The Play

My first story - so I have a certain affection for it despite the rather clunking allegory. I had the original idea in 1989 but despite several years of thinking and revising, I was never totally satisfied with it. But that's writing I suppose.

 

In a pub near London's theatreland, the narrator is approached by a casting director about taking a walk-on part in a play that same night . . .

 

 

It was last November, an evening after work. I was alone in a pub off Trafalgar Square and had just finished eating when a man and woman I had never met before joined me at my table. The man introduced himself as the casting director in a nearby theatre before making a rather unusual request:

 

"Would you like to do a walk-on part in a play for us tonight? You're just right for it!"

 

I stared at him. "Er . . . I've never done any acting before."

 

"No experience is necessary." He spoke softly and precisely, with an unplaceable accent.

 

"Is this a joke?"

 

The casting director assured me he was sincere. But I'd had a long day at work and didn't want to be bothered. "Like I said, I haven't done any acting before. My body language would be all wrong, even for a walk-on part. What if I got stage fright . . . " I shrugged, appealing to the woman. What a beautiful creature she was: smooth olive complexion, flawless oval face, tumbling black curls, rich brown eyes. It was the face of the life that I wanted, and there it was, daring me to prove myself worthy of its company. I turned back to the casting director, embarrassed by my desire.

 

"Well, I suppose it would be OK . . . When does the play start?"

 

"It's already started," answered the casting director.

 

"What! You're cutting it a bit fine! So do we have to go now?"

 

"There's no rush," he advised calmly. "Finish your drink; then we'll find a taxi."

 

"So why didn't you offer the part to one of your staff? Wouldn't they jump at the chance to do some acting?"

 

"We're all busy out on the streets looking for people like you."

 

"You're filling other parts this way?!"

 

"All of them."

 

"All of them! There are no actual actors in this play? But how can you be sure people off the street will do what they're supposed to when they're on stage?"

 

"We don't suppose anything."

 

"But isn't there a script or something? Don't you need to convince the audience? I can't understand why you don't need a proper cast - trained and rehearsed to be, I don't know, believable - lifelike - on stage."

 

"They are lifelike," answered the casting director with subtle emphasis. "Our actors are fully alive to every detail in their performance."

 

"But I'm talking about the audience. It's for their benefit you put plays on, isn't it?"

 

"Some actors believe that, others the opposite, and who's to say they might both be wrong."

 

"So why do you think people pay to come and see this play?"

 

"I'm afraid I know nothing about audiences. I've never even seen one - the auditorium is always dark while I'm at work."

 

"OK," I sighed, "let me put it like this: what do you think you achieve by staging a play with a cast brought in off the street?"

 

The casting director reflected for a moment. "I wondered about it myself once," he admitted. "Eventually I realised it was unfair to ask. Why single out a play, or a theatre, and expect it, alone, to justify itself? As far as I'm concerned, it's enough that we're still running."

 

By now, I deeply regretted having accepted the part. I could've got up and left, but it's always been very difficult for me to go back on my word. Pride I suppose, or a belief in what used to be called 'character.' And then there was the woman. I couldn't stand her watch me run away because I knew that whatever she saw in me at that moment would live with me for the rest of my life.

 

"How many people have you talked to about this part, then?" I asked the casting director mechanically.

 

"Only yourself."

 

Only me! I had made it so easy for them. At that moment, a group of excited theatregoers came into the pub and began to drift chaotically to the bar. I wondered if they would be among my audience. I imagined going up them, explaining how I'd been recruited, try and get them on my side. I wish she'd say something, I heard myself think as I became aware of the woman again, scrutinising me from across the table. I thought of asking her something directly, like 'what's your role in all this?' To entice suckers no doubt.

 

I emptied my glass: "Well, I'm ready. Should we go now?"

 

"We can do," the casting director replied.

 

But the pair of them sat immobile. Only when I finally got up and moved to the door did they follow. And on the pavement outside, they turned toward me and stood motionless, as if waiting for my next move.

 

"What now?" I asked sharply.

 

"We get a taxi."

 

I noticed a cab turning into the street. It drew closer with a low growl. My companions casually turned their heads, as if merely curious about the noise. I expected they would make as if to flag it down. But they just stood there. The casting director was looking at me. "What?!" I hissed, as if hurling a stone at him. But he answered with an empty silence: my stone had found only a ghost.

 

By now, the cab was about to pass. I raised my arm in surrender. The driver saw this belated signal just in time, and brought the cab to a brisk halt. Once the three of us were aboard, the cab turned toward the Strand. The casting director muttered a few words to the driver. I braced myself as the taxi swung round a corner. I was ashamed of my outburst, but even more offended by the casual indifference of the casting director. So I was not in any mood to apologise. I was sure the woman despised me for losing my cool, but it was too late to repair that damage now.

