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What I felt as I got off the train this afternoon wasn’t what I’d expected to feel. The journey had been as grim and tardy as I suppose it was bound to be on a December Sunday. Most of the others have chosen to go via London and they won’t be coming down here until tomorrow. I could have joined them. Instead I volunteered for the slow South Central shuffle along the coast. I had plenty of opportunity to analyse my state of mind as a seamless succession of drab back gardens drifted past the grimy train window. I knew why I hadn’t gone up to London, of course. I knew exactly why bright lights and brash company weren’t what the doctor had ordered. The truth is that if I had fled to the big city, I might never have made it to Brighton at all. I might have opted out of the last week of this ever more desperate tour and let Gauntlett sue me if he could be bothered to. So, I came the only way I could be sure would get me here. Which it did. Late, cold and depressed. But here. And then, as I stepped out onto the platform . . .
That feeling is why I’m talking into this machine. I can’t quite describe it. Not foreboding, exactly. Not excitement. Not even anticipation. Something slipping between all three, I suppose. A thrill; a shiver; a prickling of the hairs on the back of the neck; a ghost tiptoeing across my grave. There wasn’t supposed to be anything but a protraction of a big disappointment waiting for me in Brighton. But already, before I’d even cleared the ticket barrier, I sensed strongly enough for certainty that there was more than that preparing a welcome for me. More that might be better or worse, but, either way, was preferable.
I didn’t trust the sensation, of course. Why would I? I do now, though. Because it’s already started to happen. Maybe I should have realized sooner that the tour was a journey. And this is journey’s end.
The tapes were my agent’s idea. Well, a diary was what she actually suggested, back in those bright summer days when this donkey of a play looked like a stallion that could run and run and the mere prospect merited a lunch at the River Café. A chronicle of how actors refine their roles and discover the deeper profundities of a script before they reach the West End is what Moira had in mind. She reckoned there might be a newspaper serialization in it to supplement the two thou a week Gauntlett is ever more reluctantly paying me. It sounded good. (A lot of what Moira says does.) I bought this pocket audio doodah on the strength of it, while the Cloudy Bay was still swirling around my thought processes. I’m glad I did now.
But it’s more or less the first time I have been. I abandoned the diary before I’d even started it, up in Guildford, where the Yvonne Arnaud Theatre hosted the world première of our proud production. Is it only nine weeks ago? It feels more like nine months, the span of a difficult pregnancy, with a stillbirth the foregone conclusion since we had word from Gauntlett that there was to be no West End transfer. I thank God for the panto season, without which he might have been tempted to keep us on the road in the hopes of some magical improvement. As it is, the curtain comes down next Saturday and seems likely to stay there.
It shouldn’t have turned out this way. When it was announced last year that a previously unknown play by the late and lauded Joe Orton had been discovered, it was widely assumed to be a masterpiece on no other basis than its authorship. What greater proof was needed, after all? This was the man who gave us Entertaining Mr. Sloane, Loot and What the Butler Saw. This was also the man who sealed his reputation as an anarchic genius by dying young, murdered by his lover, Kenneth Halliwell, at their flat in Islington in August 1967. I have all the facts of his extraordinary life at my fingertips thanks to carting his biography and an edition of his diaries around with me. I thought they might inspire me. I thought lots of things. None of them have quite worked out.
The script of Lodger in the Throat was found by a plumber under some floorboards in the flat where Orton and Halliwell used to live. I imagine Orton would have been amused by the circumstances of its discovery. Maybe he actually planted it there as a joke. Or maybe--my preferred theory--Halliwell hid it during the final phase of his mental disintegration, not long before he bashed Orton’s brains out with a hammer and then killed himself by swallowing a fatal quantity of Nembutal tablets. The Orton experts date the play to the winter of 1965/66 and reason he gave up on it when Loot was revived after a disastrous initial tour. Now I come to think about it, that tour bore eerie similarities to the experiences of the cast I’ve been trying to lead this autumn. Loot worked second time around, of course, because Orton was alive and well and willing to revise it. The irony is that he’s not available to salvage Lodger in the Throat, the play he consigned to a bottom drawer (or maybe the floor-space) in order to return to Loot. We’re on our own. And, boy, does it feel like it.
