An empty theatre is a space stripped of purpose. It holds within its hushed air the echo of all the feet that have trodden the space between the rows, the spirits linger. Memory of programmes trimmed with gold ribbon and opera glasses released for a penny, feathers and silver-topped canes, the champagne corks in the boxes and the sweet wrappers in the one and nines. The hush of the pass door between the real world and the glittering artifice beyond. The smell of wood and greasepaint, the brushes and hangers and spirit gum in the wings, the plaster of Paris feasts of duck and fruit that has no taste, the metallic tang of swords awaiting hands to give them purpose.
The minutes pass, midnight tipping into one o’clock. Twenty past one, a quarter to two. The old watchman sits at the stage door, a muffler round his neck and his hands close to the heater, a nip of whisky, and tongue sandwiches made by his wife to get him through the small hours. The bell in the tower of St Anne’s chimes the hour over the streets of Soho. Two o’clock and all’s well.
A paperback novel is open on his lap. Henri Bencolin keeps him company. A locked room in a Paris gambling house, a mangled body on the floor, a severed head staring from the centre of the carpet, it’s a good puzzle. He reads, turning the pages with cold fingers, and the time between one circuit of the theatre and the next, the time stretches wider.
In the dead of night, there’s not a soul about. All the doors are locked and the customers have gone home. The actors are tucked up in bed or drinking with the girls from the Palace Theatre round the corner or with the poets and the playwrights in the Wardour Street gambling houses.
His head starts to droop. The book slips from his fingers to his lap, then onto the floor.
This is when it happens. When there’s no longer anyone watching or clapping or breaking the spell, the theatre comes to life.
In Wardrobe, the costumes begin to move. The kirtle and the peplos, the chiton and the farthingale. The colours of the past – madder for red, woad for blue or walnut for brown. Crinolines and corsets, feathers. First French empire, boots and neckties, plus fours and Fair Isles, all the ages of woman and of man, held on wooden hangers ready for the next time they are required.
They carry within them the imprint of every actor, each actress, who has pushed their arms into the sleeves, who has been stitched or pressed or ironed or sculpted into the cloth. No human ear can hear the music, but now they are moving, the costumes of every production that has graced these boards, coming back to waltz and to polka and to molly dance across the stage. They know each other well. For season after season, they have found themselves dyed and taken in and let out, cut and refitted to suit the players who are passing through.
They outlive us all, the wool and the silk and the cotton. Within their seams, they know how Desdemona died or Brutus betrayed, they know the outline of Mrs Malaprop as well as they know an Elyot Chase. They do not stay in one place, any more than do the actors.
Now the stage is alive again. With dancing, with movement, with speech and thought. The shadows, the ghosts, of all the women and men who have stepped into the spotlight and spoken words of love and of regret, of hate and humour, every sentiment and sentence remembered is now played out again upon these boards.
Around and around they coil and weave and twine, remembering their friendships and love affairs, gentle about the people who have inhabited the costume, knowing that each one has left an imprint. The band plays on, one minute brassy and coarse, the next falling into gentle and sinuous melodies. Major to minor, the beat changing with each tap of the conductor’s baton on the stand.
It is six in the morning and the watchman is stirring. He jerks awake, stretches, sees the novel on the floor and realises he dozed off as usual.
On the stage, the costumes sigh and look at one another. Like children to bed, they regretfully take their leave. A bow, a cuff unfurled, a skirt curtsied, a gentle withdrawal. The cue has been given. The light of another day is seeping through the gaps in the window frames, beneath the door frame and the skylight.
Soon, it will be morning. Soon, the coopers and the milk boys and the barrow boys will be out, wheels over the cobbled stones, the pale yellow sunlight rising over London.
The watchman staggers to his feet and stretches, prepares to do his rounds. As he wanders through the empty passageways of the theatre, he thinks things don’t look quite as he left them. He chalks that down to his memory. It does not occur to him that the objects we surround ourselves with have lives of their own.
Author’s Note
I’ve always felt that one of the most exciting places in the world is backstage in a theatre.
At school and university, I spent a great deal of time backstage – being ‘helpful’. Moving props, negotiating for the hire of scaffolding or clothes, wine or printing of programmes. I had no talent as a performer, but that sense in theatre that every night something unique, something special, might happen – and wanting to be part of it – has never left me.