Macduff and Malcolm, the lairds and their troops arrive. Now, at last, Macbeth and Macduff meet. The challenge. The fight. The exit and the scream cut short.
The brief scene in which Old Siward speaks the final conventional merciless word on his son’s death, and then Macduff enters downstage, and behind him Seyton, with Macbeth’s head on his claidheamh-mor.
Malcolm, up on the stairway among his soldiers, is caught by the setting sun. They turn their heads and see The Head. And finally:
“Hail, King of Scotland!” shout the soldiers.
“Curtain,” Peregrine said. “But don’t bring it down. Hold it. Thank you. Lights. I think they’re a little too juicy at the end. Too pink. Can you give us something a bit less obvious? Straw, perhaps. It’s too much ‘Exit into sunset.’ You know? Right. Settle down, everybody. Bring some chairs on. I won’t keep the actors very long. Settle down.”
They settled.
He went through the play. “Witches, all raise your arms when you jump.
“Details. Nothing of great importance except on the Banquo’s ghost exit. You were too close to Lennox. Your cloak moved in the draft.”
“Can they leave a wider gap?”
“I can,” said Lennox. “Sorry.”
“Right. Any more questions?” Predictably, Banquo. His scene with Fleance and Macbeth. The lighting. “It feels false. I have to move into it.”
“Come on a bit farther on your entrance. Nothing to stop you, is there?”
“It feels false.”
“It doesn’t give that impression,” said Peregrine very firmly. “Any other questions?”
William piped up. “When I’m stabbed,” he said. “I kind of hold the wound and then collapse. Could the murderer catch me before I fall?”
“Certainly,” said Peregrine. “He’s meant to.”
“Sorry,” said the murderer. “I missed it. I was too late.”
They plowed on. Attention to details. Getting everything right, down to the smallest move, the fractional pause. Changes of pace building toward a line of climax. Peregrine spent three quarters of an hour over the cauldron scene. The entire cast were required to whisper the repeated rhythmic chant as in a round.
“Double, double toil and trouble, fire burn and cauldron bubble.”
At last they moved on. There were no more questions. Peregrine thanked them. “Same time tomorrow,” he said, “and I hope no stops. You’ve been very patient. Bless you all. Good-night.”
But again there were stops, next day. A number of technical hitches cropped up during the final dress rehearsal, mostly to do with the lights. They were all cleared up. Peregrine had said to the cast: “Keep something in the larder. Don’t reach the absolute tops. Play within yourselves. Conserve your energy. Save the consummate thing for the performance. We know you can do it, my dears. Don’t exhaust yourselves.”
They obeyed him but there were one or two horrors.
Lennox missed an entrance and arrived looking as if the Devil himself was after him.
Duncan lost his lines, had to be prompted, and was slow to recover. Nina Gaythorne dried completely and looked terror-stricken. William went straight on with his own lines: “And must they all be hanged that swear and lie?” and she answered like an automaton.
“It was a dose of stage fright,” she said when they came off. “I didn’t know where I was or what I said. Oh, this play. This play.”
“Never mind, Miss Gaythorne,” said William, taking her hand. “It won’t happen again. I’ll be with you.”
“That’s something,” she said, half-laughing and half-crying.
At the end they rehearsed the curtain calls. The “dead” characters on the O.P. side and the live ones on the Prompt. Then the Macbeths alone, and finally the man himself. Alone.
Peregrine took his notes and thanked his cast. “Change but don’t go,” he said.
“ ‘Bad dress. Good show.’ ” quoted the stage director cheerfully. “Are we getting them down tomorrow?”
He put this to the company.
“If we get it rotten-perfect now, you can sleep in tomorrow morning. It’s just a matter of working straight on from cue to cue with nothing between. All right? Any objections? Banquo?”
“I?” said Banquo, who had been ready to make one. “Objections? Oh no. No.”
They finished at five of two in the morning. The management had provided beer, whiskey, and sherry. Some of them left without taking anything. William was dispatched in a taxi with Angus and Menteith, who lived more or less in the same direction. Maggie slipped away as soon as her sleepwalking scene was over and she had seen Peregrine. Fleance went after the murder, Banquo, after the cauldron scene, and Duncan, on his arrival at the castle. There were not many holdups. A slight rearrangement of the company fights at the end. Macbeth and Macduff went like clockwork.
Peregrine waited till they were all gone and the night watchman was on his rounds. The theatre was dark except for the dim working light. Dark, coldly stuffy. Waiting.
He stood for a moment in front of the curtain and saw the caretaker’s torch moving about the circle. He felt empty and dead-tired. Nothing untoward had happened.
“Good-night,” he called.
“Good-night, guv’nor.”
He went through the curtain into backstage and past the menacing shapes of scenery, ill-defined by the faraway working light. Where was his torch? Never mind, he’d got all his papers under his arm fastened to a clipboard and he would go home. Past the masking pieces, cautiously along the Prompt side.
Something caught hold of his foot.
He fell forward and a jolt wrenched at his former injury and made him cry out.
“Are you all right?” asked a scarcely audible voice.
He was all right. He still had hold of his clipboard. He’d caught his foot in one of the light cables. Up he got, cautiously. “All serene,” he shouted.
“Are you quite sure?” asked an anxious voice close at hand.
“God! Who the hell are you?”
“It’s me, guv.”
“Props! What the blazes are you doing? Where are you?”
“I’m ’ere. Thought I’d ’ang abaht and make sure no one was up to no tricks. I must of dozed off. Wait a tick.”
A scrabbling noise and he came fuzzily into view around the corner of a dark object. A strong smell of whiskey accompanied him. “It’s the murdered lady’s chair,” he said. “I must of dropped off in it. Fancy.”
“Fancy.”
Props moved forward and a glassy object rolled from under his feet.
“Bottle,” he said coyly. “Empty.”
“So I supposed.”
Peregrine’s eyes had adjusted to the gloom. “How drunk are you?” he asked.
“Not so bad. Only a few steps down the primrose parf. There wasn’t more’n three drinks left in the bottle. Honest. And nobody got up to no tricks. They’ve all vanished. Into thin air.”
“You’d better follow them. Come on.”
He took Props by the arm, steered him to the stage door, opened it, and shoved him through.
“Ta,” said Props. “Goo’night,” and made off at a tidy shamble. Peregrine adjusted the self-locking apparatus on the door and banged it. He was in time to see Props being sick at the corner of Wharfingers Lane.
When he had finished he straightened up, saw Peregrine, and waved to him.