Enough about the play. We’ve analysed its potential and its problems, my fellow performers and I, till we’re sick of the subject. Sick and tired. It was supposed to put my career back on the rails, or at any rate haul it out of the siding into which it was unaccountably shunted a few years ago. I’m the man who was in with a chance of being the new James Bond when Roger Moore packed it in, something I now find hard to believe, even though I know it’s true. What’s also true is that you don’t realize you’ve stopped going up until you start going down.
There are plenty of signs if you’re smart enough to spot them, of course, or if you’re willing to let yourself spot them. My name tops the bill, but Martin Donohue, who plays the part of my younger brother, has somehow managed to emerge from our dismal run with enough credit to make my primacy look shaky if we were ever cast together again--which, naturally, I’d move heaven and earth to prevent. Time was when Mandy Pringle, our ambitious deputy stage manager, would have set her sights on me, not Donohue. But that time is past. Not long past, but past none the less. Maybe they’re looking forward to a week in Brighton. What they certainly won’t be thinking is that I’m looking forward to our week in Sussex by the Sea. But I am. At least, I am now.
It rained all last night in Poole and was still raining when I got on the train this morning. Brighton must have caught the deluge too, but it was dry when I left the station and trudged south along Queen’s Road through the mild grey dusk towards the darker grey slab of the sea. I’d already written off my weird presentiment. I’d accepted the exact and unappetizing character of the next six days. And the idea of making any kind of a record of them was about as remote as it could be.
I turned east along Church Street, a fair enough route to take to my destination, but one that also permitted a detour along New Road, past the familiar period frontage of the Theatre Royal. This will be my fourth professional engagement on its antique boards and I’d happily swap any one of the others for the eight renderings of Lodger in the Throat that the near future holds.
I stopped and examined the poster, wondering whether I’d visibly aged since the photograph was taken three months ago. It was hard to tell, not least because I haven’t been taking any lingering looks at myself in the mirror lately. But it was me all right. And there was my name, listed with the others, to prove it. Leo S. Gauntlett presents Lodger in the Throat, by Joe Orton, starring Toby Flood, Jocasta Haysman, Martin Donohue, Elsa Houghton and Frederick Durrance, Monday 2 to Saturday 7 December. Evenings at 7.45 p.m. Thursday and Saturday matinees at 2.30 p.m. Part of me longed to see a CANCELLED sticker across the poster, but it wasn’t there and it isn’t going to be. We’re on. There’s no way out. Until the end of the week.
I didn’t linger, cutting round by the Royal Pavilion to the Old Steine, then heading east along St. James’s Street. The Sea Air Hotel is neither the chicest nor the cheapest B & B establishment in Madeira Place, one of the guesthouse-filled streets running down to Marine Parade, but Eunice is as actor-friendly a landlady as they come, willing to suspend her winter closure just for me. As the tour’s gone from bad to worse and the play’s immediate future has shrunk, I’ve started economizing on accommodation in order to have some dosh to show for my efforts even if kudos is out of the question. I’d probably have opted to stay with Eunice anyway, but just now the Sea Air has a number of crucial advantages apart from the tariff, principal among them being the fact that none of the others will be staying here. I have Eunice’s word on it. “I couldn’t cope with a party, Toby. All that coming and going. All that bathwater. I reckon you’ll do for me.”
I’ve only ever been here out of season, to share the dining room with the ghosts of summer holidaymakers. It’s a peaceful house, thanks to Eunice’s serene temperament and aversion to noise of all kinds. Even Binky, her cat, has learned not to purr loudly. Eunice is Mrs. Rowlandson, complete with wedding and engagement rings, but Mr. Rowlandson is a subject never touched upon, sometime existence presumed but fate unspecified. It’s true to say, mind you, that Eunice might not be able to discard the rings even if she wanted to. A thin woman she is not. And less thin than ever. An aroma of baking wafted up from her basement flat as she ushered me into the speckless, flock-papered hall and up the Axminster-carpeted...
Quatrième de couverture :
That feeling is why I’m talking into this machine. I can’t quite describe it. Not foreboding, exactly. Not excitement. Not even anticipation. Something slipping between all three, I suppose. A thrill; a shiver; a prickling of the hairs on the back of the neck; a ghost tiptoeing across my grave. There wasn’t supposed to be anything but a protraction of a big disappointment waiting for me in Brighton. But already, before I’d even cleared the ticket barrier, I sensed strongly enough for certainty that there was more than that preparing a welcome for me. More that might be better or worse, but, either way, was preferable.
