The Walled Orchard (62 page)

I know what you’re thinking, and you’re right; I am starting to sound like an old man. I think it’s writing this book that’s doing it. Before I started on this fool’s errand, I hadn’t given the old days much thought — I’m not the sort of man who likes to dwell on the past — and to a certain extent I’ve been thinking aloud for a lot of the time, as things occur to me that I never realised before. But we Athenians aren’t terribly good at noticing the passage of time. For example; Aristophanes continued putting on the stage Choruses supposedly representing men who had fought at Marathon long after all but the last few veterans of the battle were dead and buried, but nobody in the Theatre seemed to find this strange. They still imagined that there were plenty of Marathon men still alive, and so nobody ever got around to seeking out survivors of the battle and actually asking them what happened and writing down what they said so that it would never be forgotten. Then along came men like the celebrated Herodotus, and they wrote their books and gave their recitals, and there was nobody left to say whether they had got it right or not. Which is why I started writing this, I suppose — that and the money Dexitheus offered me, of course, and the prospect of something to do over the winter. Dear God, I really am starting to ramble now, aren’t I? I’d better get on with the story, before I completely lose touch with reality.

Now I’ve told you that I was listed to send on my Chorus after Euripides’ Tragedies on the second day, and that I was in two minds whether this was good or bad. Well, I sat through the opening day like a small child who’s waiting to be taken to see the market for the first time, and I hardly noticed the Tragedies. The Comedy was absolutely dire; it was one of the first of these miserable domestic farces that are so popular nowadays, all about a young man who wants to marry the girl next door but can’t, for some improbable reason, and there were hardly any jokes about the politicians or the War, while the Chorus-songs had nothing to do with the plot and seemed to have been bolted on as an afterthought. I hated it, and it was very depressing to hear the audience applauding it. I take it as a personal insult when people applaud a bad Comedy, unless, of course, it’s one of mine. When this travesty finally ground to a halt I went straight home instead of hanging about as I usually do, talking to people I haven’t seen since last year and generally enjoying being involved. Philonides came round later on, to go over a few last-minute points; but more out of politeness than for any other reason. He had everything firmly under control, rather like a good Persian governor, and needed no help from me. I asked him if he’d heard whether Aristophanes was planning any more tricks, and he looked at me very strangely and said that I was becoming obsessed with Aristophanes, so I dropped the subject. I had an early meal and went to bed, but of course I couldn’t sleep. I wanted this play to win more than any other I had ever written, and I think it was at that point that I knew that if it did win, it would be my last, and I would be through with the Theatre after that.

I didn’t know why. I still don’t.

At last it was morning, and I went over to Philonides’ house at least two hours before dawn, to find that he was still in bed and not particularly pleased to see me. He was feeling generally depressed — naturally enough, considering that it was his fifty-seventh birthday — but after a cup of hot wine with honey and cheese and a mouthful of bread, he was soon rushing about like an eighteen-year-old, and then the Chorus-leaders and the actors arrived.

I shall remember that morning till I die. The Chorus-leaders were the first to arrive, and they were full of energy and enthusiasm. Then the two supporting actors came in, and they had hangovers but were otherwise intact. The protagonist, however, was nowhere to be seen. Now the man in question, one Phiocharmus, was notorious for being late for everything, and so at first we didn’t worry. But when there was only an hour to go until the first Tragedy and he still hadn’t turned up, Philonides started sending messengers out to find him, and we sat and stared at each other, wondering what on earth was going on. Philonides was thoroughly worked up by now, and passed the time by saying what he would do to Philocharmus when he got his hands on him. But in the back of my mind I already knew what had happened to him, and so when one of Philonides’ men came bursting in and blurted out what had happened, I wasn’t in the least surprised.

Philocharmus (said the messenger) was in the Market Square. He was completely and hopelessly drunk, having been fed wine doctored with poppy-essence, and there was no earthly chance of sobering him up by this afternoon. The messenger said that he had met a couple of men who had seen our leading actor having a drink with a red-headed man and a tall man with freckles the previous evening, and that was all we needed to hear. Those two were the leaders of Aristophanes’ claque — the same men who had made the scene at the preview. God only knows why Philocharmus hadn’t recognised them. In fact, I believe he did, and that a fair amount of coined silver changed hands.

