first-years performed The Raft of the Medusa six times, repeating the exercise again and again until the students were flushed and sore and strained. As the morning wore on, their posture gradually began to change, hardening and drawing upward and becoming more aggressive and finally losing the curving self-conscious protectiveness that in the beginning had handicapped them all so plainly. The chalked line soon bled out into sticky tracks of gray and white, tearing outward like a dying star.

“Thank you,” the Head of Movement said after almost an hour, when the red-faced victor had sent his opponent lurching over the line for the sixth and final time. “Now you should all be nicely limbered up and you should have gotten used to touching each other. I want to start with the very basics of stage fighting and build upward.” He gestured for them to gather round. He said, “We’ll start with learning how to punch.”

The boy in the mask said, “I need a volunteer.”

The mask was cut away around his mouth like a jowl, curving over his upper lip so his chin and his lower teeth were exposed. The hard plastic curve around his mouth made him look a little like a marionette, shiny and rigid and hinged. The surface of the mask was smooth and flesh colored, with almond-shaped eye-holes, and attached to the boy’s face without elastic.

Several of the first-years in the audience raised their hands, grinning in a self-conscious, defensive way, and the masked boy pointed at one of them. “You,” he said, and beckoned. This was evidently a sound cue: the gymnasium was suddenly filled with the sound of a classic accordion, jolly and scissoring and gay.

The gymnasium door opened and the secretary darted in, trotting over to the Head of Acting and whispering urgently in his ear. The Head of Acting nodded, rose, and followed her out. The door closed behind them.

In the audience Stanley shivered with unknowing delight. He watched the volunteer make his way through the audience and mount the stairs to the stage. By now other masked figures were drifting coolly on to the stage from the wings, pacing about and looking impassively out at the audience through the fleshy almond holes in their cutaway masks.

“This is an exercise in the Theater of Cruelty,” the masked boy called out above the rising sound of the music. “This exercise is a challenge.”

He moved behind his volunteer. The boy stood and smiled uncertainly at them all, waiting for his instructions, listening for sounds of the masked boy’s movement behind him, and rocking back and forth self-consciously on his heels. Then the masked boy knocked him to the ground. As he fell forward on to his knees, the boy’s head was flung painfully backward, his expression hurt and bewildered by the split-second impact but still half-smiling his nervous defensive smile. Swiftly the masked boy darted forward and hit him again, and the boy fell flat on to his stomach, jarring his chin on the floor. In an instant the masked boy was kneeling on his back, pinning him flat on the ground and twisting the boy’s wrists around behind his back so he couldn’t move.

Somebody ran forward with a water-trough, a wide, flat basin filled with slopping water, and shoved it roughly down onto the floor. The attacker grabbed a fistful of his volunteer’s hair, reared up, and plunged him headfirst into the water. He held his own breath as he struggled to keep the volunteer’s head submerged, looking at his writhing victim down the length of his stiff veined arms and pinching his lips together in concentration. The victim began to thrash out in desperation and fear, his legs kicking out on the floorboards, panicked and flopping like a bloody gutted fish dying on the edge of a pier.

From where Stanley sat cross-legged in the audience, the pinioned drowning boy looked headless. Stanley could see only his damp collar and the last white knob of his spine over the lip of the water-trough as he tried in vain to struggle free. He watched as the boy slapped the floorboards and writhed and the water slopped and thrashed and the accordion kept playing its jolly provincial tune. After almost twenty seconds the audience began to shift and mutter, and someone shouted, “Let him go!” The masked boy looked up with a jerk, as if jolted out of a reverie. He released his victim immediately, jumping up and stepping backward in a nimble little leap, and the volunteer reared his dripping head, coughing and spitting and taking great savage lungfuls of air. His eyes were streaming and pink-rimmed and his face was white. He sat for a moment in hurt bewilderment, quivering and gasping weakly in the middle of the stage.

The audience watched him regain his breath in silence. They met his gaze with a kind of wary suspicion, all of them thinking that he was probably a plant, a prearranged assistant who any moment now was going to leap up and laugh and cuff them on the shoulder and say, “I got you good.” They regarded him doubtfully. They were not yet convinced. A few of the students looked around to measure the approval or affirmation of the tutor, but the Head of Acting had gone and they were alone, a baffled motley patch of black in the middle of the gymnasium floor.

