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E had five rehearsals for this play.
“What the dickens do they want with with so many?” was the indignant
comment of the First Old Woman. “Why, they’ll rehearse it more times
than they’ll play it.”
I thought five a ridiculously small number at the time, especially
when I remembered my amateur days, and the thirty or so rehearsals,
nearly all full-dressed ones, required for a short farce; but there
came a time when I looked upon two as betokening extraordinary anxiety
about a production. In the provinces, I have known a three-act comedy
put on without any rehearsal at all, and with half the people not
even knowing the patter. “Business” was arranged in whispered
consultations, while the play was proceeding, and when things got into
a more than usually glorious muddle, one or other of the characters
would come off the stage and have a look at the book. As for the
prompter, after vainly struggling to keep them to one act at a time,
and to dissuade the hero from making love to the wrong girl, he came
to the conclusion that he was only in the way, and so went and had
a quiet pipe at the stage-door, and refrained from worrying himself
further.
The rehearsals got more ship-shape as we went on. At the fourth every
one was supposed to be “letter perfect,” and “parts” were tabooed.
On this occasion, the piece was played straight through with nothing
omitted, and the orchestra (two fiddles, a bass-viol, cornet, and
drum) appeared in full force. For the last rehearsal, props and
scenery were called. We had an exciting time with Jim, over the
scenery, as might be expected. He had a row with everybody, and
enjoyed himself immensely.
I saw our scene painter then for the first time. He was a jolly
little fellow, and as full of cheery contrivance as a Mark Tapley. No
difficulties seemed to daunt him. If a court of justice were wanted
for the following night, and the nearest thing he had to it were a bar
parlor, he was not in the least dismayed. He would have the bar parlor
down; paint in a bit here; paint out a bit there; touch up a bit
somewhere else--there was your court of justice! Half an hour was
quite long enough for him to turn a hay-field into a church-yard, or a
prison into a bedroom.
There was only one want, in the present case, that he didn’t supply,
and that was cottages. All the virtuous people in the play lived in
cottages. I never saw such a run on cottages. There were plenty
of other residences to which they would have been welcome--halls,
palaces, and dungeons the saloon cabin of a P. and O. steamer,
drawingroom of No. 200 Belgrave Square (a really magnificent apartment
this, with a clock on the mantelpiece). But no, they would all of them
live in cottages. It would not pay to alter three or four different
scenes, and turn them all into cottages, especially as they might,
likely enough, be wanted for something else in a week’s time; so our
one cottage interior had to accommodate about four distinct families.
To keep up appearances, however, it was called by a different name
on each occasion. With a round table and a candle, it was a widow’s
cottage. With two candles and a gun, it was a blacksmith’s house. A
square table instead of a round one--“Daddy Soloman’s home on the road
to London. ‘Home, sweet home.’” Put a spade in the corner, and hang a
coat behind the door, and you had the old mill on the Yorkshire moors.
It was all no use though. The audience, on the opening night, greeted
its second appearance with cries of kindly recognition, and at once
entered into the Humor of the thing. A Surrey-side Saturday-night
audience are generally inclined to be cheerful, and, if the fun on the
stage doesn’t satisfy them, they rely on their own resources. After
one or two more appearances, the cottage became an established
favorite with the gallery. So much so, indeed, that when two scenes
passed without it being let down, there were many and anxious
inquiries after it, and an earnest hope expressed that nothing serious
had happened to it. Its reappearance in the next act (as something
entirely new) was greeted with a round of applause, and a triumphant
demand to know, “Who said it was lost?”
It was not until the last rehearsal that the supers were brought into
play--or work, as they would have called it. These supers were drawn
from two distinct sources. About half of them were soldiers, engaged
to represent the military force of the drama, while the other half,
who were to be desperate rioters, had been selected from among the
gentry of the New Cut neighborhood.
The soldiers, who came under the command of their sergeant, were by
far the best thing in the play. They gave an air of reality to all the
scenes in which they appeared. They _were_ soldiers, and went about
their business on the stage with the same calm precision that they
would have displayed in the drill yard, and with as much seriousness
as if they had been in actual earnest. When the order was given to
“fix bayonets and charge,” they did so with such grim determination,
that there was no necessity at all to direct the stage mob to “feign
fear and rush off L. I. E.” They went as one man, in a hurry. There
was no trouble, either, about rehearsing the soldiers--no cursing and
swearing required, which, in itself, was an immense saving of time.
