I swung back to the play just at the moment Lady Mack soliloquizes, “Come to my woman’s breasts. And take my milk for gall, you murdering ministers.” Although I knew it was just folded towel Martin was touching with his fingertips as he lifted them to the top half of his green bodice, I got carried away, he made it so real. I decided boys can play girls better than people think. Maybe they should do it a little more often, and girls play boys too.
Then Sid-Macbeth came back to his wife from the wars, looking triumphant but scared because the murder-idea’s started to smoulder in him, and she got busy fanning the blaze like any other good littlehausfrau intent on her husband rising in the company and knowing that she’s the power behind him and that when there are promotions someone’s always got to get the axe. Sid and Martin made this charming little domestic scene so natural yet gutsy too that I wanted to shout hooray. Even Sid clutching Martin to that ridiculous pot-chested cuirass didn’t have one note of horseplay in it. Their bodies spoke. It was the McCoy.
After that, the play began to get real good, the fast tempo and exaggerated facial expressions actually helping it. By the time the Dagger Scene came along I was digging my fingernails into my sweaty palms. Which was a good thing—my eating up the play, I mean—because it kept me from looking at the audience again, even taking a fast peek. As you’ve gathered, audiences bug me. All those people out there in the shadows, watching the actors in the light, all those silent voyeurs as Bruce calls them. Why, they might be anything. And sometimes (to my mind-wavery sorrow) I think they are. Maybe crouching in the dark out there, hiding among the others, is the one who did the nasty thing to me that tore off the top of my head.
Anyhow, if I so much as glance at the audience, I begin to get ideas about it—and sometimes even if I don’t, as just at this moment I thought I heard horses restlessly pawing hard ground and one whinny, though that was shut off fast. Krishna kressed us! I thought, Skiddy can’t have hired horses for Nefer-Elizabeth much as he’s a circus man at heart. We don’t have that kind of money. Besides—
But just then Sid-Macbeth gasped as if he were sucking in a bucket of air. He’d shed the cuirass, fortunately. He said, “Is this a dagger which I see before me, the handle toward my hand?” and the play hooked me again, and I had no time to think about or listen for anything else. Most of the offstage actors were on the other side of the stage, as that’s where they make their exits and entrances at this point in the Second Act. I stood alone in the wings, watching the play like a bug, frightened only of the horrors Shakespeare had in mind when he wrote it.
Yes, the play was going great. The Dagger Scene was terrific where Duncan gets murdered offstage, and so was the part afterwards where hysteria mounts as the crime’s discovered.
But just at this point I began to catch notes I didn’t like. Twice someone was late on entrance and came on as if shot from a cannon. And three times at least Sid had to throw someone a line when they blew up—in the clutches Sid’s better than any prompt book. It began to look as if the play were getting out of control, maybe because the new tempo was so hot.
* * * *
But they got through the Murder Scene okay. As they came trooping off, yelling “Well contented,” most of them on my side for a change, I went for Sid with a towel. He always sweats like a pig in the Murder Scene. I mopped his neck and shoved the towel up under his doublet to catch the dripping armpits.
Meanwhile he was fumbling around on a narrow table where they lay props and costumes for quick changes. Suddenly he dug his fingers into my shoulder, enough to catch my attention at this point, meaning I’d show bruises tomorrow, and yelled at me under his breath, “And you love me, our crows and robes. Presto!”
I was off like a flash to the costumery. There were Mr. and Mrs. Mack’s king-and-queen robes and stuff hanging and sitting just where I knew they’d have to be.
I snatched them up, thinking, Boy, they made a mistake when they didn’t tell about this special performance, and I started back like Flash Two.
As I shot out the dressing room door the theater was very quiet. There’s a short low-pitched scene on stage then, to give the audience a breather. I heard Miss Nefer say loudly (it had to be loud to get to me from even the front of the audience): “’Tis a good bloody play, Eyes,” and some voice I didn’t recognize reply a bit grudgingly, “There’s meat in it and some poetry too, though rough-wrought.” She went on, still as loudly as if she owned the theater, “’Twill make Master Kyd bite his nails with jealousy—ha, ha!”
Ha-ha yourself, you scene-stealing witch, I thought, as I helped Sid and then Martin on with their royal outer duds. But at the same time I knew Sid must have written those lines himself to go along with his prologue. They had the unmistakable rough-wrought Lessingham touch. Did he really expect the audience to make anything of that reference to Shakespeare’s predecessor Thomas Kyd of The Spanish Tragedy and the lost Hamlet? And if they knew enough to spot that, wouldn’t they be bound to realize the whole Elizabeth-Macbeth tie-up was anachronistic? But when Sid gets an inspiration he can be very bull-headed.
Just then, while Bruce-Banquo was speaking his broody low soliloquy on stage, Miss Nefer cut in again loudly with, “Aye, Eyes, a good bloody play. Yet somehow, methinks—I know not how—I’ve heard it before.” Whereupon Sid grabbed Martin by the wrist and hissed, “Did’st hear? Oh, I like not that,” and I thought, Oh-ho, so now she’s beginning to ad-lib.
Well, right away they all went on stage with a flourish, Sid and Martin crowned and hand in hand. The play got going strong again. But there were still those edge-of-control undercurrents and I began to be more uneasy than caught up, and I had to stare consciously at the actors to keep off a wavery-fit.
* * * *
Other things began to bother me too, such as all the doubling.
Macbeth’s a great play for doubling. For instance, anyone except Macbeth or Banquo can double one of the Three Witches—or one of the Three Murderers for that matter. Normally we double at least one or two of the Witches and Murderers, but this performance there’d been more multiple-parting than I’d ever seen. Doc had whipped off his Duncan beard and thrown on a brown smock and hood to play the Porter with his normal bottle-roughened accents. Well, a drunk impersonating a drunk, pretty appropriate. But Bruce was doing the next-door-to-impossible double of Banquo and Macduff, using a ringing tenor voice for the latter and wearing in the murder scene a helmet with dropped visor to hide his Banquo beard. He’d be able to tear it off, of course, after the Murderers got Banquo and he’d made his brief appearance as a bloodied-up ghost in the Banquet Scene. I asked myself, My God, has Siddy got all the other actors out in front playing courtiers to Elizabeth-Nefer? Wasting them that way? The whoreson rogue’s gone nuts!
But really it was plain frightening, all that frantic doubling and tripling with its suggestion that the play (and the company too, Freya forfend) was becoming a ricketty patchwork illusion with everybody racing around faster and faster to hide the holes. And the scenery-wavery stuff and the warped Park-sounds were scary too. I was actually shivering by the time Sid got to: “Light thickens; and the crow Makes wing to the rooky wood: Good things of day begin to droop and drowse; Whiles night’s black agents to their preys do rouse.” Those graveyard lines didn’t help my nerves any, of course. Nor did thinking I heard Nefer-Elizabeth say from the audience, rather softly for her this time, “Eyes, I have heard that speech, I know not where. Think you ’tiz stolen?”
Greta, I told myself, you need a miltown before the crow makes wing through your kooky head.
I turned to go and fetch me one from my closet. And stopped dead.
Just behind me, pacing back and forth like an ash-colored tiger in the gloomy wings, looking daggers at the audience every time she turned at that end of her invisible cage, but ignoring me completely, was Miss Nefer in the Elizabeth wig and rig.
Well, I suppose I should have said to myself, Greta, you imagined that last loud whisper from the audience. Miss Nefer’s simply unkinked herself, waved a hand to the real audience and come back stage. Maybe Sid just had her out there for the first half of the