‘You have to look at the blade,’ Sky said.
I did as she suggested and saw four words engraved in the metaclass="underline" Is this a dagger …?
‘He did Macbeth last year,’ she went on in a matter-of-fact way. I was surprised that, unlike most actors, she wasn’t superstitious about naming what most of them would call ‘the Scottish play’. It reinforced my impression that she wasn’t completely committed to the acting world. ‘He put it on in the ruins of a castle in Yorkshire, but it didn’t last very long. It poured with rain for the first three performances, Banquo slipped over in the mud, and it closed at the end of the week. He had these made for the cast.’
‘And he’s giving the ones that were left over to us?’
‘That’s right. I’ve got mine in my dressing room. I don’t know what I’m going to do with it.’
‘Well,’ I tried, ‘I suppose it’s the thought that counts.’
‘Yes. He thought we wouldn’t notice he’s a complete cheapskate.’
We signed our names and added the time in the register that was kept in the corridor, then went through the swing doors and past the first dressing room. Jordan Williams came out and laughed when he saw me with water trickling down my face. Unlike Sky, I hadn’t had an umbrella.
‘You look like a drowned rat!’ he exclaimed, enunciating every word as if they’d been rehearsed. He handed me a towel. At the same time, he noticed the knife. ‘I see you’ve picked up your opening-night prezzie.’ He produced his own and waved it at me. ‘Touché’. He was evidently in a good mood. As far as he was concerned, the performance had gone well and he’d already had plenty to drink. ‘Shall we go down?’
The Vaudeville is unusual among London’s Victorian theatres in that it has a green room where the actors can meet and relax. We went down the stairs and along the corridor to a door that opened into a small, square space where Ewan and Tirian were already waiting for us. As promised, Tirian had opened a bottle of Scotch. He was sitting at a table with a half-filled glass in front of him and a backpack resting against his chair. Sky had popped into her dressing room, which was next door, and returned with a bottle of vodka and a chocolate cake – both of them gifts from friends. Jordan, in the dressing gown that he always wore between performances and still holding his dagger, threw himself into an armchair with his leg lolling over one side. Ewan poured him a glass of whisky, spilling a few drops onto the carpet and adding to the stains from a hundred first nights, a liquid history of the Vaudeville. The room would have been shabby in any other context but here it seemed homely, with a battered table, chairs and a worn-out sofa. There was a sink on one side and an old fridge. The rain was hammering at the window, but inside it was warm and cosy, with a two-bar heater turned on full and a CD of Noel Coward playing in the background. Everyone was relaxed. Even Jordan and Tirian seemed at ease with one another.
When I look back on the London production of Mindgame, I think this was my only truly happy night. It represented the brief interval between believing that the play might have succeeded and knowing that it hadn’t. For that one hour in the green room, I was part of the company and during that time all the tension and the hostility that had accompanied the rehearsal process evaporated – as if we had accepted that whatever happened, we were all in this together. We had given it our best shot. We might as well get drunk and enjoy ourselves. We talked. We laughed. We retold some of the stories from rehearsals and the road. Tirian did an imitation of Ewan that actually caught him remarkably well. Jordan used his Scottish dagger to cut slices of cake.
At about half past eleven, Ahmet turned up with two bottles of Turkish champagne and – no surprise – Maureen accompanied him. She had dressed very smartly for the first night. Along with the fur and the jewellery, she’d had her hair permed so ferociously that it looked like one of those balls of wire you use to scrub pans. Ahmet was in an ebullient mood, smoking a foul-smelling cigarette even though it wasn’t allowed backstage. He had come from the party with compliments ringing in his ears. He was certain the play was a success and grabbed me with both hands.
‘You are a genius!’ he exclaimed. ‘A great genius!’ He sounded almost relieved. As if he had never believed it until now.
Everyone picked up their glasses and drank a toast to me. By now we’d all had too much to drink.
It couldn’t last long. And it didn’t.
It was at exactly twelve o’clock midnight when Sky suddenly looked up from her phone.
‘There’s a review online!’ she exclaimed.
‘That’s a bit early,’ Ewan said. He didn’t look pleased. ‘Who’s it by?’
‘Harriet Throsby.’ She gazed at the screen and we all saw the look that came over her face. ‘I can’t read this,’ she said, in a low voice.
‘Let’s see it.’ Tirian snatched the phone from her and laid it on the table. We all crowded round. This is what we read:
MINDGAME AT THE VAUDEVILLE
by Harriet Throsby
Is there any torment greater than the comedy thriller that is neither comedic nor thrilling? It’s so easy to fall between the two stools … and what you might call a theatrical stool, in quite another sense, will inevitably result. That, I’m afraid, is what Anthony Horowitz provides at the Vaudeville Theatre. Known for his Alex Rider series of books, which, to be fair, have encouraged a generation of boys to read, his talents fall lamentably short of what is required for an entertaining evening in the more adult arena of the West End and he must take much of the blame for what ensues. Having said that, I have to ask what it was that drew so much talent to this painful farrago.
We can dispense with the story fairly quickly. A journalist, Mark Styler (Tirian Kirke), arrives at a lunatic asylum to interview one of the inmates, a serial killer by the name of Easterman. But first he has to persuade the asylum’s director, Dr Farquhar (Jordan Williams), to allow him access. We quickly realise that things are not as they should be. Why is there a skeleton in Dr Farquhar’s office? What are the strange screams coming from B Wing? Why is Nurse Plimpton (Sky Palmer) terrified?
The lunatics have taken over the asylum, that’s why. Nothing is what it seems, and as the identities of the main players are shuffled around like playing cards before a particularly feeble magic trick, even the set joins in. A door opens into a cupboard one minute and into a corridor the next. A picture on the wall changes slowly. It may be that these special effects are meant to say something about madness and sanity, about how we can’t trust our perception. But sadly, the production has been so cheaply mounted that they aren’t very special at all and tell us only that we should have gone somewhere else.
As the play continues, the gratuitous violence mounts. It turns out that Easterman, the killer, is free and in control of the action … which becomes ever more distasteful as Nurse Plimpton is tied to a chair and threatened with immolation. By this point, I myself was tempted to punch an usher and make a break for the exit. The casual use of a woman as a would-be victim of male-inflicted aggression is particularly displeasing. Sky Palmer is a talented actress who struggles with a part that demeans and devalues her at every turn. By contrast, Jordan Williams seems to be having a good time as Dr Farquhar, but has failed to notice that nobody else is. Mr Williams is becoming increasingly grandiloquent with age and gives the impression that he is only performing to entertain himself. In this, he may well be right. One really must wonder how many more bad career choices he can make before he realises that he no longer has a choice or, indeed, a career.
Most disappointing for me is Tirian Kirke, whom I recognised from the first time I saw him as one of the most promising actors of his generation. It’s a promise broken. His performance is quite childish and, surprisingly, he is completely unconvincing when things turn violent. Kirke was so very good in Line of Duty on TV, but has failed to make a successful debut on the stage. He has been poorly assisted by Ewan Lloyd, who seems to be directing on autopilot. In his hands, the play never really catches fire, limping to a conclusion I had guessed long before the interval.