Russian Hide-and-Seek

17

The music recital, which included works by Dowland, Purcell, Sullivan, Elgar, the composer of ‘Ta-ra-ra-boom-de-ay’, Noel Coward, Duke Ellington (taken to have been an English nobleman of some sort), Britten and John Lennon, fell a long way short of the disaster Theodore had feared. The audience remained good-natured throughout and even applauded after several of the items. They disappointed the organisers, however, by talking loudly and continuously from start to finish, or rather for all but the first five minutes, when the strangeness of the experience almost silenced them. Somebody pointed out afterwards that they had not been told of the custom of keeping quiet at such shows; somebody else said this might have been just as well. The performance the following evening of ‘Look Back in Anger’ was an out-and-out success. Only very rarely in the past could the theatre have rung with so much happy, hearty laughter. Afterwards the members of the cast had been chaired round the neighbouring streets by an enthusiastic crowd.

The night after that (Thursday) was to see the production of ‘Romeo and Juliet’ that had earlier interested Alexander. He made preparations to attend. These included obtaining through unofficial channels not only a ticket but something called a dinner jacket and a dickey with a small black bow-tie clipped to it, made specially for the occasion like the church clothes. He also got one of the servants to make him up a bouquet of flowers from the garden and arranged for its delivery at the theatre. A couple of days earlier to do as much might have seemed too troublesome, but the recent decline in his passion for Mrs Korotchenko, consequent on her persuasions in the matter of her daughter, had allowed his interest to move in other directions.

He changed in Theodore’s office, had a pint of best bitter and a cheese-and-pickle sandwich at the Marshal Stalin in St John’s Street and strolled round the corner to the theatre. It was a fine September evening, unusually hot and sticky for the time of year. A few people passed in the streets; most had already gone to their homes or to the lodgings that served as their homes in this cut-off island. Two military policemen, noticeable for their blue cross-belts and gaiters, moved slowly by in step, hands clasped behind backs. All was quiet. And yet in seventy-two hours, more like seventy-six hours to be exact, the revolution was to be launched and everything would be changed, set off by his shooting of his father. Was he going to be able to do it? He must; not to would be admitting to himself, and to others, that he was a trifler, a poseur, a booby. No going back now.

The foyer of the theatre was crowded with expectant English, none of whom had attended the play the previous evening (it had been a question of one or the other), but they had obviously heard all about it. Some were reading parts of the programme aloud for the benefit of illiterates among their hearers. A doubt or two was expressed whether a story of the kind summarised there could be very funny, but the doubters cheered up a little on finding that the characters called Mercutio and the Nurse were considered by experts to demonstrate Shakespeare’s powers of comedy at their best.

The appearance of many of the men present would have struck most observers as odd. The dinner jackets they wore were just that; inefficiency and shortages had prevented the matching trousers from being ready in time. There were those like Alexander who had managed to find something not too incongruous among their own (usually very small) stocks of clothes; others had settled for tweed-like patterns or corduroys of various colours. The women looked strange too, though collectively rather than singly. A further set of shortages had caused them all to be wearing the same dress, a garment with a narrow and on-the-short-side skirt (to save material), no sleeves (same reason; hard on the not-so-young) and an unfetching round neck. By a stroke of petty lavishness, at the last minute so to speak total uniformity had been averted; exactly half the dresses were electric blue and the others emerald green, giving their wearers the appearance of opposing teams about to engage in some little-known sport. Not many younger people turned up and those that had were mostly in the bar downstairs. Nothing stronger than beer and stout was on sale, but a certain amount of spirits was being drunk, having been illegally distilled and brought along in pocket-flasks, or rather small bottles of all sorts. Here and there a mild rowdiness was beginning to show itself.

The ringing of a bell immediately produced something of a hush. When a bell rang, it meant authority was calling for attention, and plenty of those in bar and foyer could vividly remember the time when it had been wise to respond to that call without reserve. But the word soon got round that taking one’s seat was as much as was asked for. This process went on longer than would once have usual, given the number of parties and couples with no member able to read. In the end it was done and there fell another relative silence, in which this time an immense rustling of paper could be heard as several hundred boxes of chocolates, one to each seat, were torn open and their contents explored. A Russian researcher of unusually wide reading had come across the remark (sarcastically intended) that chocolates seemed to be compulsory at English theatrical performances. Those of tonight contained sweet pastes of uncertain flavouring, but they went down well enough with men and women who had had an early supper of (typically) cabbage soup, belly of pork with boiled beets, and stewed windfalls. After another pause the house lights were dimmed.