 

"So what if I make a mess of it?" I asked provocatively. "You don't want your audience queueing up at the box office afterwards asking for their money back."

 

"You are the only audience you need concern yourself with," said the casting director. "If it bothers you, don't look into the auditorium."

 

"But I can still hear them. Perhaps you should tell me what sort of play it is. Even a walk-on part has to be done in the right spirit somehow? So how am I supposed to be?"

 

"There isn't much I can tell you. My own knowledge of the play is imperfect. I don't know whether it has the overarching unity you seem to want. And I'm not aware that it sets out with a particular message . . . "

 

"So it's all totally meaningless then?"

 

"Not at all. The play may have no message. But actors infer their own meanings, and infuse their performances with them. So it wouldn't be right to say it is meaningless. In fact, there are probably too many meanings."

 

"OK," I persisted wearily with the casting director. "When we met, you said I was 'just right' for this part. What was it about me you had in mind?"

 

"I think you misinterpreted our offer. It wasn't meant to imply that you were unusually suited for the part, simply that you were as right for it as anyone else."

 

"So why did you pick on me then?"

 

"I think we noticed one of your feet beating time while you were eating. A regular beat too, even though there was no music. You probably didn't know what your feet were doing: no one ever does. But from the other side of the room it was quite distracting."

 

"So if somebody had been . . . I don't know, coughing loudly, or wearing a yellow suit, you would have asked him instead?"

 

"I really can't say . . . "

 

"Anyway," I interrupted, "it's obvious you misled me. If I'd known you didn't need me particularly, I wouldn't have gone along with you. As you well knew, no doubt."

 

"If you were misled, it was in your assuming we had some agenda."

 

At that moment, the cab entered a dark alleyway with huge windowless walls on each side. A short way along, light shone brightly from an open door. The cab pulled up. Evidently, we had arrived.

 

"But I'm here under false pretences!" I saw an opportunity to walk away, and as I stepped out of the cab, I felt I was about to announce a change of heart. But I said nothing. The open door in front of me had some magnetic fascination, and in a flash, I found I had passed through.

 

* * *

 

Pointedly disregarding the casting director and his companion, I followed a series of windowless corridors with walls of white-painted brick and lit by regularly-spaced lozenge-shaped lamps. I met no one. I suppose it was because the wings at stage-right were deserted too that, without thinking, I continued beyond the screen. I was dull with shock when I realised where I was.

 

The set was drenched with fiery white light, but seemed puny beside the vast curtain of darkness which concealed the audience. I have no memory of any scenery. As to props, all I can remember were three identical steel-frame tables and a large number of matching steel-frame chairs strewn about. I stood there for a moment, stunned. This was it. I wasn't going to speak - that I had already decided. What to do then? But immediately, it came to me: I would tidy up the chairs, placing them in rows, seat down, on the tables.

 

I think I should explain at this point that when I was at primary school, I had to stay a bit later than the other kids because my Mum worked. (That was unusual in those days - where I lived anyway.) Because of this, I suppose it was the obvious thing, when the teachers were apportioning responsibilities to the more reticent pupils, to make me 'chair monitor.' Every afternoon, as the other pupils ran out to meet their Mums, I went round the class lifting up the little chairs and placing them seat down on the knee-high tables we'd clustered around during the day with our pencils, rubbers and workbooks. It was to help the cleaners, the teachers said. At the start, the role of chair monitor felt a very onerous one, and I performed my duties reluctantly. But as time went on I got used to it, didn't mind it, because I knew that, when I was done, my Mum would be waiting for me by the school door. And she always was.

 

So that's what I did on stage that night. I lifted my first chair, turned it deftly, and holding the prongs at the back, brought it gently to rest upside down on the nearest table. Satisfied with this, I lifted a second chair away, and a third. It required a degree of concentration - if I wanted to avoid jarring clangs and scrapes - that kept my mind occupied. When I saw how well it was all going, I almost choked with quiet gratitude, savouring the artful precision of my performance as I found just enough space to fit one more chair on the first table. Perfect! And so I began on the next table.

 

If I was unnerved by anything, it was the silence in the auditorium. I had expected a few coughs, some murmuring, people shifting in their seats. But there was nothing, just the lights buzzing. Was I playing to an empty house?

 

Once I had filled the third and last table with chairs, I was left with a single chair. Not knowing what else to do, I came to see this as a puzzle, a challenge. Inside, I felt a familiar anxious sensation coalescing. I had to do something. I decided there was still room on the first table; all I had to do was pack the chairs a bit more tightly. I pushed one of them along the tabletop, increasing the pressure as it came up against the others. It was noisier than I would have liked, but I soon cleared enough space to take the final chair.

