Opening Night. Ngaio Marsh
When Martyn went out on the stage she was able for the first time to see the company assembled together, and found it consisted, as far as the players were concerned, of no more than the six persons she had already encountered: first in their fixed professional poses in the show-frame at the front of the house, and later in their dressing-rooms. She had attached mental tags to them and found herself thinking of Helen Hamilton as the Leading Lady, of Gay Gainsford as the Ingénue, of J. G. Darcey as the Character Actor, of Parry Percival as the Juvenile, of Clark Bennington regrettably, perhaps unjustly, as the Drunken Actor, and of Adam Poole – but as yet she had found no label for Poole, unless it was the old-fashioned one of ‘Governor’, which pleased her by its vicarious association with the days of the Victorian actor-managers.
To this actual cast of six she must add a number of satellite figures – the author, Dr John Rutherford, whose eccentricities seemed to surpass those of his legend, with which she was already acquainted, the man in the red sweater who was the stage-manager, and was called Clem Smith, his assistant, a morose lurking figure, and the crew of stage-hands who went about their business or contemplated the actors with equal detachment.
The actors were forming themselves now into a stage ‘picture’, moving in a workmanlike manner, under the direction of Adam Poole, and watched with restless attentiveness by an elderly, slack-jointed man, carrying a paint pot and brushes. This man, the last of all the figures to appear upon the stage that morning, seemed to have no recognizable job but to be concerned in all of them. He was dressed in overalls and a tartan shirt, from which his long neck emerged, birdlike and crapulous, to terminate in a head that wobbled slightly as if its articulation with the top of the spine had loosened with age. He was constantly addressed with exasperated affection as Jacko. Under his direction, bunches of lights were wheeled into position, cameramen peered and muttered, and at his given signal the players, by an easy transition in behaviour and appearance, became larger than life. A gap was left in the middle of the group, and into this when all was ready floated Helena Hamilton, ruffling her plumage, and becoming at once the focal point of the picture.
‘Darling,’ she said, it’s not going to be a flash, is it, with all of you looking like village idiots, and me like the Third Witch on the morning after the cauldron scene?’
‘If you can hold it for three seconds,’ Adam Poole said, ‘it needn’t be a flash.’
‘I can hold anything, if you come in and help me.’
He moved in beside her. ‘All right,’ he said, ‘let’s try it. The end of the first act,’ and at once she turned upon him a look of tragic and burning intensity. The elderly man wandered across and tweaked at her skirts. Without changing pose or expression, she said, ‘Isn’t it shameful the way Jacko can’t keep his hands off me.’ He grinned and ambled away. Adam Poole said ‘Right,’ the group froze in postures of urgency that led the eye towards the two central figures and the cameras clicked.
Martyn tried, as the morning wore on, to get some idea of the content of the play but was unable to do so. Occasionally the players would speak snatches of dialogue leading up to the moment when a photograph was to be taken, and from these she gathered that the major conflict of the theme was between the characters played by Adam Poole and Clark Bennington and that this conflict was one of ideas. About a particular shot there was a great deal of difficulty. In this Poole and Gay Gainsford confronted each other and it was necessary that her posture, the arrested gesture of her hand and even her expression should be an exact reflection of his.
To Martyn, Poole had seemed to be a short-tempered man, but with Gay Gainsford he showed exemplary patience. ‘It’s the old story, Gay,’ he said, ‘you’re overanxious. It’s not enough for you to look like me. Let’s face it,’ he hesitated for a moment and said quickly, ‘we’ve had all this, haven’t we – but it’s worth repeating – you can’t look strikingly like me, although Jacko’s done wonders. What you’ve got to do is to be me. At this moment, don’t you see, you’re my heredity, confronting me like a threat. As far as the photograph is concerned, we can cheat – the shot can be taken over your shoulder, but in the performance there can be no cheating, and that is why I’m making such a thing of it. Now let’s take it with the line. Your head’s on your arms, you raise it slowly to face me. Ready now. Right, up you come.’
Miss Gainsford raised her face to his as he leaned across the writing-desk and whispered: ‘Don’t you like what you see? At the same moment there was a cascade of laughter from Miss Hamilton. Poole’s voice cracked like a whiplash, ‘Helena, please,’ and she turned from Parry Percival to say, ‘Darling, I’m so sorry,’ and in the same breath spoke her line of dialogue: ‘But it’s you, don’t you see, you can’t escape from it, it’s you.’ Gay Gainsford made a hopeless little gesture and Poole said: ‘Too late, of course. Try again.’
They tried several times, in an atmosphere of increasing tension. The amiable Jacko was called in to make an infinitesimal change in Gay’s make-up, and Martyn saw him blot away a tear. At this juncture a disembodied voice roared from the back of the circle: ‘Sister, have comfort. All of us have cause to wail the dimming of our shining star.’
Poole glanced into the auditorium. ‘Do shut up like a good chap, John,’ he said.
‘Pour all your tears! I am your sorrows nurse And I will pamper it with la-men-ta-ti-ons.’
The man called Jacko burst out laughing and was instantly dismissed to the dressing-rooms by Poole.
There followed a quarter of an hour of mounting hysteria on the part of Gay Gainsford and of implacable persistence from Adam Poole. He said suddenly, ‘All right, we’ll cheat. Shift the camera.’
The remaining photographs were taken with a great deal of trouble. Miss Gainsford, looking utterly miserable, went off to her dressing-room. The man called Jacko reappeared and ambled across to Miss Hamilton. There was an adjustment in make-up while Martyn held up the mirror.
‘Maybe it’s lucky,’ he said, ‘you don’t have to look like somebody else.’
‘Are you being nice or beastly, Jacko?’
He put a cigarette between her lips and lit it. ‘The dresses are good,’ he said. He had a very slight foreign accent.
‘You think so, do you?’
‘Naturally. I design them for you.’
‘Next time,’ she said gently, ‘you’d better write the play as well.’
He was a phenomenally ugly man but a smile of extraordinary sweetness broke across his face.
‘All these agonies!’ he murmured, ‘and on Thursday night everyone will be kissing everyone else and at the Combined Arts Ball we are in triumph and on Friday morning you will be purring over your notices. And you must not be unkind about the play. It is a good play.’ He grinned again, more broadly. His teeth were enormous and uneven. ‘Even the little niece of the great husband cannot entirely destroy it.’
‘Jacko!’
‘You may say what you like, it is not intelligent casting.’
‘Please, Jacko.’
‘All right, all right. I remind you instead of the Combined Arts Ball, and that no one has decided in what costume we go.’
‘Nobody has any ideas. Jacko, you must invent something marvellous.’
‘And in two days I must also create out of air eight marvellous costumes.’
‘Darling Jacko, how beastly we are to you. But you know you love performing your little wonders.’
‘I suggest then, that we are characters from Chekhov as they would be in Hollywood. You absurdly gorgeous, and the little niece still grimly ingénue. Adam perhaps as Vanya if he were played by Boris Karloff. And so on.’
‘Where shall I get my absurdly gorgeous dress?’
‘I paint the design on canvas and cut it out and if