So that seemed to be that; we had no leading actor, and so no play. At least half the lines in the play were spoken by the protagonist, which was the usual thing in Comedy in my day. Philonides nearly had a stroke, mainly because it should have been his job to make sure something like this didn’t happen. But I can’t blame him; the people you usually have to watch are your rival Comic poets in that year’s Festival, not someone who isn’t even competing, and I’m sure he had taken all possible precautions against sabotage by my two immediate rivals. It hadn’t entered his head that Aristophanes would carry his personal grudge against me this far.

With about half an hour to go before the start of the first Tragedy, we still hadn’t thought of a plan; and I was all for going to the Archon and telling him, so that he could arrange for something to fill in the time. But Philonides would have none of it. He simply looked at me and said, ‘I’m not having my best work thrown away like this. One of us will have to do it.’

I stared at him. ‘You’re crazy,’ I said. ‘I don’t know the first thing about acting.’

‘I know,’ he said. ‘And your voice is all wrong, and you move like an ox-cart with a missing wheel. And you’re too short. No, you certainly can’t do it. Not in a thousand years.’

We looked at each other, We had known each other for many years. Philonides had been the first man I had spoken to that day I got back from Sicily. If I had a single friend in the whole of Athens, it was Philonides. He was also perfectly capable of out-acting Thespis himself; he had a marvellous voice, a magnificent sense of timing, and the sort of authority that would make an audience sit up and take notice. But there was one drawback. He was terrified of speaking in public.

He once told me about the only time he had spoken to a large audience. It was a lawsuit, something trivial about a small debt a neighbour of his owed him, and after a lot of worrying and putting it off, he finally took it to Court. He wrote a brilliant speech for himself to deliver and learned it perfectly by heart. He rehearsed himself in it for a fortnight, doing nothing else from dawn to dusk. He went along to the Court to get used to the atmosphere of the place, took advice from seasoned litigants, and even read a couple of books on the subject. But when the day came, and the water-clock started running, he dried up completely. For all his titanic efforts, he couldn’t bring himself to say a word, and the case went against him by default. Yet this was the man who could bawl out the most recalcitrant of Choruses, reduce professional actors to tears, and persuade authors to rewrite their best speeches, all by sheer force of personality. And now I was asking him to get up on the stage in the Theatre of Dionysus, for the first time, at the Great Dionysia itself, in front of perhaps eighteen thousand people, and play the leading role in a Comedy.

We sat there in silence, glaring at each other like two stray dogs in the market competing for a scrap of offal, with the terrible thought that one or other of us was going to play the leading role in a Comedy that afternoon.

‘You know,’ said Philonides after a very long time, ‘if you held yourself a bit straighter and spoke very slowly, you could probably get away with it.’

I smiled frigidly. ‘They say acting is totally different from speaking in Court,’ I replied. ‘For one thing, the audience is on your side. You’ll probably enjoy it once you get over the early nerves.’

He ignored me as if I hadn’t made a sound; it was a gift he had, and he used it to great effect when dealing with actors. ‘After all,’ he said, ‘it’s not that many years since the author regularly used to play the lead. Before the War, it was very much the done thing. Aeschylus did it all the time.’

‘It was Aeschylus who put a stop to it,’ I pointed out, ‘when he introduced the second actor. I remember hearing someone say once that Aeschylus used to come out in a horrible rash all over his face every time he had to go on stage. He had to have a specially padded mask.’

Philonides tried a different approach. ‘It must be really aggravating for you writers,’ he said sweetly, ‘when the audience come out after the play and all they talk about is how good so-and-so was as the hero and never even mention the poet, like the actor just made it up as he went along. And they’ll never know it was you with the mask on; they’ll think it was Philocharmus. So if you make a botch of it he’ll get the blame, and if you’re a real smash you can raise your mask at the end so that everyone can see it was you.’

‘No fear,’ I said vehemently. ‘This is a good play, and I’m not having some idiot like me make a mess of it. Face facts, I couldn’t get through the opening scene without dropping something or falling off the edge of the stage. And there’s that bit where the Chorus dance in front of me; I’m so short the audience wouldn’t even see me, even in the boots.’

‘You’re just chicken,’ Philonides said desperately. He was streaming with sweat, even the backs of his hands, and his eyes had become very big.