I didn’t trust the sensation, of course. Why would I? I do now, though. Because it’s already started to happen. Maybe I should have realized sooner that the tour was a journey. And this is journey’s end.
The tapes were my agent’s idea. Well, a diary was what she actually suggested, back in those bright summer days when this donkey of a play looked like a stallion that could run and run and the mere prospect merited a lunch at the River Café. A chronicle of how actors refine their roles and discover the deeper profundities of a script before they reach the West End is what Moira had in mind. She reckoned there might be a newspaper serialization in it to supplement the two thou a week Gauntlett is ever more reluctantly paying me. It sounded good. (A lot of what Moira says does.) I bought this pocket audio doodah on the strength of it, while the Cloudy Bay was still swirling around my thought processes. I’m glad I did now.
But it’s more or less the first time I have been. I abandoned the diary before I’d even started it, up in Guildford, where the Yvonne Arnaud Theatre hosted the world première of our proud production. Is it only nine weeks ago? It feels more like nine months, the span of a difficult pregnancy, with a stillbirth the foregone conclusion since we had word from Gauntlett that there was to be no West End transfer. I thank God for the panto season, without which he might have been tempted to keep us on the road in the hopes of some magical improvement. As it is, the curtain comes down next Saturday and seems likely to stay there.
It shouldn’t have turned out this way. When it was announced last year that a previously unknown play by the late and lauded Joe Orton had been discovered, it was widely assumed to be a masterpiece on no other basis than its authorship. What greater proof was needed, after all? This was the man who gave us Entertaining Mr. Sloane, Loot and What the Butler Saw. This was also the man who sealed his reputation as an anarchic genius by dying young, murdered by his lover, Kenneth Halliwell, at their flat in Islington in August 1967. I have all the facts of his extraordinary life at my fingertips thanks to carting his biography and an edition of his diaries around with me. I thought they might inspire me. I thought lots of things. None of them have quite worked out.
The script of Lodger in the Throat was found by a plumber under some floorboards in the flat where Orton and Halliwell used to live. I imagine Orton would have been amused by the circumstances of its discovery. Maybe he actually planted it there as a joke. Or maybe--my preferred theory--Halliwell hid it during the final phase of his mental disintegration, not long before he bashed Orton’s brains out with a hammer and then killed himself by swallowing a fatal quantity of Nembutal tablets. The Orton experts date the play to the winter of 1965/66 and reason he gave up on it when Loot was revived after a disastrous initial tour. Now I come to think about it, that tour bore eerie similarities to the experiences of the cast I’ve been trying to lead this autumn. Loot worked second time around, of course, because Orton was alive and well and willing to revise it. The irony is that he’s not available to salvage Lodger in the Throat, the play he consigned to a bottom drawer (or maybe the floor-space) in order to return to Loot. We’re on our own. And, boy, does it feel like it.
Enough about the play. We’ve analysed its potential and its problems, my fellow performers and I, till we’re sick of the subject. Sick and tired. It was supposed to put my career back on the rails, or at any rate haul it out of the siding into which it was unaccountably shunted a few years ago. I’m the man who was in with a chance of being the new James Bond when Roger Moore packed it in, something I now find hard to believe, even though I know it’s true. What’s also true is that you don’t realize you’ve stopped going up until you start going down.
There are plenty of signs if you’re smart enough to spot them, of course, or if you’re willing to let yourself spot them. My name tops the bill, but Martin Donohue, who plays the part of my younger brother, has somehow managed to emerge from our dismal run with enough credit to make my primacy look shaky if we were ever cast together again--which, naturally, I’d move heaven and earth to prevent. Time was when Mandy Pringle, our ambitious deputy stage manager, would have set her sights on me, not Donohue. But that time is past. Not long past, but past none the less. Maybe they’re looking forward to a week in Brighton. What they certainly won’t be thinking is that I’m looking forward to our week in Sussex by the Sea. But I am. At least, I am now.
It rained all last night in Poole and was still raining when I got on the train this morning. Brighton must have caught the deluge too, but it was dry when I left the station and trudged south along Queen’s Road through the mild grey dusk towards the darker grey slab of the sea. I’d already written off my weird presentiment. I’d accepted the exact and unappetizing character of the next six days. And the idea of making any kind of a record of them was about as remote as it could be.
