“Cast Barbara as Helena and have the audience wondering why both the men wanted Hermia when Helena was in their midst. Barbara won’t mind what part she plays, so long as Lynn pays her. She is a professional, you know.”
“Well, perhaps the read-through will settle a few things, although I doubt it. People always have such inflated ideas of what they can do on the stage.”
“I hate to mention it, but do I get a look-in anywhere?”
“So far as I’m concerned, you can have your pick of Lysander or Demetrius, unless Lynn picks one of them for himself. We must do our best to head him off if he does. There’s another thing which makes the casting a bit of a problem. Shakespeare, for obvious reasons, used as few women as he could, whereas in our lot we have far more women than men. In The Dream there are only four women’s parts and we haven’t enough men for the rest. We shall have to cast a woman as Oberon, I think, and perhaps for Egeus, Philostrate and one or two of the workmen.”
“Whoever plays Quince—and you must have a man for that, I think—could double as Egeus. They never appear together, and a girl could play Philostrate as a sort of glorified court page, couldn’t she?”
“Well, yes, and there’s Robina Lester for one of the workmen.”
“Yes, and a woman could do Flute. After all, Flute does take the part of Thisbe in the workmen’s play and it’s implicit in the text that he was little more than a boy. Doesn’t he say he has a beard coming? If it’s only coming (but not come), he can’t be more than about seventeen or so.”
“You know, I think I will cast it myself, once I know which parts Lynn has got his eye on for himself and his wife and son.”
“Well, if Emma Lynn, poor lost soul, wants to be Hermia, I shall opt for Demetrius. I’m hanged if I’m going to play Lysander opposite her.”
It turned out that Marcus Lynn had chosen Quince the Carpenter for himself and Hermia for Emma. He was frank about it.
“I’m not cut out for a lover. Anyway, I want a bossy part. I’m a bossy man. I’d have liked to play Bottom the Weaver, but there would be obvious jokes if my workers got to hear of it, my figure being such as it is, and that’s not good for discipline. I want Emma to show up well, and I guess Hermia is just about the best woman’s part. As for the lad, almost anything will do for him, the smaller the better. He’s got his A-levels coming up.”
The read-through was held at Brian Yorke’s house, which was in the old part of the town near the quay. It was family property which he had inherited from his father and was a well-built Georgian house fronting on to the high street, but having a pleasant garden at the back. Here the children who had small speaking parts were sent out to amuse themselves, including Yorke’s nine-year-old daughter, who was put in charge of the younger ones, Rosamund, Edmund and two tiny creatures, all white teeth and smiles, the coffee-coloured progeny of Doctor Fitzroy and his wife. These two highly-qualified local practitioners were descended from French settlers in Mauritius and their sons rejoiced in the names of Ganymede and Lucien Fitzroy-Delahague.
Inside the house the adults were assembled in a well-proportioned, gracious room in which the furniture was a trifle shabby but was comfortable enough and where the high windows looked out on to one of the town alleys in which its houses had once been lodgings for sailors whose ships paid off at the port.
The doctor’s wife, Jeanne-Marie, lighter in colour than her children and very beautiful, had been cast as Oberon, but, having dumped her offspring, she apologised for not staying, explaining that she and her husband (they were partners) had a heavy surgery and that she would pick up the children later, so Deborah, who had brought Rosamund and Edmund with her, was called upon to read the part.
Emma Lynn, obviously years younger than her husband but equally obviously under his domination, struggled valiantly with Hermia’s lines but was completely overshadowed by Barbara Bourton’s reading of Helena. (“Call you me fair?—that fair again unsay!”) The frustration, the bitterness, the longing were all there. Barbara was a professional actress of some note and was, as she expressed it, ‘between shows’ until the autumn. For that reason she was available to take part in The Dream.
At a pause in the reading Marcus Lynn said, “I’m having entirely new costumes for the play. I read how Queen Elizabeth I used to delight in dressing up her boy actors in silks and velvet and jewels, so I thought we’d have a ball. I’m expecting the costumiers along about now to measure up for the principal parts, and then, as soon as the final casting is settled, they can get busy. It’s a biggish cast, so they’ll have plenty to do.”
“That is probably them now,” said Brian.
The measuring and note-taking were soon done, but before the rehearsal was resumed Lynn said, “And I want everything as authentic as possible so, although I shan’t release them until the dress rehearsal—they’re valuable and some are irreplaceable, if you’ll forgive my mentioning it— I thought the men might like to look over my collection of swords and daggers and get their eye on one they might fancy wearing. Come along to my house at any time. If I’m not there Emma will show them to you. I’ve brought along one I’m going to have copied, because, of course, there’s one dagger which certainly won’t be for real, and that’s the one Pyramus uses in the workmen’s play when he’s supposed to stab himself.”
“He does that by sticking the dagger under his armpit, I thought,” said Tom Woolidge, “so it doesn’t need a special dagger, does it?”
“Oh, the dagger Pyramus—that’s you, Rinkley—will use will look like the real thing, but it will have a retractable blade. That under-the-arm stuff is very unrealistic.”
“The whole of the workmen’s play is unrealistic. It’s pure farce,” said Robina Lester.
“All the same, to use a real dagger might be dangerous. We shall be out of doors and under floodlighting, remember,” said Brian Yorke, “and if Pyramus or Thisbe—they both commit suicide—were to make a boss shot, the consequences might be serious.”
“When do I get the retractable dagger to practise with?” asked Rinkley.
“Oh, I’ve put it in hand already,” Marcus Lynn replied.
“I’ll need it to rehearse with, too,” said young Susan Hythe. ‘I’m supposed to draw it out of him and stick it in myself, and practice makes perfect. I think it would be funniest if I put my foot on his chest while he’s lying there supposed to be dead, and made a sort of a terrific heave and fell over backwards, don’t you? I mean, we’ve got to play for laughs, haven’t we?”
“Not your laughs at my expense,” said Rinkley. “You kindly remember that I’m the centre-piece of those workmen’s scenes, not you.”
“Oh, it’s too soon to talk of ‘business’ yet,” said Brian Yorke. “We’ll see how it goes in rehearsal when everybody knows the lines.”
Yorke, who had cast himself as Theseus, took his readers only to the end of the second act. This gave everybody a chance to speak and included the children, but before the party broke up and when drinks had been provided, Emma Lynn came over to Deborah and said, “Will you take on my part as Hermia?”
“Good Lord, no! Of course I won’t. Why?”
“I’m a mess. I didn’t want to be in the play, anyway, only my husband was so keen on it. He’s really putting it on for me, you know, but I can’t act.”
“You’ll be all right when we start rehearsing. This was only a read-through. It didn’t mean a thing.”
“You ought to have a better part.”
“I’ve got the one I opted for. I’m going to be Wall in the workmen’s play. I was only a stand-in tonight. At college they would always cast me as Desdemona or Ophelia and in my third year I was St Joan and most unconvincing.”