‘Yes,’ I agreed. ‘So are you. So which of us is going to make a fool of himself in public?’

‘I’ve got my reputation to consider.’

‘You said yourself,’ I reminded him, ‘they’d never recognise you under the mask.’

‘Someone would be bound to recognise my voice,’ he said hysterically. ‘All those people I’ve shouted at over the years.’

‘My voice is far more distinctive than yours,’ I said. ‘And it’s not nearly so good,’ I added quickly. ‘You’re always saying how no actor can speak lines properly. Now’s your chance to show them how to do it.’

‘I’ve retired, remember?’

‘So, you’ve got nothing to lose, have you?’

But he shook his head vigorously, until I was convinced it was about to fly off his shoulders. ‘No,’ he said, ‘I’m not going to do it, and that’s final. It’s your play; if you want it salvaged, you’ll have to do it yourself.’

‘Listen,’ I said, ‘it won’t be salvaging it, it’ll be ruining it. No, it’s obvious, there’s only one thing I can do, if you won’t play that part. I’ll have to go to the Archon and tell him that because of your negligence and carelessness there won’t be a play this afternoon. Then I’ll fiddle with it a bit and put it on another year, maybe under a different name. Of course, your reputation in the Theatre will be dead meat;
you’ll
never be able to work again after the news gets out; but then, that won’t matter to you because you ‘ye retired, like you said.’

I stood up to go; and I had actually picked up my stick and got as far as the door before Philonides called me back. ‘If you say anything like that to the Archon,’ he said, ‘I’ll kill you, I promise. It’s your precious enemy that’s got us into this mess.’

‘I don’t seem to have much choice,’ I replied. ‘And look at it this way. If I go out pretending to be an actor you’ve trained, and I make a hash of it, as I undoubtedly will, who are they going to blame? Not me, the poet. They’re going to blame the Chorus-trainer, “He’s really lost his grip this time,” they’ll say. “Over the hill,” they’ll say, “just like I was telling you, he should’ve retired years ago.” But if you do it, at least you’ll only have yourself to blame. Come on, man; if some of those losers who call themselves actors can do it, you can do it, no trouble at all.’

I reckon it was that last bit that did the trick, for Philonides basically despised all actors. He sat there for what seemed like for ever, not saying a word; then quite suddenly he made a noise like a splitting wineskin and started calling me all the names under the sun. Blackmailer was one of them, I remember, and there were several variants on the theme of cowardice. I took this to mean that he would do it.

‘But on one condition,’ he said. ‘We’re going to spend the rest of the day going over this thing inch by inch with a full cast, costumes, everything, until I could do it with my eyes shut; because that’s probably how I will have to do it, all right?’

‘All right.’

‘And when it’s over,’ he went on, ‘I want you to promise that you’ll hold Aristophanes’ arms for me while I break every bone in his body. Agreed?’

‘It’ll be a pleasure.’

He stood up, looking as if some unkind person had strapped a marble block to his back. ‘A really lovely birthday this turned out to be,’ he groaned. ‘Right, we’ll get the Chorus together and then we’ll make a start.’

So I never got to see those notorious experimental plays by Euripides that have since become so famous; while they were shocking a largely unprepared audience, I was hearing Philonides through his big speech for the fifth or sixth time in the big courtyard behind a friendly corn-chandler’s warehouse near the Pnyx, while a thoroughly disgusted Chorus tramped miserably backwards and forwards and calculated how much they could get away with charging me for overtime and missing the Tragedies. I’ll say this for Philonides, however; although he kept breaking off every six or seven lines to call me some new name he’d just thought up, he never once suggested cutting a word of the play to make life easier for himself; nor did he make one alteration to the moves and routines he had planned with such reckless enthusiasm. And whenever he’d finished his speech and could turn to look at the Chorus, if any of them was so much as a hair’s breadth out of position he would tear into him like a lion devouring a goat. If he was going to have to make an idiot of himself at his age, he said, the least everyone else could do was try and get it right for once, and anyone who cocked it up that afternoon was going to get the same as Aristophanes, or maybe even worse. Finally, after going through the play six times at top speed, he declared that he was as ready as he would ever be, and that all he needed now was a very stiff drink.