‘That’s been answered,’ said Haynings. ‘The effects would be impossible to manage.’
‘Only so far. I mean, nobody is going to expect a London production. A lot of tulle, or even butter-muslin, could be draped around Elvira and somebody could agitate the backcloth…’
Mrs Blaine, refusing to resume her seat, wrote Blithe Spirit on the blackboard and, to signify her own opinion of the suggestion, placed a large, almost insolent question mark against it. This started the ball rolling. Suggestions came fast and furious and so did the objections to them.
‘The Importance of Being Ernest,’ said a member.
‘Far too elegant and mannered. We’d never pull it off after people have seen Dame Edith and Sir Laurence and all that lot,’ said another.
‘What about The Dover Road?’
‘Only six characters, apart from the footmen and chambermaids. Besides, there’s no body to it. Nothing to get your teeth into.’
‘Body? Yes, what about a thriller? Murder always goes down well,’ said a young man.
‘A comedy-thriller! The Cat and the Canary?’ shouted his friend.
‘Night Must Fall?’
‘We’d never pull it off. That’s a play for professionals. Where would we find an Emlyn Williams?’
‘Why don’t we do another pantomime?’ asked a large blonde who claimed that before her retirement from it, she had been on the professional stage. ‘Aladdin would be nice. I could do the name part, with a bit of song and dance thrown in, and Tad —’
‘You shouldn’t use pet names in public, Miss Mabelle,’ said Othello hastily. ‘When we were kids in the States,’ he explained unnecessarily to the company at large, ‘I was called by my second name, Frederick, Freddy for short. Well, I couldn’t say Freddie when I was a tiny tot, so it got distorted.’
‘Sorry, love,’ said the blonde. ‘All I meant was that you could play Abanazar, the wicked uncle. You’d do that grand.’
‘We couldn’t put on a pantomime in the middle of summer,’ said Mrs Blaine firmly. ‘I shall not write that suggestion on the board.’
‘Sorry I spoke,’ said the blonde disagreeably. She was the wardrobe and make-up mistress and seldom got a part.
‘If we’re calling it the Caxton Festival,’ said a solidly-built man named James Hunty, a local house-agent and a close friend of the president, ‘I think, Hamilton, we ought to do something more or less in the Caxton period. What’s wrong with Saint Joan? I could take the Earl of Warwick and…’
‘Far too expensive a production,’ said Ernest Farrow. ‘Our finances would never run to it. Think of all those fifteenth-century costumes and the armour and all that.’
‘Besides,’ put in the youth who was responsible for the stage effects, ‘think of that scene on the bank of the Loire when, by a miracle, the wind changes. Remember that pennon on the lance? If anything goes wrong with that pennon the whole point of the scene is lost and you all know what a damned draught there is on that town hall stage.’
‘I do. I went all gooseflesh when I had to play Titania in the Dream,’ said one of the girls.
‘Well, you would play it all diaphanous,’ said Melanie. ‘Actually, you were hardly decent with the light behind you.’
‘Some are more fortunate in their figures than others.’
‘I heard some remarks passed that you wouldn’t have cared for, I can tell you.’
‘Please, ladies!’ said the chairman.
‘I remember that draught,’ said young Tom Blaine. ‘I had to play Puck stripped to the waist…’
‘Which I had forbidden you to do,’ said his mother, pointing her piece of blackboard chalk at him in a menacing manner.
‘Please!’ reiterated the chairman desperately. ‘If you all go on like this we shall get nothing settled. Are there any further suggestions before we take the vote?’
‘Bags I Saint Joan,’ said Stella Walker, ‘but, if you settle for that, you’ll have to cut quite a lot of it. There’s that boring scene in Warwick’s tent between him and Cauchon, for example. Our sort of audience could never be expected to sit through that.’
‘Shaw knew nothing about the Middle Ages, anyway,’ said a young man named Robert Eames.
‘If there are no more suggestions,’ said the president desperately, ‘I really think…’
‘Oh, but we must have some more suggestions, Mr Chairman,’ interpolated the scribe at the blackboard. ‘To my mind we have not heard one sensible voice so far.’
‘Why don’t we do three one-acts,?’ asked Geoffrey Channing. ‘We tried that at school in my last year and they went like a bomb.’
‘We tried it, too, four years ago,’ said the secretary. ‘It was hardly a success. The people in the first play felt that their evening was over much too soon, and those in the middle play complained that the first play hadn’t got the audience sufficiently warmed up, and as for the last play…’
‘Yes, I remember that last play,’ said Melanie bitterly. ‘I was the only woman in it and all the men had spent the first two plays in the pub and came on stage absolutely sloshed. I should think the people in the seventh row of the stalls could smell them and I had to be made love to by one of them. Ugh!’
‘Why not a revue?’ asked Stella Walker, giggling. ‘You know – take off the politicians and some of the people in this town. It would be a riot, I’ll bet.’
‘It probably would cause one,’ said the treasurer, ‘besides letting us in for several libel actions. I definitely think we must rule out that suggestion.’
‘I still think we ought to do a musical,’ said Sybil Gartner, sticking to her guns.
‘Porgy and Bess,’ suggested Geoffrey Channing. ‘I wouldn’t mind blacking up in a good cause.’
‘The audience would mistake us for the Black and White Minstrels,’ said Robert Eames. ‘They sing, too, you know.’
The chairman called the meeting to order again. Clarice Blaine wrote Porgy and Bess on the blackboard and added an even bigger and more offensive question mark against it than the one which already criticised Blithe Spirit.
‘I beg your pardon if I am out of order, Mr Chairman,’ said the newly-joined member, ‘but what is the object of holding a Caxton Festival? He had no connection with Hampshire, had he? I thought he set up his printing-press at Westminster.’
‘Ah, Dr Denbigh,’ said Mrs Blaine, before the chairman could reply, ‘thereby hangs a very interesting tale. We actually have a William Caxton living in our midst – well, very nearly in our midst – and as the printing-press is now five hundred years old – 1476 to 1976, you know – I decided that a festival must be held with our very own William Caxton as the principal figure. So far I have been unable to persuade him to take part, but I am determined that he can and shall be in the forefront.’
‘There aren’t those dreadful royalties on Gilbert and Sullivan nowadays,’ said Sybil, still hopeful of getting her way by sheer persistance. ‘Why don’t we do The Yeoman of the Guard?
There was a chorus made up in almost equal parts of approval, disapproval and suggestions for other Gilbert and Sullivan operas.
‘Gilbert and Sullivan? It’s been done to death on the telly.’
‘All the amateur operatic societies do it.’
‘You can’t beat Gilbert and Sullivan if you want to fill the house.’
‘The Yeoman of the Guard isn’t funny. What about The Mikado?
‘Iolanthe for my money. That policeman song always brings the house down, so what about that?’