... to dream of new dimensions,
Cheating checkmate
by painting the king's robe
So that he slides like a queen;
--Graves
I swung back to the play just at the moment Lady Mack soliloquizes,
"Come to my woman's breasts. And take my milk for gall, you murdering
ministers." Although I knew it was just folded towel Martin was
touching with his fingertips as he lifted them to the top half of his
green bodice, I got carried away, he made it so real. I decided boys
can play girls better than people think. Maybe they should do it a
little more often, and girls play boys too.
Then Sid-Macbeth came back to his wife from the wars, looking
triumphant but scared because the murder-idea's started to smoulder in
him, and she got busy fanning the blaze like any other good little
_hausfrau_ intent on her husband rising in the company and knowing
that she's the power behind him and that when there are promotions
someone's always got to get the axe. Sid and Martin made this charming
little domestic scene so natural yet gutsy too that I wanted to shout
hooray. Even Sid clutching Martin to that ridiculous pot-chested
cuirass didn't have one note of horseplay in it. Their bodies spoke.
It was the McCoy.
After that, the play began to get real good, the fast tempo and
exaggerated facial expressions actually helping it. By the time the
Dagger Scene came along I was digging my fingernails into my sweaty
palms. Which was a good thing--my eating up the play, I mean--because
it kept me from looking at the audience again, even taking a fast
peek. As you've gathered, audiences bug me. All those people out there
in the shadows, watching the actors in the light, all those silent
voyeurs as Bruce calls them. Why, they might be anything. And
sometimes (to my mind-wavery sorrow) I think they are. Maybe crouching
in the dark out there, hiding among the others, is the one who did the
nasty thing to me that tore off the top of my head.
Anyhow, if I so much as glance at the audience, I begin to get ideas
about it--and sometimes even if I don't, as just at this moment I
thought I heard horses restlessly pawing hard ground and one whinny,
though that was shut off fast. _Krishna kressed us!_ I thought,
_Skiddy can't have hired horses for Nefer-Elizabeth much as he's a
circus man at heart. We don't have that kind of money. Besides_--
But just then Sid-Macbeth gasped as if he were sucking in a bucket of
air. He'd shed the cuirass, fortunately. He said, "Is this a dagger
which I see before me, the handle toward my hand?" and the play hooked
me again, and I had no time to think about or listen for anything
else. Most of the offstage actors were on the other side of the stage,
as that's where they make their exits and entrances at this point in
the Second Act. I stood alone in the wings, watching the play like a
bug, frightened only of the horrors Shakespeare had in mind when he
wrote it.
Yes, the play was going great. The Dagger Scene was terrific where
Duncan gets murdered offstage, and so was the part afterwards where
hysteria mounts as the crime's discovered.
But just at this point I began to catch notes I didn't like. Twice
someone was late on entrance and came on as if shot from a cannon. And
three times at least Sid had to throw someone a line when they blew
up--in the clutches Sid's better than any prompt book. It began to
look as if the play were getting out of control, maybe because the new
tempo was so hot.
* * * * *
But they got through the Murder Scene okay. As they came trooping off,
yelling "Well contented," most of them on my side for a change, I went
for Sid with a towel. He always sweats like a pig in the Murder Scene.
I mopped his neck and shoved the towel up under his doublet to catch
the dripping armpits.
Meanwhile he was fumbling around on a narrow table where they lay
props and costumes for quick changes. Suddenly he dug his fingers into
my shoulder, enough to catch my attention at this point, meaning I'd
show bruises tomorrow, and yelled at me under his breath, "And you
love me, our crows and robes. Presto!"
I was off like a flash to the costumery. There were Mr. and Mrs.
Mack's king-and-queen robes and stuff hanging and sitting just where I
knew they'd have to be.
I snatched them up, thinking, _Boy, they made a mistake when they
didn't tell about this special performance_, and I started back like
Flash Two.
As I shot out the dressing room door the theater was very quiet.
There's a short low-pitched scene on stage then, to give the audience
a breather. I heard Miss Nefer say loudly (it had to be loud to get to
me from even the front of the audience): "'Tis a good bloody play,
Eyes," and some voice I didn't recognize reply a bit grudgingly,
"There's meat in it and some poetry too, though rough-wrought." She
went on, still as loudly as if she owned the theater, "'Twill make
Master Kyd bite his nails with jealousy--ha, ha!"
_Ha-ha yourself, you scene-stealing witch_, I thought, as I helped Sid
and then Martin on with their royal outer duds. But at the same time I
knew Sid must have written those lines himself to go along with his
prologue. They had the unmistakable rough-wrought Lessingham touch.
Did he really expect the audience to make anything of that reference
to Shakespeare's predecessor Thomas Kyd of _The Spanish Tragedy_ and
the lost _Hamlet_? And if they knew enough to spot that, wouldn't they
be bound to realize the whole Elizabeth-Macbeth tie-up was
anachronistic? But when Sid gets an inspiration he can be very
bull-headed.
Just then, while Bruce-Banquo was speaking his broody low soliloquy on
stage, Miss Nefer cut in again loudly with, "Aye, Eyes, a good bloody
play. Yet somehow, methinks--I know not how--I've heard it before."
Whereupon Sid grabbed Martin by the wrist and hissed, "Did'st hear?
Oh, I like not that," and I thought, _Oh-ho, so now she's beginning to
ad-lib._
Well, right away they all went on stage with a flourish, Sid and
Martin crowned and hand in hand. The play got going strong again. But
there were still those edge-of-control undercurrents and I began to be
more uneasy than caught up, and I had to stare consciously at the
actors to keep off a wavery-fit.
* * * * *
Other things began to bother me too, such as all the doubling.
_Macbeth_'s a great play for doubling. For instance, anyone except
Macbeth or Banquo can double one of the Three Witches--or one of the
Three Murderers for that matter. Normally we double at least one or two
of the Witches and Murderers, but this performance there'd been more
multiple-parting than I'd ever seen. Doc had whipped off his Duncan
beard and thrown on a brown smock and hood to play the Porter with his
normal bottle-roughened accents. Well, a drunk impersonating a drunk,
pretty appropriate. But Bruce was doing the next-door-to-impossible
double of Banquo and Macduff, using a ringing tenor voice for the
latter and wearing in the murder scene a helmet with dropped visor to
hide his Banquo beard. He'd be able to tear it off, of course, after
the Murderers got Banquo and he'd made his brief appearance as a
bloodied-up ghost in the Banquet Scene. I asked myself, _My God, has
Siddy got all the other actors out in front playing courtiers to
Elizabeth-Nefer? Wasting them that way? The whoreson rogue's gone
nuts!_
But really it was plain frightening, all that frantic doubling and
tripling with its suggestion that the play (and the company too, Freya
forfend) was becoming a ricketty patchwork illusion with everybody
racing around faster and faster to hide the holes. And the
scenery-wavery stuff and the warped Park-sounds were scary too. I was
actually shivering by the time Sid got to: "Light thickens; and the
crow Makes wing to the rooky wood: Good things of day begin to droop
and drowse; Whiles night's black agents to their preys do rouse."
Those graveyard lines didn't help my nerves any, of course. Nor did
thinking I heard Nefer-Elizabeth say from the audience, rather softly
for her this time, "Eyes, I have heard that speech, I know not where.
Think you 'tiz stolen?"
_Greta_, I told myself, _you need a miltown before the crow makes wing
through your kooky head._