She saw him briefly before the show. He gave her a wave of acknowledgement as he bustled busily up the aisle from the pass-door by the stage. He was dressed exactly as when she’d last seen him, but there was now a greater aura of importance about him. In his wake scuttled the pretty dark-haired girl who had summoned him from the university coffee shop on their last encounter. As he passed Jude, Andy Constant said, “If I don’t see you in all the confusion after the show, let’s meet up in the Bull. Just opposite the gates of the campus – do you know it?”
“I’ll find it.”
“Won’t be such a scrum there as there will in the student bar.”
“Can I set one up for you?”
“Pint of Stella would be wonderful.”
And he whisked his important way to the back of the auditorium, where the dark-haired girl was now waiting for him.
Just as the lights were dimming, Jude caught sight of Ewan and Hamish Urquhart a few rows in front, presumably there to cheer on Sophia.
The show was not bad, but it did feel slightly over-inflated for its own good. The subject of war is a big one and Rumours of Wars tried to take on all of it. There were the obligatory scenes of carnage from 1914-18, juxtaposed with the clinical battles of new technologies. There were scenes of everyman squaddies punctiliously obeying orders given to them by idiots, of bereaved mothers weeping over the deaths of children in air raids, of blimpish generals planning mass slaughter over post-prandial port.
All of this was realized in a form that involved much shouting, a certain amount of dance, some a cappella singing and a lot of mime (which was about as interesting as mime usually is). The show was built about a lot of tableaux of human bodies, dramatic images precisely engineered. It was all impressive and just a tad worthy.
Also old-fashioned. Andy Constant must have been very young during the sixties, but that was definitely the period when his ideas of theatre had been formed. Jude got the feeling that he’d definitely seen Oh! What A Lovely Wars at an impressionable age. There was a simplicity in his anti-war message which accorded better with the protest years of Vietnam, when there were still perhaps some illusions remaining to be shattered, than the cynical wartime of Iraq. The show seemed to be taking a battering ram to a door that was already wide open.
And the acting wasn’t terribly good. The kind of slick ensemble playing required by that kind of theatre was beyond the capacity of the University of Clincham’s Drama students. Though individual talents shone through in various areas, none had the all-round versatility that the piece demanded. And of all the cast Sophia Urquhart was probably the weakest. She looked pretty enough and went through the motions of what she had rehearsed, but didn’t convince. However much she threw herself around the stage, she remained quintessentially a young lady of the Home Counties who had been to all the right schools. Wherever the girl’s future lay, it wasn’t in acting.
Her singing voice, though, was something else. In the one solo number she had, she was transformed. This, again harking back to the sixties, was Pete Seeger’s ‘Where Have All the Flowers Gone?’ As the girl’s pure unaccompanied soprano spelt out the message of pacifism, she seemed not only to evoke an earlier era, but also to swell with confidence and to take effortless control of the whole auditorium. As a singer, Sophia Urquhart might make it.
The best thing about Rumours of Wars, in Jude’s view, was its length. An hour and twenty minutes with no interval. Quite long enough to preach to the converted that war is a bad thing.
Jude’s overall impression of the evening was the dominance of Andy Constant. The show was supposedly built up from improvisation, but had all the hallmarks of contrivance. Yes, the students may have come up with individual ideas, but they had been welded into a preconceived form by the director. The iron will of Andy Constant lay behind every line and every gesture. In a way, the weakness of the material served only to highlight the skill with which it had been pressed into theatrical shape.
In her brief experience as an actress Jude had come across directors like that. For them the written text was an irrelevance, an obstacle to be overcome by their stagecraft. And working from improvisation gave them the perfect opportunity to impose their wills on actors. The aim of the production was only to show how clever they, the directors, were. The whole exercise was an ego-trip.
Jude knew that that was exactly how Andy Constant would have treated his students during the rehearsal period. What he was after was control, pure and simple.
And even as she identified the kind of man he was, she was aware of the way she was drawn towards him. She could regret, but she couldn’t deny it.
Andy had said that the Bull pub would be less of a scrum than the student bar, but it was still pretty crowded, the regular clientele augmented by parents who had just experienced Rumours of Wars. From the conversations Jude overheard as she struggled towards the bar, they had thought rather more of the show than she had. Or maybe it was just because their offspring had been participating.
There were also quite a few of the students who’d been in the show, and a lot of their friends who hadn’t. Jude saw the girl with long dark hair at the centre of a giggling bunch of youngsters.
Given the crowd, she was glad she’d suggested setting up a drink for Andy Constant. One trip to the bar took long enough. As she eased her way through the crowd with a Chardonnay and a pint of Stella, she found herself face to face with Ewan and Hamish Urquhart, both dressed in Drizabone coats over their corduroy.
“Ah, Jude, isn’t it? I thought I saw you in there. So, what did you think of my little Sophia, eh?”
“I thought there was a lot of talent there,” she said tactfully.
“Yes. Bloody stupid thing for a girl to do, though, isn’t it? No security in acting. Hope she’ll see the light soon and start doing something sensible. Mind you,” he couldn’t help saying, with a father’s pride, “she is rather gifted, and she’s pretty enough to make a go of it.”
“Let’s hope so. Her singing is really excellent.” No need to say anything about the acting.
“Yes. Hamish, you get them in, will you?” Ewan Urquhart’s son obediently scuttled into the mêlée around the bar. “No, she’s a good little singer, my Soph. You can catch her singing in here most Friday nights.”
“Really?”
He pointed to a poster pinned on to a board nearby. It had been printed up on a home computer by someone who had only just discovered how many fonts and colours it was possible to use, and advertised ‘MAGIC DRAGON, Clincham Uni’s Number One Folk⁄Rock Band’. A rather smudged photograph showed a longhaired figure who was recognizably Sophia Urquhart fronting two guitarists and a fiddler.
“Obviously they’re not doing it tonight because of the show. But most other Fridays during term-time you’ll find her in here singing her little heart out.”
“I must try and catch them one day. As I say, she has got an exceptional voice.”
“Yes.” Ewan Urquhart agreed in a voice that mixed pride with scepticism. “Trouble is, if she goes into that kind of business – singing, acting – God knows what kind of riff-raff she’s going to mix with. Funny lot, actors, aren’t they?”
“Some of them. So there isn’t any showbiz in your family?”
“Good God, no. I went to Charterhouse, spent all my time doing sport. No time for bloody acting.” Ewan Urquhart seemed to need to shoehorn his status as an Old Carthusian into every conversation.
“I thought maybe Sophia’s mother…”
“Sophia’s mother and I parted company some years ago,” he responded with some asperity. “And if you’re wondering whether Sophia got her acting or singing talent from that source, let me tell you my ex-wife had no talent of any description.”