I turned east along Church Street, a fair enough route to take to my destination, but one that also permitted a detour along New Road, past the familiar period frontage of the Theatre Royal. This will be my fourth professional engagement on its antique boards and I’d happily swap any one of the others for the eight renderings of Lodger in the Throat that the near future holds.
I stopped and examined the poster, wondering whether I’d visibly aged since the photograph was taken three months ago. It was hard to tell, not least because I haven’t been taking any lingering looks at myself in the mirror lately. But it was me all right. And there was my name, listed with the others, to prove it. Leo S. Gauntlett presents Lodger in the Throat, by Joe Orton, starring Toby Flood, Jocasta Haysman, Martin Donohue, Elsa Houghton and Frederick Durrance, Monday 2 to Saturday 7 December. Evenings at 7.45 p.m. Thursday and Saturday matinees at 2.30 p.m. Part of me longed to see a CANCELLED sticker across the poster, but it wasn’t there and it isn’t going to be. We’re on. There’s no way out. Until the end of the week.
I didn’t linger, cutting round by the Royal Pavilion to the Old Steine, then heading east along St. James’s Street. The Sea Air Hotel is neither the chicest nor the cheapest B & B establishment in Madeira Place, one of the guesthouse-filled streets running down to Marine Parade, but Eunice is as actor-friendly a landlady as they come, willing to suspend her winter closure just for me. As the tour’s gone from bad to worse and the play’s immediate future has shrunk, I’ve started economizing on accommodation in order to have some dosh to show for my efforts even if kudos is out of the question. I’d probably have opted to stay with Eunice anyway, but just now the Sea Air has a number of crucial advantages apart from the tariff, principal among them being the fact that none of the others will be staying here. I have Eunice’s word on it. “I couldn’t cope with a party, Toby. All that coming and going. All that bathwater. I reckon you’ll do for me.”
I’ve only ever been here out of season, to share the dining room with the ghosts of summer holidaymakers. It’s a peaceful house, thanks to Eunice’s serene temperament and aversion to noise of all kinds. Even Binky, her cat, has learned not to purr loudly. Eunice is Mrs. Rowlandson, complete with wedding and engagement rings, but Mr. Rowlandson is a subject never touched upon, sometime existence presumed but fate unspecified. It’s true to say, mind you, that Eunice might not be able to discard the rings even if she wanted to. A thin woman she is not. And less thin than ever. An aroma of baking wafted up from her basement flat as she ushered me into the speckless, flock-papered hall and up the Axminster-carpeted...
Actor Toby Flood, formerly of big and small screen, arrives in Brighton on the first Sunday in December with the other cast members of the Joe Orton play Lodger in the Throat. They have been on tour since September and are looking forward to the end of the run the following Saturday.
Flood is visited that night by his estranged wife, Jenny, now living with wealthy entrepreneur Roger Colborn, whose country residence, Wickhurst Manor, lies just north of Brighton. Jenny runs a shop in the Lanes and is worried about a strange man who has taken to hanging around outside. Roger has dismissed her concerns and she hopes instead that Toby will agree for old times' sake to follow the man and get to the bottom of his behaviour. Reluctantly, Toby agrees.
Next day he trails the man to his house and confronts him. Derek Oswin is an unemployed loner, who blames Colborn for his father's death from cancer, on account of dangerous practices at the defunct plastics factory run by Roger and his father, the late Sir Walter Colborn. Many other workers at the factory met a similar fate and Oswin wants to remind Colborn of what he should have on his conscience. Circumstances conspire to draw Flood further and further into Oswin's life. Colborn gets wind of Flood's contact with Jenny and tries to buy him off, but Flood sees only a longed-for opportunity to win Jenny back. Before he fully understands the risks he is running, he finds himself entangled in the mysterious - and dangerous - relationship between the Oswins and the Colborns. Prospects of his survival until the close of the show suddenly start to look very far from good.
Play to the End is another classic Robert Goddard mystery, intricate, fascinating and deeply satisfying to the last page.
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- ÉditeurBantam Press
- Date d'édition2004
- ISBN 10 0593047605
- ISBN 13 9780593047606
- ReliureRelié
- Numéro d'édition1
- Nombre de pages336
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PLAY TO THE END
Edité par
Bantam Press
(2004)
ISBN 10 : 0593047605
ISBN 13 : 9780593047606
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