New Albion (19 page)

Neville Watts was sighing and glancing up at the ceiling. “And what has this to do with the nigger troubadours, Mr. Farquhar Pratt?”

“And so I must agree with Mr. Hicks,” Pratty continued, unruffled, “and harken back to a better day, a golden age before the damnable railroad came along when theatre flourished and the character of the National Drama was consistent and unadulterated.” Having made his defense of the golden age of theatre, Pratty returned to the more pressing matter of his revisions. Mr. Hicks chewed his meat pie
con brio
, and Neville Watts sat fuming and mumbling to himself.

* * *

Later this afternoon, Mr. Wilton summoned me to his office. “Here is my letter to the theatre-going public,” he said, handing me a yellowed sheet of paper which contained his army man’s scrawl. “One further point,” he continued. “I have engaged Mr. Christie’s Minstrels for a one-week run beginning fifth of February. Please see that they make it into the bills, Phillips.”

Ours
is not to reason why, and so I exited Mr. Wilton’s office with his letter in hand. Having been born into a family furniture and upholstery business in Manchester, I am of two minds about this issue of foreign influence upon our National Theatre. Foreign influence involves the injection of new ideas, new styles, and new subject matter into our lives on this quiet little island. But a familial operation has the virtues of cohesiveness, loyalty, and the entire troupe pulling together in one direction. Still, I know that the actors will not be happy with Old Stoneface’s decision, given the discussion they’d had earlier in the day.

I read Mr. Wilton’s letter with interest before sending it along to the
Times
and the
Play-goer’s Guide
. His apology to the theatre-going public was as follows:

To whom it may concern.

Having been swindled by Mr. Enoch Wolsey
(who calls himself an actor but is not worthy of that epithet), the management of the new albion theatre wishes to apologize to her patrons. as a token of our appreciation for past and future
loyalties, the management has agreed to lower its prices of admission to 9 shillings (stalls) and 11 shillings (balcony) until the new year. half-price tickets will be available after eight o’clock for 5 shillings.

Thomas Wilton, Proprietor

Perhaps Mr. Wilton’s letter will have its desired effect upon the patrons of the New Albion. For tonight, however, the audience was infinitesimal and quiet, very quiet.

* Chapter Twelve *

Wednesday, 11 December 1850

Mr. Farquhar Pratt invited me
to join him at the Cock and Hen Ale House in Whitechapel Road after rehearsals today. I informed him that I was an abstainer from alcohol, and he replied that it did not matter. I could have ginger beer, but he had something of import to discuss with me. I ate my noon lunch in the garish surroundings of the tavern while Pratty indulged in a pint of lager, which cannot have been good for him but which he said was excellent. Grey workmen sat listlessly all around us, staring as if for Life’s Meaning into their glasses of gin and pots of ale.

When I had settled down to my Ploughman’s Lunch and he to his lager, Pratty leaned forward confidentially and said, “The actors have no faith in my new panto.”

I scooped some chutney on to a jagged piece of rough bread and feigned ignorance. “The actors do not have faith in anything but what has been done beforehand,” I replied. “They will be brought around to your way of thinking in time.”

The old man was looking suddenly quite drained as he settled back into his chair. “I want to thank you for being my support,” he said. “I have not always been as respectful of you as I should have been because of your close relationship with Mr. Wilton. But whatever you are, Mr. Phillips, you are full of decency and honor.” He quaffed a mouthful of beer from the dimpled glass, swishing the liquid about in his mouth and savouring it as if it were a pleasant and long-forgotten memory.

I pretended to be deeply involved with my bread and cheese at that moment. “Very kind of you, Mr. Farquhar Pratt,” I mumbled.

He lowered his beer glass to the table, and it struck the coarse wood with a thud. “I am a failed playwright and before that I was a failed actor.” His manner was blunt and honest.

“Not true,” I said. “What of
The Vicissitudes of a Servant Girl?
What of your work with Kean?” I was in the midst of delivering a large triangle of Stilton to my mouth.

