All this had been carefully rehearsed, but, as it was not quite finished, without the cart until the pre-dress rehearsal. As the reprieve marked the end of the opera except for the last song and dance, the final scene came so late in the evening, when the cast were almost blasphemous with exhaustion, that it had been run through ‘just for the sake of the motions’ as Laura put it, and the cart left on the stage, from which the stage-hands removed it during the College dinner-hour on the morning of the dress rehearsal proper. However, when the time came to get it on stage again for the dress rehearsal, there occurred an unseemly and maddening hitch, the more annoying in that, apart from it, the rehearsal went well.
‘Hey!’ said one of the volunteer stage-hands, a student who had helped to construct the cart. ‘Some funny ass has taken the wheels off! How are we going to trundle it on to the stage?’
‘Manhandle it, I suppose,’ said his friends.
‘Not on your life. No room at the sides of those stairs. We’d break it. Except for the actual platform where the bloke stands, the thing’s only made of cardboard, hessian and papier-mâché. Slip the word to the players. The chap will just have to stand at the right spot on the stage and imagine he’s on the cart.’
‘The noose won’t reach his neck and I don’t think we’ve got a longer piece of rope.’
‘He’ll have to do without a noose, then, won’t he? After all, this is only a rehearsal. We must make sure it’s all right on Thursday, though.’
‘He won’t mind about the cart. He’s always jibbed a bit at that rope round his neck. Think he’d got a guilty conscience or something, wouldn’t you?’
‘Well, let him know. I’ll have a scout round and see what’s been done with those wheels. I’d like to lay hands on the blighter who perpetrated the merry jest, that’s all.’
After the rehearsal Denbigh took the matter philosophically.
‘If we don’t find the wheels – and we’re certainly not going to turn the back of the stage and the dressing-rooms upside-down tonight,’ he said, ‘we’ve got Tuesday and Wednesday to find some more wheels and for you chaps to fix them on. If the worst comes to the worst, I can tip off the cast to go back to the original script and have the reprieve from the condemned hold instead of from the gallows. It isn’t, to my mind, such good theatre, but at least we should be carrying out the author’s intentions, and that, I suppose, is something.’
On the following morning he telephoned the town hall and was answered by the porter on duty. He requested that the missing wheels should be traced if the porter could spare the time. As Denbigh had conducted public concerts in the town hall on previous occasions and was known to be moderately generous with his pourboires, the porter promised to do his best and to ring the College if the missing wheels came to light. They did, and were found on the electricians’ gallery.
‘One of your students having a bit of a game, eh, sir?’ asked the town hall porter.
‘Possibly. Well, now you’ve found them, you might put the wheels in the principal dressing-room and lock the door, would you? The students who will call at about half-past one to put the wheels on again will show you my visiting-card. That will prove their bona fides. All right?’
‘Very good, sir.’
‘And perhaps you’ll just keep an eye on the cart when the students have re-affixed the wheels?’
‘I’ll do that, sir. In fact, I’ll do better than that, sir. If that prop – we call ’em props, sir, these gadgets and things as are needed on stage, sir – if that prop, when the wheels is on, will go up that ramp what covers the steps on to the stage, sir, that prop will go in my cubby ’ole. Suppose I was to wheel it in there when the young gents have put the wheels on it again, sir – it’s no height, so it won’t catch the top of my door – and lock the door on it when I ain’t in there, sir? How would that be?’
‘That would be excellent, but what if you go off duty?’
‘There’ll be somebody here with a key, sir. If it isn’t me, it will be my mate. I’ll give him the tip-off as nobody ain’t to touch that prop without they can perdooce your card.’
‘Fine. I’ll leave the whole thing in your hands, then, and, of course, I’ll see you – er—’
‘Thank you very much, sir.’
‘Funny thing about that hangman’s cart,’ said Laura to Sybil and Melanie, with whom she shared a dressing-room. ‘Who would play a daft trick like taking the wheels off it?’
‘One of those beetle-brained students, of course,’ said Melanie. ‘Thought it funny, I suppose. All boys of that age have a warped sense of humour. Personally, I’m glad there are wedges under those wheels as an extra precaution. The stage slopes forward quite a lot. It would scare me silly if I was blindfolded and that cart began to move.’
‘I never could abide Blind Man’s Buff myself,’ said Sybil. ‘You feel so helpless when you can’t see.’
‘But he can see,’ said Laura. ‘I tried the hood on to find out what it was like, and I could see through it quite easily. It’s only made of thin gauze. Anyway, thank goodness we don’t have to be made up just yet.’
Laura’s make-up took some time; Sybil’s was simpler; Melanie was not to be made up until the beginning of Act Two, when, during the interval, Laura would have removed her own make-up, or most of it, and changed out of Mrs Peachum’s costume in order to take over the prompter’s stool and Sybil would have her face expertly touched-up, ready for her next appearance. Melanie, therefore, was supposed to be alone in the dressing-room, or wherever else she chose to be, for the whole of the first Act.
This was because she had rebelled against assuming the office of prompter for that Act, asserting, with vehemence, that the versatile Laura could prompt, whether she was on or off the stage and that she herself was prone to catch cold if she sat in a draught. As there was no doubt, as had been pointed out when the choice of a play was under discussion, that the wings of the town hall stage were definitely – some said fiendishly – draughty, Denbigh had given the job to Hamilton Haynings who, like Sybil, did not come on until Act Two and was well upholstered in Lockit’s heavy costume.
Hamilton, whatever his private feelings about this particular chore, performed it faithfully for two nights, but on the Saturday evening nobody prompted at all, and as it became important, later on, to establish where everybody was and what he or she was doing at the beginning of the last scene of the play on the third and last night of the performance, these were Denbigh’s arrangements for all three nights of the show.
The Player and the Beggar, that is to say one of the students and Ernest Farrow, would be on stage in front of the curtain. Behind the curtain would be Macheath, in the person of Rodney Crashaw (alias Thaddeus E. Lawrence) already mounted on the hangman’s cart. Waiting in the wings would be the highwayman’s gang, mostly students but also including two members of the society, Geoffrey Channing and Robert Eames, who had the parts of Ben Budge and Matt o’ the Mint. On the other side of the stage and also waiting in the wings, would be Polly and Lucy (Sybil Gartner and Melanie Cardew), Filch (Mrs Blaine’s son Tom), the drawer (from the inn scene), the turnkey and the second jailer (Lockit’s assistants) and also the ladies of the town who included the blonde wardrobe mistress and Stella Walker, she who combined the parts of Jenny Diver and Diana Trapes. She had decided to revert to the costume of the former when she took her curtain calls, as she thought it far more attractive than that of the disposer of stolen property. The rest of the ‘ladies’ were students who had appeared also in the third Act as the women prisoners in Newgate gaol. These, having had their trial referred to the next sessions, were to celebrate this temporary reprieve with a dance, an activity in which the men students had declined to take part.