The stage manager told the sergeant what was wanted. That gruff-voiced
officer passed the order on to his men (first translating it into his
own unintelligible lingo), and the thing was done.
To represent soldiers on the stage, real soldiers should, without
doubt, be employed, but it is no good attempting to use them for
anything else.
They are soldier-like in everything they do. You may dress them up in
what you choose, and call them what you will, but they will never be
anything else but soldiers. On one occasion, our manager tried them as
a rabble. They were carefully instructed how to behave. They were told
how to rush wildly on with a fierce, tumultuous yell; how to crowd
together at the back of the stage, and, standing there, surging
backward and forward like an angry sea, brandish their weapons, and
scowl menacingly upon the opposing myrmidons of the law, until, at
length, their sullen murmurs deepening into a roar of savage hate,
they would break upon the wall of steel before them, and sweep it from
their path, as pent-up waters, bursting their bonds, bear down some
puny barrier.
That was the theory of the thing. That is how a stage mob _ought_ to
behave itself. How it really does behave itself is pretty generally
known. It comes in with a jog-trot, every member of it prodding the
man in front of him in the small of his back. It spreads itself out in
a line across the stage, and grins. When the signal is given for the
rush, each man--still grinning--walks up to the soldier nearest to
him, and lays hold of that warrior’s gun. The two men then proceed to
heave the murderous weapon slowly up and down, as if it were a pump
handle. This they continue to do with steady perseverance, until the
soldier, apparently from a fit of apoplexy--for there is no outward
and visible cause whatever to account for it--suddenly collapses,
when the conquering rioter takes the gun away from him, and entangles
himself in it.
This is funny enough, but our soldiers made it funnier still. One
might just as well have tried to get a modern House of Commons to
represent a disorderly rabble. They simply couldn’t do it. They went
on in single file at the double quick, formed themselves into a
hollow square in the center of the stage, and then gave three distinct
cheers, taking time from the sergeant. That was their notion of a
rabble.
The other set, the regular bob (sometimes eighteenpence) a night
“sups,” were of a very different character. Professional supers, taken
as a class, are the most utterly dismal specimens of humanity to be
met with in this world. Compared with them, “sandwich-men” are dashing
and rollicky. Ours were no exception to the rule. They hung about in
a little group by themselves, and looked like a picture of dejected
dinginess, that their mere presence had a depressing effect upon
everybody else. Strange that men can’t be gay and light-hearted on an
income of six shillings a week, but so it is.
One of them I must exclude from this description--a certain harmless
idiot, who went by the title of “Mad Mat,” though he himself always
gave his name as “Mr. Matthew Alexander St. George Clement.”
This poor fellow had been a super for a good many years, but there
had evidently been a time when he had played a very different part
in life. “Gentleman” was stamped very plainly upon his thin face, and
where he was not crazy he showed thought and education. Rumor said
that he had started life as a young actor, full of promise and talent,
but what had set him mad nobody knew. The ladies naturally attributed
it to love, it being a fixed tenet among the fair sex that everything
that happens to mankind, from finding themselves in bed with their
boots on to having the water cut off, is all owing to that
tender passion. On the other hand, the uncharitable--generally
a majority--suggested drink. But nobody did anything more than
conjecture: nobody really knew. The link between the prologue and the
play was lost. Mat himself was under the firm conviction that he was a
great actor who was only kept from appearing in the leading _rôles_ by
professional jealousy. But a time would come, and then he would show
us what he could do. Romeo was his great ambition. One of these days
he meant to act that character. He had been studying it for years,
he once whispered to me in confidence, and when he appeared in it, he
knew he should make a sensation.
Strange to say, his madness did not interfere at all with his superial
duties. While on the stage he was docile enough, and did just as he
saw the other supers do. It was only off the stage that he put on his
comically pathetic dignity; then, if the super-master attempted to
tell him what to do he would make a ceremonious bow, and observe, with
some hauteur, that Mr. St. George Clement was not accustomed to be
instructed how to act his part. He never mixed with the other supers,
but would stand apart, talking low to himself, and seeming to see
something a long way off. He was the butt of the whole theater, and
his half-timid, half-pompous ways afforded us a good deal of merriment;
but sometimes there was such a sad look in Mat’s white face, that it
made one’s heart ache more than one’s sides.
His strange figure and vague history haunted my thoughts in a most
uncomfortable manner. I used to think of the time when those poor
vacant eyes looked out upon the world, full of hope and ambition,
and then I wondered if _I_ should ever become a harmless idiot, who
thought himself a great actor.