Page 36 of Autumn in Sycamore Park
Gavin shrugged. ‘She’s okay.’
‘That’s good. Go on, you’d better hurry up. You’re missing playtime.’
‘Right, are we ready?’
Amy, holding her script out in front of her like a priest about to begin a sermon, looked around the assembled group. Some shrugged, some grunted in agreement. Old Don sighed. Jennifer, standing to Amy’s left, glanced at Rick, who was already making gestures in the air like a silent movie thespian, a look of total concentration on his face.
‘Okay, final read through, then we’ll do it with actions. Oh, I’m so excited!’
‘Fire had engulfed the land,’ Jennifer began, trying to sound dramatic in her role as part narrator, part minstrel. ‘The war against the dragons had continued for all eternity. From the ashes of the country rose one man who could end the war forever. His name was … Sir Brent.’
Rick sniggered.
‘Can you make it sound a little more … hopeless?’ Amy said.
‘I’m trying.’
‘Lass’s first time to act,’ Colin Tiller said with a chuckle.
Jennifer cleared her throat. ‘Fire had engulfed the land—’
‘Try putting the stress on “engulfed”,’ Old Don Jones said. ‘And hurry up about it. Lord Brent will have died of old age before he even gets out on his quest.’
‘Sir Brent,’ Collin Tiller said.
‘Are you starting on me, you pompous old—’
‘It’s Sir Brent,’ Rick said.
Amy gave a frantic clap of her hands. ‘Let’s start over again. From the top….’
At six o’clock,it came down to a vote whether to have one more run through, or call it a night. Amy enthusiastically voted yes, with Jennifer offering half an arm as moral support. The rest of the teachers were done, though, so time was called and they all headed home.
Jennifer, her throat aching from a day of shouting at the kids followed by practice of the newly inaugurated school song, and then drama practice, grabbed some takeaway food on the way home, ate it on the sofa before mustering a last gasp of energy to take Bonky out for a walk.
It was a beautiful late September evening. Warm with a light breeze blowing through the trees, the sun leaving mottles of shadow across the paths. A few scatterings of leaves had already fallen, others were just beginning to change colour. Jennifer felt her stress draining away as she watched Bonky racing across the grass, vainly in pursuit of the pigeons hunting for seeds.
Angela was right. She had to look forward instead of back. Refusing to think about Mark or the past she had left behind, she tried to focus on the upcoming festival. It would surely pass without a hitch, but it surprised her how nervous she felt, particularly about the teachers’ drama. It was hardly a showpiece, with the audience likely to be a handful of disinterested mums and dads and a few pupils hoping their teachers slipped up. Even so, she hadn’t done any acting since school, and the thought of any audience whatsoever was terrifying.
She was just wondering whether it might be best to slug a quick glass of wine before going on, when she noticed a line of people heading into the theatre. She wandered over with Bonky and found that a new play had just opened, a local group performing a musical version of Shakespeare’s Macbeth.
The evening show was due to start in half an hour. Not really giving herself time to think, Jennifer scooped Bonky up under her arm and jogged home, threw on some slightly more appropriate clothing and then dashed back to the theatre. As she headed in through the ticket gate, paid her five pounds for a stalls ticket, she hoped the server in the box office wouldn’t notice the sweat beading along her brow. She made a quick toilet stop then found her seat, thankfully with a few spaces on either side of the sparsely populated theatre.
Like every British school kid who could actually read, she had absentmindedly studied some Shakespeare at school, but had largely forgotten it in the intervening years. Thankfully, this seemed to be a watered down and reworked version, as the first characters came out speaking in language that it was possible to understand, before breaking into song against a recorded background tape.
While not exactly the West End, Jennifer felt a little inspiration as she watched the way the characters walked around the stage, how they stood, how they gestured, and how they performed their lines. It was clearly an amateur group by the sparseness of the stage backs and costumes, but they performed with no little skill. She found herself nodding along to the first song, and had a smile on her face when a trumpet sound blew, and to a round of applause the main character came on stage.
He marched to the middle, spread his arms, and announced himself as Macbeth, future king of Scotland. Jennifer stared openmouthed. As the actor gave a cackling laugh for effect, she tried to shrink down in her seat, aware that all he had to do was look down to see her.
As the applause ended, his eyes scanned across the audience. Jennifer gave an embarrassed smile as Tom, dressed in a frilly shirt, black trousers and boots, with a toy sword hung at his hip, gave a double take as he spotted her, and nearly missed a step. Quickly hiding a look of surprise, he managed to recover his composure with professional grace and deliver his next line. As soon as another character took centre stage, he glanced back at Jennifer, flashed a smile and winked.
A couple of minutes later, he broke into a song. Jennifer watched in awe of Tom’s stage presence, note perfect singing voice, and mastery of his lines. She quickly got over the shock of seeing him as an actor and found herself drawn into the story, a modified version of the original tragedy featuring a lot more humour, a scattering of borderline cheesy songs, and a couple of cool battle scenes.
And Tom, the gardener who raked leaves and caught injured ducks for a living, became something else entirely. On stage he looked a natural, head and shoulders above the rest of the group, as though he had spent years working in theatre and knew all the tricks. Each time he took centre stage for a speech or a song, Jennifer found herself unable to look away.
At the end, instead of being murdered in the final battle, Macbeth dressed in drag and fled off into the night, intent on becoming a mummer in a travelling circus while biding his time to return to Scotland and take his revenge. The players lined up and took a bow to a standing ovation, Tom again flashing Jennifer a quick smile. Then the curtains came across, and the lights went up.
People began getting up and shuffling out. Only a couple of hundred spectators had been present to witness Tom’s masterclass, but with daily showings for the next two weeks, Jennifer planned to return, perhaps with Angela or Amy. She waited for a couple of minutes, hoping Tom might come out, but the curtains stayed closed. Reluctantly, she headed for the exit.