 

There was a deafening crash: a chair had fallen off the other end of the table! My ears burned as the noise echoed through the invisible spaces beyond the stage. I stared helplessly at the fallen chair. The silent auditorium suddenly felt coldly hostile; the bleaching glare of the stagelights seemed intensely more penetrating, leaving not a trace of shadow anywhere on stage.

 

Without my noticing, a tall man entered from stage-right. "Aren't you finished yet?" he boomed. I turned, startled, to find him staring at me as if he expected a response! Of its own accord, my mouth emitted a weak and rather hesitant "No."

 

"Never mind, that's enough," snapped the man brusquely. "You'll have to go now." It was a harsh dismissal, put in undoubtedly for dramatic effect. Yet it did not slide harmlessly over me but seemed to cut through to my heart. I withdrew to stage-left with my head lowered. It was over, but I felt no relief.

 

* * *

 

I was surprised to find the wings empty. Then the stagelights were switched off. I was left inside a circle of gloom around a faint wall-light. As if the darkness which had watched my performance from the stalls had leapt onto the stage and was now peering at me through the screen. I assumed the play had reached a night-time scene. But I heard nothing of it.

 

I tiptoed to a wooden stool under the wall-light. There I reflected on my performance a few times; it had been dreadful, and with no redeeming features to cling to, my thoughts gathered instead around the fact that I was still waiting.

 

Where the hell is that casting director?! I checked my watch. Five or ten minutes had passed. There had been no trace of activity on stage or in the auditorium. Had the play finished? But I had seen no one, heard no applause. And it was starting to gnaw at me that I had not been paid for my efforts. I hadn't wanted to bring up the question of money myself, and frankly if it had all gone well, I wouldn't have been that bothered about it. But it hadn't gone well, and I resented the casting director for not preparing me better, for not being there afterwards to thank me at least.

 

I got up intending to go and look for him. There was no exit behind the backdrop. But I found a flight of stairs leading below stage. For a minute I hesitated, but eventually I grabbed the handrail and went down.

 

At the bottom, there was a second door. I pushed it open slowly and found myself in a brightly-lit corridor of the familiar white-painted brick. But I quickly found myself at a dead end. I tried one of the doors which lined the passageway. It gave onto a lighted, but empty, room. Within, I found another door, bringing me to a second corridor, identical to the first.

 

"I really don't need this," I exhaled, sighing deeply, my breath condensing as a ghostly cloud in front of me. I tried every door in the corridor. I don't know why, because whenever one opened, I did not go through it, but simply moved along to the next. Finally, I turned a corner, and noticed a large sheet-metal door marked 'Fire Exit.' Relief washed through me: I would leave the building, go round to the main entrance, introduce myself to someone and ask for the casting director!

 

I pressed hard on the iron bar across the firedoor and pushed. With a nauseous scraping, I was delivered to a small dimly-lit yard which seemed like the bottom of an enormous pit, its vast encircling walls disappearing upwards into the gold-tinged black of the city sky. The door retreated slowly and had jammed shut again before I reached the tall strip of darkness which signalled an alleyway.

 

I guided myself slowly through the alley and reached a small square from which ran three narrow lanes. Minutes later, I was lost among deserted backstreets twisting their way, confused and cowering, between dark, sleeping walls of brick. More by persistence than skill, I came eventually to a wider, busier street where all the light and noise and people were quite disorienting at first. I went into a shop and asked if there was a theatre nearby.

 

"Many theatres near," said the man behind the till in an abridged English. I bought the current issue of a weekly theatre guide and in a cafe studied it for clues. I assumed the casting director would have told me the name of his theatre when he introduced himself, but it hadn't stuck, none of those listed in the guide seemed familiar, and none of the plays it described sounded like what I had taken part in.

 

I left the cafe intending to continue my search, but unsure what I was looking for, or in which direction to start. So when I passed an underground station, I gave up. I turned, went down the escalators, and rejoined the London I knew. But it wasn't over: every step I took toward my bedsit felt like a betrayal.

 

* * *

 

The following evening, I returned to the pub where we had met and waited for the casting director. I got there about 6 and stayed till well after 9, watching with anticipation every approaching silhouette in the frosted glass of the main door. But I did not really expect him to appear, and he never did. The woman behind the bar confirmed she had been working the previous night, but did not remember me, the casting director or his striking companion, and only gave me a pitying grin when she heard my story.

 

In the subsequent weeks I developed the encyclopedic knowledge of London's theatreland I now have as I walked miles in the hope of retracing my steps of that evening. But it might as well have been in another city on the opposite side of the world. Some people told me I'd been mad to go along with the casting director in the first place: I might have been robbed or worse, or taken like a patsy to some crime scene. (I did actually go to the police station at Charing Cross the following week, but the bemused desk officer told me there was nothing he could do unless I was prepared to report a crime.) Others thought the casting director might have confused me with someone else and taken me to a rendezvous only to abandon me when it transpired he had got the wrong man. Still others said it had been a prank, and one of my colleagues wondered if it had been a 'happening.'

