LAST NIGHT

Saturday September 5th 7.45pm. It is the last night of ‘Art.’ I am in the dressing room, fiddling with make-up. Fifteen short minutes to curtain. K, a very beautiful eighteen year old who is helping with the props, thinks I use too much. You don’t need any, she chides. Still, I persist.

Beside me, L, an experienced actor who has appeared on the London stage produces an ultra-professional make-up kit, packaged in webbing. I just have to delve in the theatre’s plastic box whose contents are a hopeless jumble; most of this stuff is years old. I’m the only one who dares use it. Except the powder perhaps.

In the show L plays my friend, Serge. I fuss for something to darken my eyebrows. A pencil is nowhere to be found. I haven’t the courage to ask L. So I have to make do with some dark eye-shadow. I manage, just, to avoid looking like a pirate. K snorts her disgust.

I don a dark French blazer - this is a French play after all - Pierre Cardin - and found in a bric à brac shop in St Brieuc twenty-five years ago. I suspect it dates from the sixties. Anyway it has gilt buttons. I put a red spotted handkerchief in the top pocket. It reminds me for some reason of Peter Rabbit and therefore of luck. I straighten myself up, dust down the blazer and tuck my impossible hair behind my ears, all the while creeping slowly into my smug and supercilious character, who for some reason carries a raincoat.

The stage manager’s call comes. I take the raincoat from its peg. A last look in the mirror and then I am drawing the bolts on the back dressing room door, for I have to enter via the auditorium. They are stiff and I have a momentary panic that I shall still be there, unable to open the door, long after the show has started. But suddenly the door is open.

Outside all is deserted. I creep into the empty foyer, patiently watching through a chink for the house lights to go down. I can hear the Chairman’s voice making announcements - “unlike most theatres we encourage you to use your mobile phones during the performance, but please note we charge a £50 fee if you choose to do so.” A titter of laughter.

The laughter subsides, the opening music starts, the house lights dim. I slip into the darkness, looking towards the blackness of the vacant stage, repeating under my breath the word ‘brush,’ which is supposed to compose the features. Routine! Carrying my raincoat I begin to walk up the aisle.

The music fades, the stage lights go up. Now, I am climbing the steps to the stage. A curious feeling this arriving on stage - a private feeling. Of being completely in command. As of entering a railway carriage. All the time in the world.

I hang the raincoat over a chair and out of the corner of the eye catch the red spot stuck to the stage. Stand upon it and the 650w white spot fifteen feet away catches you right between the eyes. I stand just to the side, glancing at the audience. Even so, the spot bores into me, making everything I see black. I can just make out a few shapes, a few faces. Deep breath:

“My friend Serge has bought a painting....
It’s a canvas, about five foot by four, white.
The background is white and if you screw up your eyes you can make out some fine white diagonal lines.
Serge is one of my oldest friends.........”

I am conscious that, somewhere behind me, L has come on and is busy removing the cover from the white painting. I finish my speech and he looks at me in expectation. I look at him and at the painting - forward, backward, chin in hand, scratch the head, pull glasses out of blazer, examine something minutely, turn away, pause: ‘Expensive?’ I ask.

We are off. The lines flow and with them the action, the emotion. On the last night I am always conscious that this is really a ‘last’ - the last time I shall say these lines. I have a mental vision of tearing up the script as I go along. Like that sad, sad film of the Germans retreating from the Russian steppes in a train that draws behind it a great hook that tears up the sleepers in its wake.

One scene flows into another. On stage we are, in more ways than one, in another world. Gone is the normal flotsam and jetsam of the mind hovering around just above or below the level of consciousness; the day to day concerns of work, life, love, money, ageing; out go the infirmities, the pains, the tiredness, the stress of everyday living. On stage one is just a character without a background, uncrippled by age or guilt or a thousand of life’s problems. Play characters are like new born babes - sans baggage. Acting is like sleep, I suppose, or perhaps a dream.

I have the first speech in this play and also the last.

“My friend Serge has bought a painting
It’s a canvas about five feet by four
It represents a man who moves across a space
And disappears.”

The applause clatters away. We line up. Bow, once, twice, thrice and then peel off into the wings and into the dressing room. And soon I am quite alone there. For reasons quite unknown to medical science I am pathologically unable to get changed or unchanged in the same sort of time as anyone else. If they take four minutes I will take eight or even ten. I cannot begin to understand why. The result is I am always being called and have to decant to meet my public with laces still undone and clothing never quite adjusted.

A glass of champagne awaits and armed with this I venture into the bar, where the traditional CADS Saturday night supper is in full swing. Bread, paté and cheese. And wine of course. Never was something quite so simple, quite so tasty. Or made to go so far. If the good Lord ever were to run out of loaves and fishes then paté and cheese would be an acceptable substitute to feed the five thousand.

I am congratulated by different people. The best adulation is both gross and faked. You know it is faked and they know it is faked - but nevertheless it makes you both feel good about yourselves. “Darling you were wonderful, quite wonderful. However, do you do it? All those lines? Entirely believable! Better than the performance at the New Theatre. Just fabulous.”

But something understated, a reserved smile, a pat on the back, a kiss, a ‘well-done’ also charms the soul. It’s when the adulation is not faked that you know you have problems.

Some more champagne, the Chairman congratulates everyone. The Director receives a bunch of white flowers that mimic the painting and then we pack up. The guests go, the lights turn off and I am out again in the darkness of the muddy car park. Both literally and metaphorically my feet turn to clay. Come on K, let’s get you home!