On stage the masked boy was standing impassively, his legs apart, his hands together behind his back. Then in one fluid motion he raised his arm, and two other masked boys ran forward, grabbed the gasping volunteer by his arms, and hauled him to his feet. The first boy ran forward and there was a flurried snipping shoving movement, and then the volunteer boy was shoved to his knees once more and slapped hard across his face. The two boys who were holding him began to tug at his shirt, and Stanley realized that the boy’s clothes had been cut off him, sliced from the hem to the collar up the length of his spine. The masked boys tore away the ragged shirt and jumper, and then darted back, leaving him pale and shirtless and shivering in the middle of the floor.

The masked boy looked directly at the audience now, as if in challenge. The first-years looked back in bewilderment.

“That sucks, man,” the volunteer boy said suddenly, looking at the torn remains of his jersey and his shirt wadded in a ragged pile in front of him. His voice was thin. “That’s my favorite shirt.”

The masked boy didn’t flinch. He kept looking at the audience, as if waiting for somebody to speak. Nobody did. He leaped forward, and the scissors flashed out again, and in a swift careful movement he grabbed a fistful of the volunteer boy’s hair from the top of his head and cut it off with a thick silver snip.

There was a collective intake of breath from the students on the floor. The masked boy stood holding the clump of brown fur aloft like it was a trophy scalp. Nobody moved. There was a long and horrible pause, and then all of a sudden the volunteer boy jumped up and bolted. The masked boys tried too late to grab him—they missed. He jumped off the edge of the stage and ran out of the gymnasium without looking back.

The masked boy watched him leave and drew himself up a little higher.

“This is an exercise in the Theater of Cruelty,” he said. “We are here to show you what it means to really feel something.” He gave an odd little bow and then the curtain fell, whistling swiftly down like a blade. The bottom folds hit the stage floor with a thump and then the first-years were alone in the gymnasium. They could hear the soft apologetic patter of the actors’ feet as on the other side of the curtain they dispersed and then finally disappeared.

“Come with me,” was all the Head of Movement said when Stanley found him, and Stanley followed his sloping barefoot tread all the way from the courtyard to the office upstairs, both of them silent, Stanley falling back as he tried to swallow and mask his tears. He was surprised at the violence of his feelings.

“I’ve come to complain,” was all he’d said, standing with his bony knees together and squeezing the blood from his hands. “I can’t find the Head of Acting. I want to complain.”

Through his distress Stanley found himself a little relieved that he had found the Head of Acting’s office locked and the staffroom empty. The Head of Movement was infinitely more approachable than the older man, who peered through his glasses at the students with a kind of impassive chill and wore short sleeves even in winter, as if he were cold-blooded and felt no difference.

Now, in the still of the office, the Head of Movement placed his palms together in an entreating way. “Stanley,” he said. “Stanley, what do you think you would do if you paid to go and see a play which included a rape scene, and during this rape scene the assailant began to really rape his victim?”

“I’d say something,” Stanley said. His voice quavered a little and he reached up to rub his cheek with the heel of his hand.

“You would not,” said the Head of Movement. He laced his fingers together. “You would shift in your chair and you would think that this was terribly avant-garde but still it really wasn’t your thing and you would marvel at how realistic everything was looking and maybe if you were very uncomfortable you would look around you to see what everyone else was making of it. And then if you really started to feel like something was amiss, maybe if the victim was obviously crying out for help, or if everybody in the audience was clearly feeling uncomfortable, then you might stand up and shout something out. But it would take you a very long time. Most likely by the time you got the courage to fight back, the scene would be over.”

Stanley was at a loss for what to say.

“I know it’s a horrible thing to have to imagine,” the Head of Movement said, “but I’m trying to make a point. I’m just trying to point out that if a person is standing onstage in front of an auditorium full of people then ‘real’ is a useless word. ‘Real’ describes nothing on stage. The stage only cares whether something looks real. If it looks real, then whether it is real or not is immaterial. It doesn’t matter. That’s the heart of it.”

“That’s not what you told us in Movement class,” Stanley said, with rising anger. “You said what was important was truth and not sincerity. All that stuff you said about mime. I believed all that.”

The Head of Movement sighed and pressed his fingers to his lips. “No,” he said, and paused for a moment, shaking his head and gathering his thoughts together. He drew a weary breath. “No. We’re talking about two different things now.

