Dead Voices, page 7
From his vantage point it appeared that their faces were heavily powdered, as if they hadn’t bothered removing their stage makeup, including their wigs and facial hair. Or perhaps it was just the light, the play of the artificial candles from the table top. The older one who had written the play, and was maybe an actor as well, looked to be in his mid-forties, while the other was about a decade younger. The older one had chestnut long hair, with a high forehead, scraggily whiskers, and an earring. The younger had russet curly hair, a short beard, and a heavy waist. In their faded collarless shirts, the laces untied at the neck, and black leggings, they looked unkempt and weary from a long day. The actor was riffling through a few rolls of paper — written in longhand, by the look of them, and glued together — as they spoke.
“What do we have here?” the younger one said in a flippant tone of voice. “Is it a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury?”
“Sure, if it signifies nothing,” the older one said, laughing.
“And we get a few pennies for our efforts.”
“As long as I keep scribbling, you mean.”
“You scribble and I’ll strut. Though I don’t know how you do it.”
“Very simple, Rich. I transform the words of the prophets and Montaigne and the ancient histories into little entertainments for the groundlings. With the sound and the fury I can make my pennies, like a John-a-dreams.”
“And who knows what dreams may come?”
“We must be careful, though, to put one thing in the guise of another. Like the Bible where theology’s in the guise of history.”
“We live in perilous times. Nothing’s what it seems.”
“This is why it’s the role of a lifetime, Rich,” the playwright said. “You’ll be the Prince, the son of a father murdered and prompted to his revenge by heaven and hell.”
“More hell than heaven, I warrant. Will I not be too much in the sun?”
“Not if we hide the son in the father,” the playwright said.
“One confusion hidden inside another. Like a revenge play within a tragedy within a morality, if I’m not mistaken.”
“Words that tie themselves up in knots, Rich. Aporia, it’s called.”
“You’ve stamped it with thy new coat of arms, I see.”
“Aye, the pennies add up.”
“But the Prince is still too young,” the actor said. “If I’m to play him, make him older and a little scant of breath . . . for my girth.”
“Make him older how? He’s of university age.”
“The how is up to you. The groundlings will be already reeling from confusion. You’re the scribbler, I but a poor player.”
“Poor, my arse,” the playwright said.
“I play what I play, good sir. We count on deception to make our fortunes.”
“It’s not deception, Rich, if our aim is to enrich and ennoble.”
Mark wasn’t sure whether he was eavesdropping or watching a performance. Or it could’ve been that these actors were rehearsing and still in character. Whatever the case, he sensed a certain inflection of tone, an ironic lilt in their words, that suggested he was somehow implicated in their conversation, and that its purpose would be revealed to him in due course. Which made him even more excited. Had he gone through some rabbit hole to be so honoured? Or was he being accorded a rare opportunity to hear the words no one else could hear?
Only, as much as he wanted to, he couldn’t interfere and ask them, as if there was some sort of invisible barrier between them.
All he could do, he knew, was to suspend his disbelief. Observe and listen. And remain in the zone of expectation and let the scene play itself out.
Their words veered away from the play. They spoke about the actor’s previous performance of Brutus in Julius Caesar, mentioned in passing the danger in putting on a special performance of Richard II for the partisans of Essex, and certain matters of patronage and politics. They talked about the Privy Council and the Star Chamber, the Tower of London, and her Royal Highness, the Queen, who was on her last legs. In her pasty makeup, Rich said, she looked ghoulish. They dropped names like Southampton, Cecil, and Burghley. They spoke about a conspiracy and leaned closer together and Mark lost the thread of the conversation. He had to strain his ears and focus on their lips which were at a side view and obscured by the dim light.
His excitement mounting and feeling he wouldn’t be able to recall all their words, and that they might be lost forever, Mark took out one of the books he had just purchased and a small notebook he kept in the side-pocket of his backpack. By standing the book in front of his notebook he could observe and listen while hiding the fact he was jotting down their words.
“ . . . after the comedies and histories,” the younger actor was saying, “you’re going into dark matters, good sir. This play, while we’ve seen it before, is very different from what it was before and from your other work. Not only is it dark, but it’s full of self-doubt. You’re exposing the soulguts of the Prince and the workings of our magical arts much too much, if you ask me.”
“Our greatest defect can be our greatest strength. Like a mole and a mountain.”
“True enough. But we are actors first and foremost.”
“No, Rich, we are fathers and sons first and foremost, feeding our roles as actors. You, for example, are playing the words of a father who’s given himself his son’s name, and who, in turn, is a son himself to a father he must avenge to an uncle who represents our duplicitous age.”
“You’re playing with me now. You mean the smiling, damnèd villain, do you not?”
“No other, Rich.”
“One thing in the guise of another.”
“I must unpack my heart with words like a whore.”
“Keep unpacking, good sir. We must fight the Rose and the Hope and the Swan on the Bank side, not to mention Whitefriars and Blackfriars and the Curtain on the other side.”
