To conclude the practical side of producing, Brian arranged that the backdrop, whichever scene it represented, should always be sufficiently far forward to allow the actors to cross the stage out of sight of the audience when this was necessary. This was for the convenience of the workmen and the court party, for these entered sometimes from the prompt side and sometimes from O.P.
“Well, I think we’ve thought of everything,” Brian Yorke had said at the conclusion of the all-too-immaculate dress rehearsal. “I don’t want anybody going up to the house except during the interval. Everything needed in the way of props will be in the wings. You’ll have to speed your armour up a bit, Rinkley. The others have only to collect their bits and pieces as Lion, Wall and Moonshine and Thisbe has only to pin a skirt round herself and plonk a wig on her head, but you must get that body-armour on quicker and your sword-belt and helmet, too. Marcus, you could help him a bit couldn’t you? As Quince you’ve nothing to do except pick up your scroll.”
“Some fool had moved my armour and belt from where I left them,” said Rinkley. “I wish to goodness people wouldn’t meddle with my props.”
“I moved your armour and helmet and your sword-belt,” said Susan Hythe, his Thisbe. “You’d pinched nearly all the trestle table for them and you had pushed Moonshine’s dog and my mantle on to the ground, so I put our things back on the table and dumped your stuff.”
“I’ll have a table to myself, and then perhaps you meddling moggies will leave my things alone.”
“You mustn’t mind Rinkley,” said Yorke, when his leading man had gone. “That antique shop he and his wife used to run before she kicked him out and divorced him is absolutely booming and, of course, it’s hers, inherited from her father, so he’s got no claim on the profits and that makes him pretty sore.”
“He’s overdrawn at the bank,” said Robina, whose husband was a bank manager. “I ought not to have let that out, so please forget it, but he is. I daresay that doesn’t make him any sweeter.”
“He was in trouble some time back over seducing a minor, or so I heard,” said Susan when Yorke also had left them. “I would never have agreed to act opposite him if I had known that.”
“I heard it, too, but I don’t believe there’s anything in it, or Brian would never have had him in the play. The Yorkes are nice people, but Valerie is very strait-laced. She didn’t want Rinkley in the play, you know, because of that scandal about a child that he was involved in. I don’t know any details, but—”
“But I do,” said Robina. “However, to give the man his due, the case was thrown out by the magistrates for lack of any real evidence. Well, let’s go up to the house and get changed. A Greek tunic and sandals may have been suitable evening wear in Athens, but in England, even in June, they’re hardly adequate at this time of night.”
“The dress rehearsal went off well, I thought,” said Caroline, as the three women, two young and one middle-aged, took the steep path up to the house.
“Brian thinks it went far too well,” said Robina. “He prophesies disaster at the actual performances. He’s not calling a rehearsal for tomorrow. He says he shall spend the day in prayer. Which of you two is my son walking home tonight?”
The girls giggled and Caroline said she thought it was her turn.
Wednesday passed without incident and the performances on Thursday and Friday went off well, the Thursday performance having been attended by Dame Beatrice and Laura.
“What did you think of the play?” asked Dame Beatrice, as they drove home through the starlit summer night with George, the chauffeur and handyman, at the wheel.
“Better ask George first,” said Laura. “He saw it, too. What did you think of it, George?”
“Very well dressed, Mrs Gavin, but the acting a little uneven.”
“Yes. I gather that the actress who took Hermia is a pro, or so my neighbour was telling me. Never a good idea to mix the breeds.”
“I thought the tall, stooping, bearded youth in that opening scene was miscast as Egeus,” said Dame Beatrice, “but I believe he was chosen simply because it is a small part and he is still a schoolboy preparing for important examinations. I thought the sylvan setting was effective.”
“But the amplifiers distorted the voices a bit,” said Laura. “The costumes were gorgeous, though. Take it for all in all, I thought it was a pretty good effort for a local dramatic society. The Pyramus and Thisbe scene was quite funny, but it’s a pity they had to miss out the fairies at the end. Those small fry really were rather scene-stoppers, didn’t you think?”
“Delightful children, but it would have been far too late to keep them up, particularly as the play is to run for three nights. I think, too, that the rather self-satisfied man who took Pyramus was glad to see the finish of the play so soon after the conclusion of his own performance. Those overlong speeches by Oberon and Titania were cut to the barest minimum and Puck’s closing oration was limited also. Of course one missed ‘glimmering light, by the dead and drowsy fire’. I wonder what problems the director and producer had to solve in putting on the play?”
On neither evening did a little changeling boy put in an appearance, although his father had brought him to the dress-rehearsal. A message came on the Thursday to say that the child was suffering from a mild stomach-upset, but that, if it cleared up in time, Narayan Rao would bring Sharma to the third night of the play.
The body-armour which Rinkley donned as Pyramus was rather like a waistcoat worn back to front. He had to put his arms through the armholes and then Marcus Lynn had to lace him up the back. His helmet was a formidable although a lightweight affair which almost obscured his features, and his sword-belt, with the webbing pocket to hold the weapon, had to be slung over the left shoulder to place the dagger on the wearer’s right-hand side. The crimson-coloured belt itself came diagonally across the breastplate and showed up effectively against the bright silver of the armour.
Although at the first full rehearsal Rinkley’s handling of the dagger had been the subject of criticism, at the Thursday and Friday performances, assured that the dagger could do him no harm, he had struck himself a convincing blow over the heart. The bit of by-play devised between himself and Marcus Lynn proved not only quite good knockabout farce, but was necessary from a practical point of view, for it had been made clear at the dress-rehearsal that Pyramus, having been laced into his breastplate by Quince behind the scenes, could not get out of it without the other’s assistance on stage. He had to get out of it in order to stab himself in a convincing manner, as an earlier demonstration had proved.
“We ought to have been allowed to have the costumes earlier,” Yorke had said, “but Lynn wouldn’t release them in case we messed them up. He has spent a lot of money on the show, so I can’t blame him, but it isn’t until the costumes are actually worn on stage that one realises where the snags are going to come.”
However, in this instance, both Lynn himself and Rinkley enjoyed inventing an extra bit of ‘business’ in removing the armour, and the audience seemed to relish the nonsense, too, when Marcus Lynn put up what appeared to be an epic struggle with knots in the laces of the corselet and finished up by putting his knee in the small of Rinkley’s back in a pantomime of an early Victorian tirewoman or lady’s maid dealing with her employer’s refractory pair of stays. This foolery evoked applause as well as laughter when, the recalcitrant fastenings having given way, Rinkley fell flat on his face, a circus trick he had been at some pains to bring off to perfection.