The Memory of Blood(77)

‘But why hasn’t anybody else picked up on the fact that it used to be a theatre? And surely it would have been worth more as offices?’

‘Not if you get the right audience for a new play. You can licence it for different productions all around the world. As offices, the ground floor would have provided a nice atrium but that’s just wasted space. This one could be packed with 450 people who would pay nightly to be here. Kramer needed the right script to launch the theatre. He wanted to get in a younger crowd, so he commissioned Ray Pryce.’

‘Why Ray?’

‘Why not ask him yourself?’ Bryant pointed behind him just as Ray entered the stalls.

‘I got your text, Mr Bryant, although I had trouble understanding it.’

‘He doesn’t know how to use predictive,’ May warned.

‘Oh, my God, what is that?’ Ray peered over the corpse’s boxed-in head and leapt back.

‘Mr Bryant, can I ask you to keep the public out of this site?’ said Banbury.

‘I’m afraid it’s Mona Williams. Ray, explain to my partner how you convinced Mr Kramer to stage your play, would you?’

Ray had trouble drawing his eyes away from the bridled actress. ‘I told him it would outrage everyone. Controversy is a surefire way of firing up the box office. There’s no such thing as bad publicity.’

‘Now tell him the rest. Tell him how you plagiarised someone else’s work to worm your way into Kramer’s good books.’

Ray looked shocked, and started stammering. ‘I don’t know what you mean.’

‘Come off it, chum. I know you copied the play.’

‘It’s not plagiarism, not in the strict sense.’

‘The Two Murderers follows the script of Les Deux Meurtriers almost word for word.’

‘I’m clear of the seventy-year rule.’

‘You haven’t exactly gone out of the way to acknowledge the original, have you? Does Robert know?’

‘No, but—’

‘The seventy-year rule,’ May repeated. ‘An author has to have been dead for seventy years before his work comes out of copyright.’

‘That’s right,’ said Ray, shamefaced. ‘I found the script right here in the building.’

‘Now perhaps you’d like to tell my partner about the Grand Guignol,’ Bryant prompted.

‘Okay, sure.’ May could see that Ray was nervous not because he was standing near a corpse, but because he had suddenly had the spotlight of suspicion turned on him. ‘The Grand Guignol was built in the Pigalle, in Paris, at the end of the nineteenth century, by a man called Oscar Méténier. It was a kind of vaudeville of horror. It staged a program of one-act plays that featured murder of all kinds—matricide, infanticide, kidnap and rape. The scenes were graphically depicted onstage. They were so realistic that audience members regularly used to pass out.’

‘And where did the name of the theatre come from?’

‘From “Guignol,” the Punch and Judy puppet character from Lyons.’

‘The plays were often taken from the police blotters of the times,’ Bryant added. ‘True crimes, staged to delight and horrify Parisian audiences. Sex and violence for the chattering classes. Now explain what happened over here, if you would be so kind.’

Ray glanced back at the body and blanched. ‘Can we go somewhere away from—her?’

‘I’m sorry. Of course.’ The detectives took him out to the foyer. ‘Pray continue, if you would,’ Bryant asked.

‘Well, it’s simple. The Grand Guignol of Paris was a huge success for the next twenty years. So it was brought across the Channel, and staged in what was then known as the Little Theatre, here in Adam Street. But right from the start there was a problem. We had a Lord Chamberlain who censored plays, and he refused a licence to any play he considered dangerous to the morals of the public. So the Grand Guignol at the Little Theatre highlighted the psychological cruelty of the characters, rather than showing blood and sex.

‘In a way, that was worse. In two years they staged eight series of plays, and many more were turned down. Altogether, forty-three plays were seen here. Most of them were psychological studies of damaged people. Stanislavsky created emotional memory exercises for actors—the idea was that you give a more convincing performance by inhabiting the character and making it believable from a psychological point of view. As a result the theatre attracted famous names, even though it drew adverse critical reviews and caused a scandal. Noel Coward wrote a play for the Little Theatre called The Better Half, and Dame Sybil Thorndyke appeared in many of them. For four years, young Londoners came here to be shocked. Eventually, the Lord Chamberlain got fed up with what he considered an affront to human decency, and the theatre had to close.’