“And get our pennies.”
“Aye, business is booming. We are drawing them from across the river in their water taxis and barges like an armada.”
“With the Wooden O on my shoulders, Rich. Now that the rituals and the trappings of the papists have been purged, it’s up to me to write them their spectacles for our new church.”
“Our whorehouse, you mean.”
“Aye.” The playwright laughed. “Sometimes I wonder myself.”
“But this play will not be easy to stage. The histories and the comedies were easy enough. You were giving them their revels and their new sense of themselves. But this play is beyond anything you have ever written. It gives words and thoughts beyond the reaches of our souls. It’s hard enough creating believable puppetry on the stage, good sir, but you expose the wires. And it’s too dark and cynical and confusing.”
“As an actor, you must suit the word to the action, the action to the word, and don’t o’erstep the modesty of nature. As for me, I must tamper with nature and o’erstep my bounds.”
Mark looked up from his writing, his heart pounding. The playwright, whose voice faltered, had his head hung in sorrow. He felt the urge to speak, but it was impossible to speak, lest he burst the barrier.
“We’re out to get their pennies, not their souls,” he heard the actor say. “We have to cast a spell that makes it real enough that they forget the plague, the papists, the conspiracies — and makes us forget ourselves.”
“I’m not just an actor, Rich. And I can’t forget.”
“Still your son, I see,” the actor said in a heavy tone.
At this point they spoke very quickly, their words fading into whispered speech, which frustrated him to no end. Just when he thought he was going to the get the scoop, it all came to naught. All he heard was that the playwright had never known his son very well, having left him in the care of his wife and parents. And for that he had suffered pricks of conscience. But he could still recall his son’s arms around his neck when he carried him piggyback, the times they played together on Henley Street, the times he had taught him and his twin sister how to read, the times they went into the Arden for picnics. Who would carry on his name now? The two girls would get married and that would be the end of it.
“Unless, Rich,” Mark heard the playwright say. “I can keep him alive in the realm of uncertainty and disquiet. In the realm of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Ghost.”
“Thanks for confusing me even more,” the actor said.
“This confusion will be for our benefit if we confuse the Master of the Revels and get this play through to its performance.”
“Aye, you are a sly one, good sir.”
“For these are actions that a man might play with the trappings and the suits of woe. But I have that within which passes show.”
“The true Hercules of the Globe.”
“I will play the Ghost and burst out of the trap door and cellarage of Purgatory.”
The actor paused, his voice dropping. “We must be careful, good sir. We cannot be a party to sedition. The Ghost might be considered too papist.”
“Were my Paduans too Paduan, my Romans too Roman?”
“Our heads can easily be on pikes on London Bridge.”
“Not if we play our puppet-parts so convincingly we expose even the wires.”
The actor gave him a long look. “Be sure you don’t outwit yourself, good sir. The play is much too long. Too many words and not enough action.”
Again Mark felt the urge to speak — or at least to recite his lines in due course as part of the play, but he sensed it was impossible for him to speak. As if he were powerless, in the grip of someone else’s will, and he had to play out his part without speech and without action.
The playwright said he had to do a bit of pruning. He was the victim of his own antic disposition for words. He had to counteract the papist Ghost of action and revenge by means of the spirit of inwardness in his son. The old ritual of the Eucharist — the papist spectacle played on the altar — had to give way to the new power of words alone, he said. And he had a dual duty, to be loyal to the page as well as the stage.
Mark tried to get everything down. He was writing so quickly he was leaving an illegible scrawl, his ear and hand working feverishly.
The playwright said, as a poet, he was no more than a mouthpiece of the muse. But he had to be loyal to his audience as well and keep them entertained. They were living in mad times. Nothing was what it seemed. They had defeated the Armada and yet they couldn’t defeat the plague. People were living in the rotten squalor of an open sewer. They needed Westminster and St. Paul’s, sure, but they needed their temples of drama even more.
“Aye, the Globe itself,” the actor said. “Totus mundus agit histrionem, from Jaques himself. And I will certainly act my part on the stage.”
“Without a doubt you will — as I will.”
“Aye, marry, as you will, we will — and thereby get rich by it.”
“Let us give hope to it,” the playwright said. “That we will all be the richer for it.”
The two guys laughed and put their heads together and spoke in a whisper. Mark couldn’t make out what they were saying. He paused in his writing and looked at his scribbles. Some words looked no more than flat-lines on the page. He trusted he could resuscitate them later, depending on his own memory and what he already knew of the play.
“I shall need some substance behind my words,” the actor spoke up.
“The son is given a duty by a dead father. Remember me, the Ghost says.”
“Remember thee? Aye, poor ghost whiles memory holds a seat in this distracted globe.”
“Swear,” he cries under the stage. “Swear by his sword.”
“Rest, rest, perturbed spirit. The time is out of joint, o cursed spite that ever I was born to set it right.”
