“Albert, that can’t be,” said a dubious gofer, but in a tone that betrayed that she very much wished it to be so, and thirsted for marvels.
“Would I kid you? Have you ever known me to kid you? I’ll tell you something that will be invaluable to you when you are all happy wives and mothers—or maybe just mothers, in these carefree days. When your child is born, take a look right away at where its teeny-weeny exit ought to be. If it isn’t there, honey, you’ve borne a critic.”
“Albert, I don’t believe it!”
“Fact. Medical fact. Imperforate anus, it’s called, in medical circles. And it’s the mark of the critic. The real, top-flight critic. They have two or three of them, pickled, in the medical museum at Johns Hopkins and there you can observe the phenomenon as plain as if it were labelled No Exit. The little fellows, they’re like you and me; they have the normal disposal facilities. But not the biggies. No, no, no. Remember your Uncle Albert told you.”
“They say Claude Applegarth is here tonight,” said Schnak. She and Dr. Gunilla were in the small dressing-room reserved for the conductors. It was very close, for the Doctor was smoking one of her black cigars.
“Who is Claude Applegarth?” she asked.
“He’s supposed to be the most influential critic in New York. And I suppose that means the world,” said Schnak, who had all the Canadian awe of New York.
“I do not know his name,” said the Doctor. “And I blow my nose in his hair,” she added. This was to encourage Schnak, who was trying to dissemble her terror. Gunilla would conduct in the pit tonight, of course, but Schnak was to be offstage conductor; when the Chorus sang in the wings, it was she who must direct them, taking her time from a monitor on which appeared a ghostly, grey Gunilla. She must do this with an unwieldy baton that was, in fact, a small red lamp on the end of a metal stick, and her beat, never elegant, became ridiculous when she waved what the Chorus called her fairy wand.
Conducting! Oh, conducting! Would she ever master it? Conduct the libretto, not just the score, Gunilla was always saying. Easy for Gunilla, tall, elegant, romantic figure. In the evening dress that Dulcy had rigged up for her, Schnak felt like a scarecrow. With a razor she had painfully hoicked the hair from her armpits, and now, in Dulcy’s creation, they did not show. But they hurt. At this moment, Schnak would gladly have forgone any future as a public performer.
“Five minutes, please, ladies and gentlemen. Overture and beginners in five minutes.” Gwen’s voice, low and clear, came from the speaker on the wall.
“Perhaps you should go to your post,” said the Doctor.
“I haven’t anything until after the Overture.”
“But I have,” said the Doctor. “And I should like to be by myself.”
Darcourt, standing in the foyer, saw that at the five-minute call, which he could not hear but which he knew was being given, a special group of people arrived, and quickly dispersed themselves into twos and threes. There was nothing positively disturbing about them, but they seemed somewhat overdressed for the occasion. Of course, many of the people who had already entered the theatre were in evening clothes—dinner suits and dinner frocks—but several of these men wore full dress and white ties that spoke of antiquity. The ladies tended to be dressed in plushy materials, well worn and somewhat sprung in the seat. One had a plume in her hair, and another sported a metal headpiece studded with impressive, but not totally convincing, gems. It was the Yerko Claque, and in the midst of them Yerko rose like a mountain in shirt and tie that had grown yellow with time, and a coat, the tails of which hung to his calves; beside him was Mamusia, and it was she who wore the paste jewels and kid gloves that had once been white; they reached well above her elbows. The group comported itself with a stateliness rarely seen on the North American continent, and certainly never in Stratford.
Yerko’s eye met Darcourt’s, without a spark of recognition.
Well, God help us, here we go, thought Darcourt, and went inside to claim his seat.
AN OPERA IN THREE ACTS planned and sketched by E. T. A. HOFFMANN and completed from his notes by Hulda Schnakenburg under the direction of Dr. Gunilla Dahl-Soot.
King Arthur of BritainHans Hoizknecht
Modred, the King’s nephewGaetano Panisi
Sir LancelotGiles Shippen
MerlinOliver Twentyman
Sir Kay the SeneschalGeorge Sudlow
Sir GawaineJean Morant
Sir BedevereYuri Vollmer
Sir Gareth BeaumainsWilson Tinney
Sir Lucas, ButlerMark Horrebow
Sir Ulphius, ChamberlainCharles Bland
Sir DynadanMark Luppino
Sir Dagonet, the FoolNutcombe Puckler
Sir PellinoreAlbert Greenlaw
Sir PalomidesVincent LeMoyne
Queen GuenevereDonalda Roche
Morgan Le Fay, sister to the KingClara Intrepidi
The Lady ElaineMarta Ullmann
The Lady ClarissantVirginia Poole
Ladies of the Court: Ada Boscawen, Lucia Pozzi, Margaret Calnan, Lucy-Ellen Osier, Appoline Graves, Etain O’Hara, Esther Moss, Miriam Downey, Hosanna Marks, Karen Edey, Minnie Sainsbury
Heralds: James Mitchell, Ulick Carman
Attendants: Bessie Louth, Jane Holland, Primrose Maybon, Noble Grandy, Ellis Cronyn, Eden Wigglesworth
Costumes and settings designed by Dulcy Ringgold, and executed in the Festival workshops.
Scenic Artist: Willy Grieve
Head Carpenter: Dicky Plaunt
Lighting Director: Waldo Harris
Stage Manager: Gwenllian Larking
Concert-Master: Otto Klafsky
Répétiteur and Harpsichordist: Watkin Bourke
Director: Geraint Powell
Conductor: Gunilla Dahl-Soot
The Libretto realized by Simon Darcourt, assisted by Penelope Raven and Clement Hollier.
The public relations people had done their job efficiently. The house was decently full and not with an audience of despair, recruited from nurses’ residences and old folks’ homes. Darcourt found himself sitting next to Clement Hollier; he reflected that he had never seen Hollier in evening dress before, and the learned man stank pungently of some spicy toilet water or after-shave. This may be hard to endure, thought Darcourt. But he could not ponder long on this, for the house lights dimmed, and Dr. Gunilla Dahl-Soot strode into the orchestra pit, shook hands with the concert-master, and bowed elegantly to the audience.
The audience responded eagerly. They had never seen anything like Gunilla, with her masculine good looks, her magnificent green tailcoat, and her ample white stock, and their expectations for the evening rose. The show, they felt, had begun.
Gunilla raised her baton, and the first heavy chords, stating the theme of Caliburn, were heard, and gave way to a firm but melancholy theme, the theme of Chivalry, which was developed for perhaps three minutes, until the point in the score marked by Letter D was reached; then the splendid red curtains swept upward and back, to disclose King Arthur and Merlin standing on the brink of the Enchanted Mere.
This was something for which the audience was wholly unprepared. Geraint, Waldo Harris, and Dulcy Ringgold had laboured faithfully to reproduce the stage dressing of the early years of the nineteenth century—the stage as Hoffmann would have known it. From the footlights—for there were footlights—the stage rose in a gentle rake which reached backward to the full forty feet of stage space, and on each side were six sets of wings, painted to represent a British forest in springtime as perhaps Fuseli might have imagined it; at the back, in front of a splendidly painted backcloth, the rollers which had been so much trouble a few days before were revolving silently, giving an impression of gently heaving water. It was a perspective scene in the nineteenth-century manner, designed to be beautiful and to complement the stage action, rather than to persuade anyone that it mimicked some natural reality.