A tubby old man came on to the stage in front of the curtain. His painted face and his clothes, which were hard to imagine as the attire of any person in the real world, combined with the circumstances to suggest at once that here was an actor. Applause, led by a small claque, greeted him and he bowed. Confirmation of his histrionic status was soon given by his manner of speech, monotonous but unnatural, the voice dropping at the end of every line of verse. When he came to the words ‘the hour’s traffic of our stage’ there was of course nobody to remark this notice that the text of the production had been cut by something like half or the metrical deficiency of the altered line. The man soon finished his say and, to more applause, withdrew. The curtain rose.

A loud sigh of pleasure and wonder arose from the audience. The wonder at least was understandable: the sets were the work of a Russian artist or artisan whose instructions had been to portray sixteenth-century Verona in a style the twenty-first-century English would appreciate. (He had conscientiously read the play in a recent translation and had put in many a touch he thought was Shakespearean.) Two men carrying swords, more fancifully dressed than their predecessor, came in and conversed for a short time. Two other men followed. The attention of the audience was held at first by the sheer unfamiliarity of everything before them, then by the excitement of the fights, which had been well arranged and thoroughly rehearsed, then by the (to them) dazzling opulence of the clothes worn by the Prince and his train. The exchange between Montague and Benvolio was cut almost to nothing; the good-looking young man playing Romeo was a natural actor, with a command of expression and gesture that enabled most of those there to catch the drift of those passages he understood himself, and it was found generally inoffensive.

Alexander had naturally not bothered to read the synopsis in the programme (an unnecessary demand on his English, for one thing), so he was almost surprised when, just after the start of the third scene, the tall dark-haired figure of Sarah Harland walked on to the stage. She was wearing a blue-and-white dress that miraculously both fitted and suited her and altogether she was looking even finer than he had remembered. After she had made a couple of brief remarks, two other females chatted for a few moments; she moved away and looked out into the auditorium and immediately, or so he fancied, caught sight of him. If she had, the way her face changed boded ill for his chances after the show, chances which seemed further diminished when he turned his eyes away and found himself looking straight into those of Kitty Wright. She arid her father were sitting remarkably near for him not to have noticed them before. It was going to be tricky, making for Sarah without Kitty seeing, but short of cancelling Sarah it would have to be done. An old Russian proverb said a rabbit in the snare was worth two in the field, and someone with far less experience of women than his would still know full well that infidelity even in remotest intention drove them wild with rage, in sad contrast to his own view that they could do what they liked provided they were available whenever he wanted them. (This may well have been his expressed view; his practice on learning of such conduct was to turn wild with rage and walk out at once, unless indeed nothing else was fully available at the time.)

The audience had some trouble with the Nurse’s maunderings about Lammas-eve, which the writer of the adaptation had not dared to shorten because of what the experts had told him. There were attempts to laugh at it, but they soon died down when it went on being incomprehensible and, more important, when the other characters present went on either showing impatience or refusing to listen. But enjoyment of the occasion and the fair amount of goodwill accumulated in the first few minutes saw the Nurse through. What caused the first stirrings of resentment was Mercutio’s Queen Mab speech, again uncut for similar reasons, and again for similar reasons the initial laughter was short-lived. By the end the house was audibly restive, and cheers greeted Romeo for finally shutting him up. Capulet’s ball, what with the music, dancing and costumes, and a new set of great singularity, quietened things down for a time, though the Nurse drew an outburst of catcalls.

By the middle of Act II the conventions had been firmly established. Romeo and Juliet themselves were to be respected, or at least allowed to speak their lines in comparative silence. Mercutio, the Nurse and, as soon as he appeared, Friar Laurence were picked out as the enemy, to be subjected to jeers, abuse, threats and all manner of wordless yell. Jubilation at the death of Mercutio in the first scene of Act III stopped the show for over five minutes. A personal appeal from Romeo got it going again, but it never fully recovered.

Muttering grew audible in Juliet/Sarah’s speech at the beginning of the next scene; she was without the support of Romeo’s presence and her dramatic powers were inferior to his. One passage, however,

‘Come, gentle night, come, loving, black-bro wed night,

Give me my Romeo; and, when he shall die,

Take him and cut him out in little stars,

And he will make the face of heaven so fine

That all the world will be in love with night

And pay no worship to the garish sun, she seemed to understand and spoke with some conviction, not that that made any difference to the muttering.

The end came, or began, with the re-entrance of the Nurse. The prospect of more of her was suddenly too much to bear. Unlike the church congregation, the people here had thought they had an idea of what was in store for them and been disappointed. They had been looking forward to enjoying themselves and had been bewildered and bored. They had been told over and over again that this was a great play by a great Englishman and there was nothing in it. They had put on these ridiculous clothes and come all this way to be made fools of. It was what some of them had been calling it from the beginning – just another Shits’ trick.

