‘I can’t quite see myself on a stage playing some part.’ The very idea made Jonas laugh.
‘Don’t say that, lad.’ Gabriel was vehement now, brandishing his cigarette like a conductor’s baton. ‘Every one of us invents and plays as many different parts in our daily lives as we need in order to be taken seriously. Just look at yourself. I mean, it’s ridiculous to think that each person should be stuck with just one persona.’
‘I’m not with you.’
‘What I’m saying is that every human being has many sides to their character,’ said Gabriel. ‘See, any one of us could go off our heads at any time, it just so happens that, for some reason, we don’t.’ Gabriel squinted at Jonas with his two mismatched eyes. ‘I’ll never forget my dear friend Niels Bohr,’ he went on as if something vital had just occurred to him. ‘A man of vision who gave one of the most momentous speeches of the twentieth century, at a physicists’ congress in Como, in ’27 that must have been, in which he introduced the world to the theory of complementarity, working from the basic principle that light appears to exist both in particle and in wave form. So don’t you ever forget, Jonas, that there’s more than one side to a human being; just like light, we contain the potential for both particles and waves. At the very least. Imagine the possibilities! All you have to do is take your pick. So: be an actor!’
Out in the galley, some pickle jars chinked together as a couple of waves — one might almost think Gabriel had ordered them up specially — caused the boat to roll a little more than usual, but neither of them turned a hair. In an act of sheer genius Fridtjof Nansen had once let his boat drift with the ice. Now it was Gabriel’s boat that was drifting, although this was far from being part of some grand plan but an act of sabotage. The boat drifted on, without the two on board, snug and warm down below in the saloon, noticing a thing. They had no idea that they would soon be right out in the middle of the shipping lane and even less idea that the Skipper Clement, more like a small town than a ferry, was heading straight for them.
Gabriel was no longer in the theatre, but he could look back on what had been a remarkable career. After leaving school he had followed his English mother when she moved back to London, where he soon found himself caught up in the theatrical scene, and it was here, among other things, that he formed a firm friendship with the actor John Gielgud, who was the same age as himself. More than once Gabriel had described Gielgud’s inimitable interpretation of Hamlet — not the much-vaunted production at the New Theatre in 1934 but the one staged in 1930 at the Old Vic, the best Hamlet ever, according to Gabriel, making Jonas laugh with his imitation of Gielgud’s way of speaking, in which ‘Words, words, words,’ came out as ‘Wirds, wirds, wirds.’
Every person has their own quintessential story, one which says more about who they are than any other. Gabriel Sand’s was a classic story, albeit with the odd twist or two; in the early twenties John Gielgud had persuaded him to take part in a production of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet to be staged at a little theatre near King’s Cross — the competition for parts was fierce, but even so, after only one audition, Gabriel was signed up.
Just for the fun of it, and to show Jonas that he could still remember it, Gabriel did the first half of the balcony scene for him, taking both Romeo’s and Juliet’s parts; he played it any number of different ways, to show what a wealth of techniques an actor has at his disposaclass="underline" everything from diction and tempo to pauses and posing. For Jonas, it was a bit like when his father played the organ and showed him how he could make a tune sound different by switching to a different register. One version Gabriel did as a parody so outrageous that it put Jonas in mind of Norwegian actors, those few he had seen.
Gabriel stood on the deck with a bookshelf at his back and a paraffin lamp as his only spotlight and truly became another person, or rather a whole host of other people, and even in his antiquated suit and without a single prop he was Juliet, to the life, and then, in the warm light that glinted softly off his gold tooth and the watch-chain draped across his stomach, he suddenly played the balcony scene in a way which left Jonas convinced that Romeo and Juliet wanted to die and, thereafter, by dint of only a few minor alterations, forced Jonas to change his mind completely and believe that it was all down to the hand of fate. More than just about anything else, what he admired was Gabriel’s beautiful English; it was perfect, spoken like a true native. Jonas never witnessed better theatre than in the saloon of an old lifeboat, on a stage that reeked of tar and whisky, birch logs and Camel cigarettes.
In the London production Gabriel had played, not Romeo, but his friend Mercutio. To cut a long story short, the cause of all the drama — off-stage, that is — was that Gabriel, by all accounts an incorrigible satyr, had seduced and bedded the girlfriend of one of the other actors, something he had not given a second thought, such goings-on being not exactly unknown in those circles. In any case the rehearsals went smoothly, with no confrontation of any sort. But his injured fellow-actor, who, as luck would have it, was playing the part of ‘the furious Tybalt’ and, as such, his adversary in the play as well, had other plans.
‘I knew on the first night that something was wrong,’ said Gabriel. ‘Bloke had this really crazy look in his eyes. And at the beginning of the third act, in the sword fight that breaks out between Mercutio and Tybalt, where Mercutio is meant, right enough, to be mortally wounded, I suddenly realized that this man really was out to kill me, right there on the stage: that way he could get away with saying that it had been a regrettable accident. Oh, you should have been there! He fenced like a madman, using a needle-sharp rapier — no foil. I had to use every trick I knew to fight him off. And the audience — well, of course, they were thrilled, shouting “Bravo, bravo!” They’d never seen such a fierce or realistic swordfight. After the performance John Gielgud told me he’d only ever seen one man fence better than me, a young actor by the name of Laurence Olivier.’
The fight had grown more and more frenzied, with his opponent becoming ever more frantic in his efforts to deal Gabriel the coup de grace — a truly fatal blow, that is. Gabriel was at his wit’s end by the time Gielgud, who was playing Romeo, decided, thank heavens, that the fight had gone on long enough and stepped in, as he was supposed to do in any case in the play, to stop them. This allowed Gabriel to stagger back and die, without actually being fatally wounded. It was as he was about to deliver his final lines, beginning with ‘Ay, ay, a scratch, a scratch,’ that he realized that Tybalt, his adversary that is, the boyfriend of the woman he had seduced, had nonetheless managed to deal him a rather nasty wound over one eye, drawing blood — to the delight of the audience who assumed that this was merely a splendidly lifelike stage effect.
It was at this point that Gabriel had his threefold revelation: Firstly, he saw quite clearly how he, Mercutio, constituted the very nub of the play — and later in life, this perception would lead to his bringing a fresh motivation to every part he played, inasmuch as he worked from the premise that the entire play centred on that one part, no matter how small the part might be.
Secondly and more significantly, Gabriel gained a fresh insight into the chain of cause and effect: it suddenly dawned on him that he had not slept with that woman because he was attracted to her but in order to avenge the cut to his eye. As if the latter had come first.
And finally, perhaps even more importantly: as Gabriel is about to deliver the line about his hurt being neither so deep as a well, nor so wide as a church-door; but ’tis enough, ’twill serve — just as he says these words he sees something down in the auditorium which makes him think that that cut must also have opened a flap in his consciousness, created a new aperture into his inner self, because down in the auditorium he sees hundreds of people all with his own face, just dressed differently, and this leads him, with a sort of existential Eureka! to the realization that he is manifold, that he contains a multitude of different personas within himself — all at once.