They both laughed again, looking directly at him as if they were aware of his eavesdropping and putting him on.
Mark looked away, focused on the photos and pictures on the walls of the alehouse.
He took a few deep breaths and tried to collect himself. All his excitement had spent itself out, it seemed. There had been no great revelation, no great insight. He had only heard words in an old pub. Words that could’ve been easily manipulated to fool him. Or to trap him. Like a play-within-a-play to test his guilt or innocence.
The air in the pub had become cloyingly thick, as if all the oxygen had been sucked out. The beer on an empty stomach didn’t help matters. He felt very drowsy. Like the times he had taken his classes on field trips to Stratford and watched the plays after a heavy lunch. One time he had actually nodded off and a student had nudged him awake with a little smirk on her face.
The two guys, at that point, inclined their heads over the table and spoke in low tones. Mark tried to get his bearings. His head was spinning from the beer and he felt the onset of a headache. It was past the rush hour. He had to get home. He was very hungry and tired. And he couldn’t be sure he had heard right.
He wanted to ask the playwright certain questions about the play. Even though he had taught it for over a decade at his school, as well as seeing many screen adaptations and live performances at Stratford and New York, it had still remained an enigma to him.
No performance, however, had compared to a Hart House theatre production his son had been involved in before going to Vancouver.
He and Jen had sat in the old theatre in the basement of Hart House at the university, the same theatre that had launched a few great screen and theatre actors. The thin effeminate guy playing the Prince, though competent enough, rendered his lines as if reciting poetry instead of creating drama. The other actors were professional unknowns, good enough to make the evening not an entire waste, but not much more than adequate. He could remember the actress playing Ophelia being beautiful and elfin, a mere victim of circumstances. And Gertrude wasn’t as passive as he would’ve thought, but a commanding presence who kissed her son as if giving him the kiss of death.
And Matt played an easy-go-lucky Laertes at the beginning, listening to his father’s advice like a good obedient son and going off to school in France.
Only when he came back to Elsinore, however, having learned of his father’s death at the hands of the Prince, did his true colours come to life. Mark could never forget how Matt had erupted like a volcano on the stage.
“To hell allegiance! Vows to the blackest devil! Conscience and grave, to the profoundest pit! I dare damnation! . . . I’ll be revenged most thoroughly for my father.”
It was as if the words, long fulminating inside him, had suddenly exploded and burst out with hot lava, onto the audience, his son’s eyes directly focused on him seated in the third row with Jen. She had reared back with the onslaught. The whole audience had reared, feeling the molten fury spewing onto them. Mark, however, had felt the words had been directed especially to him, the father who had meddled too much in his son’s life.
Had it been that bad? Had he been too close to his son? Perhaps he should’ve given him more space, let him make his own errors, learn life’s lessons on his own without his father hovering over him all the time, offering advice like a meddlesome old fool.
As much as he wanted to speak, he knew he couldn’t speak.
Mark saw the two players put their heads together and whisper. The playwright took the rolls of paper from the actor, jotted a few words down and handed them back.
“Aye, I see,” the actor said. “The Grave-digger’s scene. A little late in the play, I’d say, to suggest his age. Even in the midst of grave-digging, however, you mix in clowns and mirth and equivocation.”
“We transform pain and grief into poetry, Rich.”
“And keep alive all our dreams,” the actor said.
“I doubt it not.”
“So let us swear.”
As if on cue, Mark looked up from his scribbling and saw they had both turned to face him with a tight-lipped menacing look.
Mark stopped scribbling. In the silence of the pub, he listened for the traffic noise outside but heard nothing. It felt as if he were in this hermetically sealed bubble. No one else seemed to be in the pub. It was getting a little spooky.
He saw the two guys dressed in black turn away from him and exchange looks. The pitcher of beer was empty.
Not long afterwards the waitress appeared from out of nowhere. The two guys beckoned her over and paid their bill. They quickly collected their bags and jackets, giving him menacing glances. Mark looked away, trying to avoid their eyes, and covered his notebook with the book.
As they passed by his table, the younger one, Rich, stood over him with a grim visage.
“Did you get everything down?” he said, with a little smirk. “Speak. I’ll go no further.”
Mark was lost for words, as if caught in a paralyzing torpor and completely discombobulated.
After they had left, Mark went back to his notebook scribbling away like crazy, trying desperately to get all the words down on the page.
After a while, however, it ceased to matter who was speaking and who was listening — or where the words had come from.
All that mattered was the words and to get them down on the page before the bubble burst and it was too late.
Prime Time Challenge
Wes took a quick peek at the studio audience sitting above the floor cameras. Every seat was filled as usual. Their resident actor-comedian, Larry, was doing the warm-up session, settling the audience into the show, explaining procedure, adding a few quips, and getting the laughs. In casual attire, with his bulk and red beard, Larry looked like a cuddly bear.