In what followed almost no one took no part and there was no opposing faction within the audience. Shouting, gesticulating, assuring one another that it was no joke and not good enough, they stood up en masse and slowly made their way to the space between the front row and the orchestra pit. The half-dozen Russian-trained stewards were swept helplessly along. The riot police had already been summoned by electronic alarm but it would be several minutes before they could arrive. The crowd appeared indignant rather than menacing and at first contented itself with verbal aggression. From behind the footlights Romeo, Juliet, Capulet, Benvolio, Prince Escalus pleaded and apologised in dumb-show; words would have been wasted. Then some of the younger men from what had been the audience set about climbing up the barrier surrounding the pit with the evident purpose of getting on to the apron and so to the stage proper. Those questioned the next day said they intended no personal harm and meant only to do some damage to the set and properties, but anybody could have been forgiven for deciding to be on the safe side and making his or her exit before it was too late. The players did that.

Alexander, standing in the central aisle halfway down the front of the house, had an excellent view of all this and even more of the events that followed. For a moment the stage was empty. Then Romeo and Benvolio hurried back on to it and down on to the apron. They were shouting violently though inaudibly, inaudibly not only to Alexander but, as it seemed, also to anyone in the crowd; nobody looked at them. And they were shouting a single word, a monosyllable to judge by the movements of their mouths. He wondered very much what that word was. Nor did he have to wait long to find out. In the most spectacular fashion, a cloud of smoke, dense and spreading with remarkable rapidity, drifted into his view from behind the flats of Capulet’s orchard. Very briefly it was his view alone. During that interval the concealed door next to the stage, the one by which Aram Sevadjian and Theodore had come to join him at the rehearsal he had visited, was opened from the far side. Actors among others began to come through that doorway, a minor Montague, a minor Capulet, one of the Prince’s train, a man recognisable as Mercutio. He was certainly recognised by some of those milling about near him, but before he could be assailed or otherwise abused others had seen the smoke, much thicker and more widespread than when it had first appeared.

The shouting stopped, or rather changed into unnecessary but understandable cries of ‘Fire!’ Alexander looked at the stage again. Romeo and Benvolio were nowhere to be seen; they could only have descended into the auditorium. One after the other Prince Escalus, a man who might have been a stage-hand, a girl who might have been anything, Capulet came into sight and clambered down from the stage, presumably unable to make their way to the pass-door Mercutio’s party were using. Where was Sarah? Here at last she was, still dressed as Juliet, running, coughing, carrying a hold-all. In her turn she reached the apron and started to negotiate the gap between it and the barrier, but she was impeded by her hold-all, lost her footing and in a flash had fallen through the gap into the orchestra pit. Alexander acted nearly as quickly. He had moved along one of the rows of seats so as not to be in the path of the multitude surging up the aisle; now he scrambled over into the next row down and repeated the process until he reached the front. It was no great business for one of his physique to force his way through the press and haul himself up on the barrier so as to be able to see over it.

The floor of the pit, into which smoke was rapidly drifting, was perhaps two metres below him. Sarah Harland, coughing and gasping, half-lay on it struggling to get up but, no doubt because of her fall, without success. She saw him at once, recognised him and silently but unmistakably entreated him to help her. He considered. He would have no trouble getting in and very little trouble getting her out. The trouble would come when he tried to get out himself. She could not help him, nobody else would and there was no furniture in the pit at all, nothing to stand on. He would have to rely entirely on the strength of his arms, and whether he could make it would depend on how far he found he had to reach up. From where he was it looked as if it might be too far. It just might be; that was enough. His decision must have shown in his face, because on to hers came a look of totally unsurprised contempt, a terrible look that was to haunt him till the day he died. He turned away to search for Kitty, for whom after all he was much more responsible.

Huge rounded masses of smoke piled on one another were sailing up the front of the house. The safety curtain, its mechanism failed or its operator fled, was less than half lowered; flames were moving down stage towards it. To be sure, it would not have saved Sarah Harland even if it had come all the way. She died of asphyxiation a few minutes after Alexander had left her, the only fatal casualty of the ‘Romeo and Juliet’ fire. It was soon established that this had been started deliberately, but the perpetrator was never found, nor even his motive placed beyond dispute. An adverse critic of the performance so terminated would have had no time to assemble his materials; a straight saboteur of the Festival might have been expected to pick a time when the building was empty. The most popular theory was that the culprit had been a crazed pre-war set on punishing the cast, the theatre staff, the audience and everybody concerned for having, in different ways, collaborated with the oppressor; he would have counted (rightly) on giving them all a good scare and could not have been expected to shed any tears if many more than one person had died. Again, no evidence for this view was discovered.

On the night of the fire Alexander returned to quarters; troop inspection 0800 hours on the morrow. Although it was still early the mess was deserted. This displeased him; for once he hankered for companionship. At the bar he took a bottle of beer from the shelf, put it back and poured himself a stiff vodka. The following afternoon would see his vital session with Mrs Korotchenko; his thoughts were soon fixed entirely on that. She had her imperfections, but for capturing and holding the attention, even at a distance, she was most effective.