Emma Lynn, reassured by the compliments of the High Sheriff at the reception given before the show and by the encouragement she received from her husband and Deborah, spoke Helena’s lines with a passion and a confidence which surprised everybody, and when she made her exit on the line, ‘To have his sight thither and back again’, there was spontaneous applause.
In the workmen’s scene which followed, Robina Lester began by reverting to the over-acting which the company hoped had been quashed at rehearsals, but she was soon called to order by receiving a sharp kick on the ankle from Susan Hythe, who was standing next to her. In fact, by the time, in the second act, that Peter Woolidge as Puck had performed his preliminary acrobatics and Rosamund had faultlessly enunciated the fairy’s speech, the audience had fallen under the spell of the night, the garden, the woodland setting, and the play itself.
Little Sharma Rao was released into Deborah’s charge at the appropriate time and toddled hand-in-hand with her while she delivered her rebellious speech to Oberon. The child, fat, brown and solemn, wore a golden tunic and on his head was a charmingly lop-sided chaplet of yellow flowers. He was on stage for a very short time and then Deborah took him back to his father in the wings. Narayan vacated the chair he had been given and, so far as anybody knew, took the baby boy home as soon as he had dressed him. At any rate, that is what everybody assumed, supposing that anybody thought anything about it at all.
Narayan must have seen Rinkley in the first scene in which the workmen appeared, and Rinkley must have known that Narayan was there because nobody could have been unaware of the presence of the baby boy who so trustingly committed himself to Deborah’s care for the short time that he was on stage, but nobody saw or heard any exchange between the two former litigants and it came out later that when Narayan took his child home he certainly did not return to see the rest of the play and could have had no hand in what happened before it ended.
Meanwhile the play romped on and reached the point where Theseus and his train find the lovers asleep in the woods. Young Yolanda, slim and looking tall in her doublet and hose, and permitted, for this one scene, to wear her dagger (one of the prize pieces of Marcus Lynn’s collection) proudly led in the dogs. Her father, magnificent boots and all, praised them in the most beautiful description of hounds ever penned:
‘My hounds are bred out of the Spartan kind,
So flew’d, so sanded; and their heads are hung
With ears that sweep away the morning dew;
Crook-knee’d and dew-lapp’d like Thessalian bulls;
Slow in pursuit, but match’d in mouth like bells,
Each under each,’
Brian Yorke declaimed thus, while his daughter, determined that on this occasion the dogs should receive their due meed of applause, paraded them across the front of the stage. It was against orders, but to good effect.
What was less effective was the exit of Bottom from the wood. After the huntsmen had been bidden to blow their horns and wake the lovers and these had gone off with Theseus and the rest, Bottom scrambled dizzily to his feet. Awakened and not at all sure of what had been happening to him among the woodland sprites, Rinkley was supposed to have communed with himself, planned to have Quince write a ballad about the amazing dream he thought he had had in the wood, and then crossed the stage to the prompt side ready to come on again when the workmen meet in Quince’s house.
Instead of this, as soon as the stage was clear, Rinkley, having got unsteadily to his feet, went off on the O.P. side in the wake of the hunting-party.
To the majority of the audience this deviation from the rehearsed procedure made no difference at all. Even those who were familiar with the full text of the play probably thought that the producer was responsible for the innovation. As for Rinkley himself, he staggered away and when he reached the trestle tables which held the ‘props’, among the trees, was violently sick.
Yorke, who was taken aback by the actor’s unscripted and unrehearsed exit, hastened after him. All questions were obviously unnecessary and Yorke asked only one. “I say,” he said, “what’s come over you?”
“Those damned mussels. I should never have eaten them.” Another indescribable upheaval followed and then Rinkley zigzagged blindly away and lay on a patch of grass shivering and sweating. Yorke went off to look for assistance.
“What is it?” asked Robina Lester, who was picking up her bits and pieces for the workmen’s play and had witnessed Rinkley’s unrehearsed exit.
“Food poisoning. Dr Jeanne-Marie is in the audience. I’ll stay with him if you’ll go and get her. Be as quick as you can.”
Deborah came up. Yorke said, “I don’t think he can go on again tonight. Go in front and beg the indulgence of the audience for a few minutes, would you, while we get the understudy changed and briefed?”
“Mussels?” said Dr Jeanne-Marie. “He had better go to hospital, although it seems there can be little left in his stomach. He may have an allergy to shellfish, but one thinks also of myelotoxin, so to get the stomach washed out is precautionary.” Some of the men carried the sweating, trembling, mottled Rinkley up the slope to the house, ready for the ambulance to pick him up, using the stretcher which was in readiness for carrying Pyramus off the stage in the workmen’s play. While, accompanied by Deborah, who was not needed again until the very end of the show, and Dr Jeanne-Marie who was to do the telephoning, the bearers carried the feebly protesting man up through the woods, Brian Yorke went to find Donald Bourton and urge him to change as quickly as he could from the Fairy King’s fantastic trappings into the tunic and armour of Pyramus.
He found his Oberon in a little clearing, but was perturbed to note a half-empty bottle of whisky at Bourton’s side and Bourton seated on the ground.
“Here!” he said urgently. “On your feet, Don, and make it slippy.”
“Ur?”
“Rinkley has passed out on us. Get into the Pyramus outfit. You’ll have to stand in.”
“Can’t. Got to go on again as Oberon.” He was slightly glassy-eyed, but his speech was clear and when he rose to his feet he was quite steady.
“Never mind about Oberon. Look, I’m cutting out the little scene where Bottom turns up again at Quince’s house and I’ve told the scene-shifters to put on the palace back-drop. We’ll go straight into the workmen’s play.”
As he talked he had Bourton by the arm and was urging him towards the table on which the armour, sword-belt and helmet were laid out. An anxious Marcus Lynn was standing there and received their advent with relief.
“Oh, good man, Donald!” he said. “Come on. I’ll help you.”
“And I’ll go in front again and hold the audience for another few minutes,” said Yorke.
To release the men who had carried Rinkley up to the house and who were needed in the next scene, Deborah remained with the patient until the ambulance came for him and so she missed the extraordinary conclusion of the third night of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. As the play, in view of Rinkley’s retirement and the necessity to put on Bourton as his understudy, was to conclude with the burgomask dance, leaving out the fairy ending except for Puck’s last lines, she would not be required on stage again, for there was no time for Bourton to change back again from Pyramus to Oberon.
With him in Rinkley’s part, the workmen’s scene went even better than it had done at the two previous performances, and he, whether influenced or not by the whisky, appeared to be enjoying himself. The interruptions, essays of wit, ripostes and responses from the court party, sparkled and crackled as they had never done before. Then came the point at which Pyramus, believing that the lion had killed Thisbe and carried her off, decides to commit suicide.