“Stanley,” he said, “think how you would feel if you acted in a play in which your character had to die, and after the performance everybody came up to you and said I really believed you, I really honestly believed that you had died. I saw you dead onstage and I felt myself thinking, Oh my God, he’s actually dead. You would be rapt. It would be the best possible compliment anybody could give you: that your pretence, your big game of let’s-pretend, looked so real that somebody actually thought it was real.”

“But I’m real,” Stanley said, realizing to his displeasure that he was again on the verge of tears. “My performance might be pretend, but I’m not.”

“That’s exactly it,” said the Head of Movement swiftly. “If you are a good actor, you will be using your emotions, displaying your laughter, your tears, your sexuality, your insecurities. There’s always this doubleness at play. You and the character you are playing both have to be transparent. You have to look through the one to see the other. That is why being an actor is such a difficult job. It really is you up there.”

“But there wasn’t any doubleness today,” Stanley cried out. His voice was high and tight and choked. “It was just him. It was his shirt they ruined. It was his breath. It was his hair. They were hurting him.”

“You’re angry because they betrayed you,” the Head of Movement said simply. “They lured you into feeling something truthful and real, and then they destroyed it in front of you.”

“They betrayed him!” Stanley shouted.

The Head of Movement sighed and looked down at his hands.

“Why is this not a problem for you?” Stanley said after a moment, still breathing quickly. “How can it be okay by you that something like this is able to happen?”

“I understand your anger,” the Head of Movement said. “Please believe that it wasn’t meant to happen in the way that it happened. In fact I don’t think the boys properly understood what they were doing. The manifesto of the Theater of Cruelty is really a lot more complicated and interesting and life-affirming than its name suggests.” He closed his eyes, recalling a loved passage to his mind, and said, “ ‘I have therefore said “cruelty” as I might have said “life” or “necessity” because I want to indicate that there is nothing congealed about it, that I turn it into a true act, hence living, hence magical.’ ” He opened his eyes and smiled sadly at Stanley. “Artaud,” he said, “in his own words.”

Stanley sat for a moment, breathing heavily and feeling stalemated. He tried to remember what they had been talking about a few minutes earlier, to renew his argument and try to force the Head of Movement out of this tired apologetic apathy.

“I like that you had the courage to talk to me,” the Head of Movement said now. “I’ll be speaking to each of those students very seriously so they really understand the emotional impact of what they did.” He blinked at Stanley and waited. The minute hand moved forward with a solemn thock.

When the Head of Movement was younger he acted for the Free Theater, a mothy ragged band of minstrels and failed gypsies who squatted in derelict houses and camped in parking lots and traveled around the country each year to perform at prisons and rural schools. On the wall above his head were a few snapshots from those days showing greasepaint and street-side juggling and oil-drum fires and scratched guitars. Now he sat bowed with age and a clinging fatigue, reaching up to stroke his thin hair with a dry wrinkled palm, crisp and graying and faded like a piece of parchment left too long in the light.

“Has it ever happened to you?” Stanley said suddenly. “Like the rape thing. Have you ever gone to see a play where something real happens and everyone just watches and thinks it’s part of the play?”

“Yes,” the Head of Movement said. “A long time ago. I saw a man die of a heart attack. He was old. The curtain came down, that’s all. They asked us to leave. Everyone left very quietly.”

“Who was he playing when he died?” Stanley asked.

“Oh, it was an obscure little play that didn’t do especially well, as I recall,” the Head of Movement said, leaning back in his chair and looking at the ceiling to better conjure up the memory. He was relieved not to have to look at Stanley anymore. “Everything was rather beautiful, in a funny kind of way. He died in the last scene of the play and on closing night. We didn’t know at the time that he was dead—we thought perhaps a stroke. It didn’t look fatal from where I was sitting. But we read about it the next day in the papers.”

The Head of Movement was rarely asked to recall scenes from his life in this way, and he savored the feeling.

“The character he was playing was a man who has become rich by impersonating people and forging things and lying. Late in his life he returns home and finds that his family have no memory of him. It was as if he had never existed as a real man. That was roughly the way the story went.

“I suspect that his character was going to die anyway,” the Head of Movement said, “in the final few pages. But of course I never saw the ending.”