He dismissed my statement with a feeble wave of his parchment-skinned hand. “I will not be remembered past death.”

“Nonsense!” I sputtered, lying. “Of course you’ll be remembered.” I stuffed the cheese into my mouth in the hope of terminating this morose strain of conversation.

Pratty managed a smile. “You are extremely kind, Mr. Phillips. Did you know that when I was a young man, I had a horrible stutter? I surmounted that, as I did many obstacles, with hard work.” He took another drink from his beer glass and looked out the greasy window on to the street. He seemed to be looking through the pedestrians walking by, through the buildings opposite, across the Thames, across oceans, across the world. “But hard work is not enough, and genius, when it strikes, strikes but a few. I have not been one of them.”

I was eager to end the conversation, and I almost choked, as a result, on a large morsel of bread. “You have had a long and varied career in the theatre,” I managed, after a moment.

“Now I must look at things
sub specie aeternitatis
,” he said. The truths he was speaking were as unbearable for me as they must have been for him. “This panto is the last story I have in me. And I want somehow to thank you for supporting me in the writing of it.” He reached into his tattered satchel and produced a manuscript. “This,” he said, “has been passed down through the family. I want you to have it.”

The pages were aged and crisp. When they were in my hands, I read the title.
“The Lieutenant and the Handmaid,”
it said, “by George Farquhar.”

“I want you to have that particular piece of theatrical ephemera,” he reiterated, closing the satchel very deliberately and placing it on the floor beside his chair.

Until that moment, I had never really believed that there was any association between the esteemed Restoration playwright George Farquhar and the aged man who sat before me, resembling a small slag heap covered by a great coat. I was eminently pleased to have the proof of their relationship in my hands, but I also felt most unworthy of retaining the document. Trying to persuade Pratty to take the papers back, I said, “I cannot keep this. This manuscript has obviously been in your family for years. And it is quite possibly worth something.”

He smiled and lifted the beer glass once more toward his thin cracked lips. “One of the old gentleman’s more unproduceable plays.” Pratty was evidently chuffed at seeing the manuscript in my hands and at seeing my reactions as I gazed upon the virile handwriting of the great master. “It may be worth something one day, but I can promise you that it is worth very little at the moment.”

“Still, it is your heritage.” I held the manuscript before me as if it was a great treasure, and it was.

His eyes grew sad. “I have no children to pass it along to. I want you to have it.”

“But your wife –”

“My wife is a caring helpmate and my soul’s partner,” he said, “but alas she can neither read nor write.”

Because he would not hear of taking back the manuscript, I had no alternative but to say, “Very well, then. But if you or your good wife should ever want it back, the manuscript will be at your disposal.”

He immediately began to discuss other matters – Mr. Hicks’ drunkenness; the weather, which has been cold and rain-drenched of late; the progress of the Crystal Palace in Hyde Park, which he despises and derides as the delusions of “that power-hungry Austrian prince.” I sat and listened to him until I could no longer avoid going back to my work.

“Allow me to pay the reckoning,” I said, rising from my
chair.

He would hear none of it. “Nonsense, Mr. Phillips. It is I who have invited you here.” But when the broken-nosed bartender demanded ten pence instead of five for his ale, Mr. Farquhar Pratt looked helplessly at me and then back at the bartender. “But a pot of ale has always been five pence,” he complained, “ever since I was an actor in Kean’s company.”

I quickly thrust ten pence into the bartender’s waiting palm, thanked Mr. Farquhar Pratt again for his present and hurried back to my desk off-stage left, back to the petty lives of actors and actresses who are more concerned with the number of words they are given to speak than with their contribution to mankind
sub specie aeternitatis
.

