“I reckon so. Lad’s got the breeding, you know. Son of a lord, even if he was born the wrong side of the blanket.”
There was to be an interval fairly early on in the play so that the elves and fairies, having danced and sung and, in the case of Peasblossom, Cobweb, Moth and Mustardseed, said their first little bits of dialogue, could be removed, dressed in their ordinary clothes and claimed by their mothers. From the outset Deborah had insisted that the children’s parts were to finish at the end of the first scene in Act Three.
“After all,” she said, “their bedtime will be late enough anyway and it is far more important than scratching a donkey’s head. As for the fairy procession at the end, well, you will have to do without it. Nobody speaks except Oberon, Titania and Puck, so they will have to carry it on their own.”
“In any case,” said Emma Lynn, “nobody wants the job of minding little children from the end of the first scene in the third act right to the end of the play. Most of them would be asleep, anyway, or making themselves miserable and cross, poor little things.”
There had been a slight contretemps at the dress-rehearsal. It was not nearly enough to dispose of Brian Yorke’s superstitions, partly because its real significance, that the stage ‘props’ were sacred objects, did not appear until later, but mostly because, at the time it occurred, he knew nothing about it.
The two bloodhounds, bred and lent by Tom Woolidge, were not to make their brief appearance on stage until the hunting-scene in the fourth act. They were tied up outside the summer-house. This was in a little clearing in the woods and had a stoutly-railed verandah to which the dogs were tethered. They were gentle, amenable creatures, their evening meal and bowls of water were placed well within their reach, and no trouble of any kind was expected from them. Even if they bayed, they were far enough from the stage for this to be a matter of no great concern.
Yolanda, in whose charge they were placed when they made their appearance, had always, at rehearsals, been zealous in her care of them. As her scenes were in company with her father and mother, she sat with her parents in the woodland wings on the O.P. side, but paid occasional visits to the summer-house to ensure that all was well with her charges.
At the dress-rehearsal she had been so much entranced with the Elizabethan costumes that she spent most of her time avidly watching the stage and it was not until about the middle of the third act, when she was finding the exchanges between the four lovers excessively boring, that she remembered the bloodhounds and went to visit them. She returned in short order and whispered agitatedly to her mother, “Mummy, the dogs have gone!”
Valerie Yorke drew her daughter further back from the stage and asked, “Darling, what do you mean?”
“I went to see whether they were all right and their leads were there, but they’d gone.”
“What about their collars? Have they slipped them?”
“No, their collars had gone, too. There were only the leads left. Anyway, I don’t think bloodhounds can slip their collars. Oh, Mummy, what shall we do?”
“Don’t worry, darling. I think I know where they are. We didn’t have Rosamund stay at our house for nothing.” She went to Deborah, who was offstage until the opening of the fourth act (from which the fairies had been dispensed) and gave her the news. Deborah’s conclusion was the same as her own, so they waylaid Puck as he came off the stage and Deborah said to him:
“These draperies of mine are a bit of a nuisance if I need to run. Could you belt up to the house and bring back the bloodhounds? I am sure my little wretches have collected them.”
Young Peter Woolidge bounded away and tore uphill through the woods and up to the house, where he found one of the dogs in bed with Rosamund, the other with Edmund. Before Peter led them back to where they should be, Valerie had followed him and addressed a stern admonition, backed up by threats of chastisement, to the chief culprit.
“The dogs are ‘props’. Don’t you know better than to meddle with props?” she demanded. “If you ever play about with any other props I’ll spank you hard.”
Rosamund apparently took these words to heart, for the Thursday and Friday performances passed off without a hitch, and Brian Yorke’s presages of disaster vanished and were replaced by a cautious optimism.
Rinkley proved himself not sensitive enough to realise that Bottom’s wood was an enchanted one and that Bottom, no more than Thomas the Rhymer, would never be quite the same man again after his encounter with the Queen of the Fairies. Rinkley had never read lines which, of all the cast, probably only Deborah knew.
‘Harp and carp, Thomas,’ she said;
‘Harp and carp along with me—
But if you dare to kiss my lips,
Sure of your body I shall be.’
‘Betide me weal, betide me woe,
That weird shall never daunten me.’
Syne he has kissed her rosy lips
All underneath the Eildon Tree.’
And so, thought Deborah, had it been with Bottom the Weaver, but there was no magic in Rinkley’s soul. He saw no poetry in the cloddish clown. As Pyramus, however, Rinkley excelled himself. At the first full rehearsal, when, not having been supplied with body-armour, he had pushed the retractable dagger somewhat gingerly against his breast, Yorke was heard to exclaim: “For God’s sake, man, put a jerk in it! You’re killing yourself, not brushing flies off a sleeping Venus!” But that was the only time Rinkley was faulted, so, finding that the dagger could be trusted, Pyramus thereafter tackled his suicide with a will and accomplished a back-fall on to the turf which might have been the pride of a professional tumbler.
“I’ve made a bruise on my chest, thanks to you,” he said to Yorke, after the first full rehearsal. “That dagger hurt me.”
“It was worth it. You were great, old boy, simply magnificent. Keep it up, because that scene is practically the climax of the play.”
Apart from his main task of welding his actors, with their varying talents, into a team, Yorke, as producer as well as director, had had other problems to solve. One was to decide how much scenery was needed in addition to that provided by the garden itself, and the other was how to bridge the distance the dressing-rooms were from the stage.
His first problem was solved easily and satisfactorily. The woods curved round towards the terrace, so all that was needed was a reversible wooden backdrop on one side of which was painted some Ionian pillars to represent the palace of Theseus and on the other a window in a plain wall to represent Quince’s cottage. For the woodland scenes another backdrop was painted with highly stylised trees which almost met the real ones, but leaving the actors with an obvious exit. Both backdrops were mounted on wheels and the scenes were changed, Chinese fashion, in full view of the audience.
The second problem was also easily solved. Except for the donning of his accoutrements by Pyramus, which could be done in the wings, the only necessary changes of costume should have been for Theseus, Hippolyta, Philostrate and Egeus for the hunting-scene, but this also involved a change back again for the last scene of all. Faced with the fact that the dressing-rooms were up at the house, Yorke had compromised. He allowed Philostrate and Egeus no change of costume at all and himself as Theseus a pair of thigh-length boots to wear over his elegant Tudor hose. He gave the only real change of costume to Hippolyta who, for this scene, was to appear as the goddess Artemis with bow and arrow.
For the purpose of this change, he had had a small square tent erected just off the O.P. side of the stage. Screened by the trees were three trestle tables to hold the props. These included the body-armour, helmet and sword-belt complete with retractable dagger worn by Pyramus in the workmen’s play and another belt with a dagger from Lynn’s collection of weapons. This belt was worn by young Yolanda Yorke in the hunting scene, and only then, so it remained on the trestle table for most of the play. Yorke shed his own sword-belt after the first scene until his re-entrance in the hunting scene, after which he kept it on for the rest of the play, Jonathan and Tom wore their sword-belts throughout the whole action.