The Planet on the Table (13 page)

The hall ended in a T and I could not remember which way to go. Acting on a dim intuition I turned right and found myself in a veritable maze of T-connections. I alternated turns, going first right, then left. One hall followed dropped several steps, then turned and became a flight of stairs, which I descended. At the bottom of this stairway were three long, dim halls, all furnished (like the stairway) with the same dark carpet, bronze wallpaper, and gas jets. I chose the right-hand one and ventured on. Just as I began to think myself inextricably lost there was a door, recessed into the right wall. I opened it and was at the back of the theater, looking across the audience to the curtain.

The audience was large, about forty or fifty people. Many times I had acted in plays which no one had come to see; in those the imaginary fourth wall had become real, and we had played for ourselves, aware only of the internal universe of the play. Most actors preferred it that way. But I liked the idea of an audience watching. And it was not surprising, with this play. It wasn’t often that one got to see the first performance of a play four hundred years old.

An usher appeared and propped the door open for me. Behind him a fully-armed security guard looked me over. He was there, I supposed, because of Hieronomo. The usher offered me a program and I took it. “I need to get back stage,” I whispered.

He smiled. “Just go through the door by the stage,” he said. “It’s easier.”

Backstage I stopped and looked at the program in my hand. The first page listed the dramatis personae:

The opposite page was almost filled by one of Bloomsman’s learned program notes:

The Guise
is one of the four previously lost plays in the Aylesbury Collection, twenty-four plays and hundreds of miscellaneous papers discovered in 2052. The invaluable books and manuscripts, found at Aylesbury Manor near Oxford, had been locked in a storage trunk for over three hundred years.

The copy of
The Guise
in the Collection is a quarto volume, published in 1628 “by N.O. for Thomas Archer.” Stage directions have been added by an unknown 17th century hand.

The text is anonymous. It was presumed that the play was by John Webster, who mentioned a work of his by the same title in the dedication to
The Devil’s Law Case
(1623). But this has been questioned. Earlier references to a
Guise
play—variously spelled
The Gwuisse
, or
The Guesse
—indicate that there was probably more than one play so named. Most of these presumably concern the de Guise family, but the plot of our play was taken from an Italian novella,
Il Travestimenro di Pallio
.

Critics have made cases for the authorship of Middleton, Tourneur, and Massinger. The debates continue—even the authenticity of the entire Collection has been questioned recently. While this state of uncertainty remains, we at the Rose have thought it best not to attribute authorship.

This is the first Vancouver performance of
The Guise
.

It was less than I already knew from talking to Bloomsman. I had been one of many requesting a part; it had been worse than trying to get reservations to play Hamlet. Everyone who performed Jacobean drama had inquired, fascinated by the prospect of a new and unknown play. It had been a surprise when Bloomsman called and said, “You’ll be Pallio.”

I made my way through backstage corridors to the dressing room, found the cubicle with my name on it. My first costume—grey britches, white ruffled shirt-front, long blue coat—felt as familiar to me as my street clothes. The other costumes went on hooks. I sat down before the mirror, turned on its lights, and pulled my makeup kit from the bottom of the bag. My face was damp; the white powder stuck to it. I darkened my eyelids, exaggerated the curve of my upper lip. The sight of the stranger in the mirror, face white as a mask, quickened my pulse. I considered the many layers of his character, and played over his archaic language.

A small crystal perfume bottle rolled against my foot. I reached down, picked it up; still seated, I stuck my head around the partition separating me from the next cubicle. There was no one there. Dresses, white and scarlet and black, hung from the walls, making the cubicle seem smaller. Crystal bottles like the one in my hand reflected the blue light from the makeup mirror behind them.

Within the mirror there was movement. I turned my head and looked up at an auburn-haired actress, one I had never seen before. Her face was a narrow oval. Her eyes, grey as slate and flecked with black, surveyed me calmly. She looked into her cubicle and back, clearly framing her question. I lifted the bottle in explanation, and her mouth. which curved down sharply in repose, lifted as if propelled by the same motion, into a warm smile.

“Caropia?” I asked.

Her head turned aside. She walked past me into her cubicle without responding. A strand of her hair spiraled down; her slim back was splashed with tiny streaks of the powder that whitened her shoulders. I noticed that the grey eyes were still observing me from the mirror, and I quickly withdrew, Pallio’s face mocked me in my own glass. Remember where you are, he said… By and large, acting was as congenial an art form as any other; friends often performed plays together. But those of us who gravitated to the world of Jacobean tragedy were not a very communicative bunch. Strangers came in, played their parts, and went their separate ways into the city, remaining strangers to each other. The Hieronomo was one of us.

The stage set was large and uncluttered. The bedroom at the rear had wide black staircases bracketing it, and a narrow balcony above, so that it was deeply recessed, like a cave. I experienced the familiar wash of
déjà vu
as I viewed it; a false one, in that I had truly
already seen
the set, as part of the implanting. Real
déjà vu
would have been an uncanny feeling, I was sure; but in a world of memory implants it was as common as recollection itself. (Still, there were people addicted to the sensation. They would implant in their memory the remembrance of a world tour and then take that very tour, in a continuous stale of
déjà vu
, pulse high, adrenaline running in their arteries…)

In the large prop room directly behind the stage the director, Eunice Bloomsman, was holding the first and final cast meeting. Bloomsman was quite short, and very calm. Many of the players were ignoring her, expressing the common belief among them that directors were powerless lackeys, no more than the stage managers of old. But they were mistaken—directors programmed the information to be implanted in the players, and that gave them the chance to exert much subtle influence.