* * *

I had thought
to lay a trap this evening for the thief who has been stealing the belongings of our actors and actresses. Having spoken with Mr. Sharpe, who climbs about in the fly tower ropes like an African chimpanzee, I left a five pound note in plain view on my desk near the stage-left entrance. Mr. Sharpe had agreed to keep an eye on my five pounds from the heavens when he wasn’t busy raising and lowering scenery. I made a point of standing by my desk at the usual times, to give the appearance of normalcy, and then disappearing to the Green
Room or to the dressing rooms quite regularly. A less-than-subtle ruse, I know, but it was all my busy, addled brain could think of.

From his perch high above the stage, Mr. Sharpe observed the actors milling about at the stage-left entrance. At the end of the evening’s performance, he told me that Pratty had come in to see the first act and had stood by my desk in order to do so. Mr. Sharpe told me that the old man frequently steadied himself against the desk, with his hand near the five pound note. But when the old man left the theatre during an intermission, Mr. Sharpe observed, the five pound note was still there.

Young Colin Tyrone spent most of the evening in the Green Room, playing solitaire. I do not know how much longer Mr. Wilton can employ the young man when he is of no obvious use. When he tired of the card game, Mr. Tyrone went down to watch some of the last act. Mr. Sharpe kept a close eye on him, as he too viewed the proceedings from the stage-left entrance. (I was purposely downstairs, speaking into Mr. Hardacre’s ear horn, at the time.) Mr. Sharpe told me that young Tyrone never approached my desk, certainly never laid a hand upon it, but that at one point Mr. Sharpe looked down only to meet Mr. Tyrone’s gaze. The young man was peering breezily up into the fly tower and, when he locked eyes with Mr. Sharpe for a moment, Mr. Tyrone’s expression was jocular in the extreme. Then young Tyrone turned on his heels and left the backstage area.

The other actors were in the vicinity of my desk, of course, whenever a stage-left entrance was called for. Young Master Weekes had little to do on that side of the stage, but Mr. Hicks loitered there incessantly, often with a flask in his hand which he would place carefully under my desk when he was about to enter the stage. I know Mr. Hicks, though, and I cannot believe that he would stoop so low as to steal from his compatriots.

Mr. Sharpe had to busy himself with the raising of some scenery at the end of the play and, when he looked down at the desk again, my five pound note was gone! It was perhaps neither the best trap I have ever laid nor the best investment I have ever made.

Thursday, 12 December 1850

The oppressive clouds finally lifted today, and the rain stopped. The sun shone through along Cloudsey Road. All green spaces between there and the theatre were glistening, the dewed grass glistening, glistening also the leaves on the walnut trees. The actors and actresses, when they began arriving in the theatre, were in better spirits than I have seen them in for some time.

Mr. Wilton came down to my desk before rehearsals began, at ten o’clock, and announced that he’d leased the theatre to a church group for this coming Sunday and for all Sundays in the foreseeable future. This would help defray the costs of running the place, he said, since audience numbers have been so scarce of late. It would also prove to the Police Commission that the administration of this theatre was serious about improving the morals of its audience. In Mr. Wilton’s words, “The bastards will see that we mean to do good.”

* * *

A poor house again
this evening. Mr. Wilton’s open letter will be published in tomorrow’s paper. Hopefully, it will charm audiences back into the theatre.

At eight o’clock, during the final act of
Lady Hatton
, I left my desk and wandered down to the gentlemen’s dressing room. Shortly before I reached the door, I could hear somebody rustling about inside, which I thought was odd, since all of the
actors had to be onstage for the last act of the play. Not knowing
what I would do if I found a thief there in
flagrante
, I nudged the door open half an inch and observed young Mr. Tyrone rifling through a set of pockets, liberating any spare change he happened to find there. His act of thievery and betrayal, perpetrated within a close-knit theatrical grouping, infuriated me so that my next move was to thrust the door open fully and to confront him with his misdeeds.

Mr. Tyrone was caught, literally, with his greasy hand in somebody else’s pocket. Instead of covering up, he continued in this activity, smiling crookedly, when it became apparent to him that I was in the room. “Sure, they hought to pay a man a livin wage in this theatur,” he said calmly.