He sat in the stalls with his head buried in his hands, contemplating the work that he still had to do if he was to bring this production up to scratch. Not for the first time on this show he felt helpless in the face of the casting problems. Cues could be tightened, props rehearsed with, entrances practised until they were engraved on the memory. But a bad actor is a bad actor is a bad actor. He could labour till doomsday neatening and sharpening, but he could not make a silk purse of the sow’s ear that was Diane Duvall.
With all the skill of an acrobat she contrived to skirt every significance, to ignore every opportunity to move the audience, to avoid every nuance the playwright would insist on putting in her way. It was a performance heroic in its ineptitude, reducing the delicate characterization Galloway had been at pains to create to a single-note whine. This Viola was soap-opera pap, less human than the hedges, and about as green.
The critics would slaughter her.
Worse than that, Lichfield would be disappointed. To his considerable surprise the impact of Lichfield’s appearance hadn’t dwindled; Galloway couldn’t forget his actorly projection, his posing, his rhetoric. It had moved him more deeply than he was prepared to admit, and the thought of this Twelfth Night, with this Viola, becoming the swan-song of Lichfield’s beloved Elysium perturbed and embarrassed him. It seemed somehow ungrateful.
He’d been warned often enough about a director’s burdens, long before he became seriously embroiled in the profession. His dear departed guru at the Actors’ Centre, Wellbeloved (he of the glass eye), had told Galloway from the beginning:
‘A director is the loneliest creature on God’s earth. He knows what’s good and bad in a show, or he should if he’s
worth his salt, and he has to carry that information around with him and keep smiling.’
It hadn’t seemed so difficult at the time.
‘This job isn’t about succeeding,’ Wellbeloved used to say, ‘it’s about learning not to fall on your sodding face.’
Good advice as it turned out. He could still see Well-beloved handing out that wisdom on a plate, his bald head shiny, his living eye glittering with cynical delight. No man on earth, Galloway had thought, loved theatre with more passion than Wellbeloved, and surely no man could have been more scathing about its pretensions.
It was almost one in the morning by the time they’d finished the wretched run-through, gone through the notes, and separated, glum and mutually resentful, into the night. Galloway wanted none of their company tonight:
No late drinking in one or others’ digs, no mutual ego-massage. He had a cloud of gloom all to himself, and neither wine, women nor song would disperse it. He could barely bring himself to look Diane in the face. His notes to her, broadcast in front of the rest of the cast, had been acidic. Not that it would do much good.
In the foyer, he met Tallulah, still spry though it was long after an old lady’s bedtime.
‘Are you locking up tonight?’ he asked her, more for something to say than because he was actually curious.
‘I always lock up,’ she said. She was well over seventy:
too old for her job in the box office, and too tenacious to be easily removed. But then that was all academic now, wasn’t it? He wondered what her response would be when she heard the news of the closure. It would probably break her brittle heart. Hadn’t Hammersmith once told him Tallulah had been at the theatre since she was a girl of fifteen?
‘Well, goodnight Tallulah.’
She gave him a tiny nod, as always. Then she reached out and took Galloway’s arm.
‘Yes?’
‘Mr Lichfield…‘ she began.
‘What about Mr Lichfield?’
‘He didn’t like the rehearsal.’
‘He was in tonight?’
‘Oh yes,’ she replied, as though Galloway was an imbecile for thinking otherwise, ‘of course he was in.’
‘I didn’t see him.’
‘Well… no matter. He wasn’t very pleased.’
Galloway tried to sound indifferent.
‘It can’t be helped.’
‘Your show is very close to his heart.’
‘I realize that,’ said Galloway, avoiding Tallulah’s accusing looks. He had quite enough to keep him awake tonight, without her disappointed tones ringing in his ears.