Bloomsman looked up at me, then continued. “All of you but one chose minimum text, so you’ll have to stay alert to keep up. I’ve made the cues two and sometimes three lines long, so you’ll have plenty of warning. In case you get lost there will be prompters in the usual places.

“This play has an extraordinary history, as you know, and there’s a large audience here to see us. so let’s try to do a good job. That means an absolute ban on interpolations—agreed?” There were nods from several. “Good. Now introduce yourselves so you’ll know who’s who.”

A tall man stood, dressed in the rich red robes of stage clergy. “I’m Cardinal Donado,” he said.

Two men then rose and introduced themselves as Hamond and Orcanes, followers of Donado. I had played with them before; they always performed together.

The actor next to them tugged at his black waistcoat and looked about the chamber. “Sanguinetto.” he said in a harsh, low voice. I had played with him before also. He always took the part of the most deranged villain the work had to offer, which in revenge tragedy was saying a great deal. I had watched him play lago with the most chilling bitterness; and in
Edward II
he had laughed his way through the ugly part of the murderer Lightborn. This actor took the backstage convention of silence to its limit, and never said anything but his lines. Between scenes be stood wordlessly near his next entrance. This was too much for some. Once a young actor had drawn me aside and asked me if I thought he was the Hieronomo—l had laughed. No, I told him, the Hieronomo always takes the part of the hero. Besides, he always returns with a different face, and I’ve seen this man before.

The others rose and identified themselves. I didn’t recognize any of them. Latecomers from the dressing room arrived, and the diverse mix of costumes now included every color, creating a confusion much more plausible than any coordinated costuming could be. This was Bloomsman’s idea, another of her innovations that seemed to give the players more freedom.

When the auburn-haired actress stood, she looked directly at me. Behind the mask of cosmetics (her mouth was a dangerous sickle of dark red) her grey eyes seemed colorless. “Caropia,” she said. I remained expressionless, and she smiled.

Then there was a rustle and a man stepped out of a dim back comer of the room. He was dressed in black, and his short hair was a light, dull blond. He had thin lips, and a wide jaw that made his face look square.

My heart was thumping rapidly. Bloomsman turned to him. “And you are?” she inquired.

“I am Velasquo,” the man said, and at that moment I felt extreme cold, as if suddenly probability had relaxed and all the air had left my side of the room. Something about the man—the turn of his nose—told me I should know him, and in my brain thoughtless energy ran through neural corridors, struggling in vain for recognition.

“That’s very good,” Bloomsman was saying. Everyone else was attending to their appearance, each of them preparing for his or her five thousandth, ten thousandth entrance… I felt isolated. “The whole cast is here. Is everyone familiar with the stage?” The question was ignored. Bloomsman pursed her lips into an expression of contempt. “Let’s begin.”

The curtain rose. Lights dimmed, and the audience was nothing but rows of white faces, which slowly became indistinct, like blobs of dough, then faded away in the deeper gloom. Small rustlings ended, and the little room was perfectly silent, perfectly dark.

A shaft of blue light, so faint that it first appeared to be only a seam in the blackness, gained strength and defined center stage. Into this conjuration of blue walked Velasquo, who stopped as if snared by it. He turned to face the audience, and from my vantage point at stage right I could see his sharp profile, and the light hair, now glazed blue, and a suddenly raised hand, in which a sheet of paper fluttered. He spoke, in a nasal tenor:

“This note commands me: I must have revenge!”

He read the note aloud. It was a garbled, nearly incoherent document, which informed him that his father the old Duke had been murdered, “poison’d by a spider in his bed,” and exhorted him to vengeance. It made only obscure references to the identity of the killer—”What now seems finest is most ill”—and Velasquo threw it down in disgust.

He explained to the audience that his father’s death had been unexpected and mysterious; it had been attributed to overeating by Elazar, a doctor of doubtful reputation. He saw now that the foul play had been obvious. Bitterly he described the corrupt court of Naples, which, under the “dull and amiable” hand of his elder brother Pallio, now the Duke, had become the plaything of riotous sycophants. Pallio was too stupid to want to search for a murderer. (I listened with great interest.) The rest of the court was too evil, and probably somehow implicated in the deed. Only his sister Caropia remained untainted. As he described the rest of us, one by one, my mind reverberated with the memory of the play, which hovered just on the edge of consciousness. Suddenly I knew the end of the play; the tangled plots that led to it were still a blank, but there were tendrils of association that linked each character with his final fate, and I saw the culmination, the vivid murders, my own death, the bloody, corpse-littered stage.

Shaken, I watched Velasquo walk toward me. I had never divined the end of the play so soon before— Velasquo raised his voice, and my attention was drawn back to him. He vowed to look for the note’s author, who clearly knew more than he had written, and then search for the killer:

“I’ll seek him out—to do it I’ll dissemble:

And if there be a murderer, let him tremble.”

That was my cue.

I walked on stage and an aura of blue light surrounded me. Velasquo greeted me and I replied a bit too loudly, I thought, for the size of the room. I began concentrating, working to express naturally lines I had never spoken, doing that improvisation of stance and gesture which makes ours so much different from the acting in any previous tradition.

His eyes never leaving me, Velasquo suddenly told me of the contents of the note— “Our poor father has been most foully murdered!”

My mouth fell open. “But nay,” I objected, “he’s dead.” Velasquo ignored me and proceeded to describe the deed, in much more elaborate detail than the mysterious letter had as if the bald mention of the crime had brought the scene up full-bloom in his imagination. At the end of the gruesome tale I said, “That’s not so well done, brother!” and continued to make stupid exclamations of shock as Velasquo listed the rest of the potential assassins at court. Finally be exhorted me to vengeance, and I eagerly agreed to help him. “I’ll be your constant aid. But now, what shall we tell our holy sister?”