 

"A happening?" I asked.

 

"Yeah, like in the sixties," she replied. "They used to do stunts like that. Put on plays where the audience would get involved and it would change the whole course of the story. So like the audience would become the cast and the cast would become the audience. I think they were making some point about art and reality."

 

"Did everyone know what their roles were?"

 

"I don't know. I'm sure some of them would've tried to confuse people about whether they were cast or audience. It might've made more sense, considering what they were trying to do. So long as there was a director, or someone outside it all somehow, to watch and record what happened . . .  I'm wondering, maybe they were filming you that night!"

 

"That's a horrible thought," I shuddered. "Awful . . . is it the Australian Aborigines who say that, if you photograph them, you steal a part of their soul? Well that's exactly what I'm feeling right now . . . "

 

"I wouldn't worry," my colleague tried to reassure me. "Doesn't sound like anything you did was illegal or, you know, compromising . . . "

 

"Yeah, but . . .  It's just that, if there is a film, I'd like to see it. In fact, I think I have a right to see it. Not just my bit. The whole thing. So I know what it was all about, in the end."

 

* * *

 

Though my mind still returned to it occasionally, my acting debut had been receding from me until this evening, becoming ever more deeply buried under the conversations, sensations, reflections and exertions of one day after another. Then, just twenty minutes ago, sitting on an underground train, there was a tap on my shoulder. I looked up to find a lean white-haired man standing over me.

 

"Ugh?" I started.

 

"You don't you remember me then?" he grinned.

 

"Er . . . "

 

"Last year, 18th of December: a Friday night it was."

 

"Er . . . I think you're maybe mixing me up with somebody else?"

 

"I don't think so. You got me to do a walk-on part, remember? Just thought I'd tell you how I got on . . . "

 

"Wait, is this another joke? I mean, what are you saying? Someone came up and asked you to take a part in a play?"

 

"Yes, you did. Or your twin! I'll understand if you have to deny it. Casting directors who do their work the way you do have to stay anonymous. You've got to keep that element of surprise!"

 

"No, this is the wrong way round . . .  The same thing happened to me . . .  Are you in on some joke here? Is this a performance now? Is someone filming?" I looked up, to see all the other heads in the carriage firmly switched away from me - toward books, papers, or into space.

 

"It's OK, it's OK," he reassured me with ludicrous familiarity. "But did you ever wonder how I got on that night? Do you remember me saying I'd tell your audience about my boss, swear like mad, really slander the bastard. I mean, how would they know what was proper lines and what wasn't? I might've got good reviews! That'd have been a laugh - except for him! Then I thought, no! I'm not going to hide it in a play! He'll get it face to face and all that. So do you know what I did?"

 

" . . . "

 

"I sat down," the man continued oblivious, "closed my eyes and fell asleep! Didn't take long - we'd had our Christmas Party that afternoon, loads of wine . . . "

 

"You fell asleep on stage!"

 

"Thought that'd get you! Don't even know how long I dozed for. When I woke up, I just went off stage and walked out the way we'd come in! Your audience would've been baffled, I'm sure! Never heard 'em, mind - they were probably in shock!"

 

"Do you remember where the theatre was?"

 

"No idea. Why, how many do you work for?"

 

"Look, I know you think you recognise me. But I'm not him!" I found myself trying to recall the 18th of December. "I can't prove it to you, but really, you've got the wrong man."

 

"Course I have," he grinned again. I was repelled by him, his loud voice, his presumptuous matiness, his shameless self-satisfaction. The train was full of people, and I imagined they were listening to us, amused no doubt, like we were a comedy duo - me essential to him, him the essence of me. Pointedly, I turned to face the window. The man finally slank away, sitting a short distance across the aisle.

 

I fix my attention on the semitone rises and falls of the dirt-painted cables as they flow by, each bar denoted by clasps on the tunnel walls.  . . . The man wouldn't have taken it personally, I reflect. He is much too full of himself for that. I have only been honest with him.

 

"I have to change here," I mumble in his general direction, rising from my seat as the train starts to decelerate. Usually, I stay on the train at this point and change further up the line, but I've decided against that tonight.

 

"Till we meet again then!" he laughs. Like I thought, totally unruffled.

 

My feet are like lead weights as I step onto the platform. I can't quite walk away. So I just stand there and watch as the doors close and the train pulls off. I see the man briefly. He is staring into the window on the far side of the carriage. Then with a blue flash the train is swallowed by the curving black tunnel ahead. I listen to the knocking rumble as it fades then merges into the sound of an invisible train arriving on another platform somewhere out beyond the walls.