Opening Night by Ngaio Marsh

Author:Ngaio Marsh [Marsh, Ngaio]
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780006157748
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 1987-04-14T18:30:00+00:00

They were all on again. Dr. Rutherford came out from the O.P. corner. The cast joined in the applause. Martyn's heart had begun to sing so loudly that it was like to deafen every emotion but a universal gratitude. She thought Rutherford looked like an old lion standing there in his out-of-date evening clothes, his hair ruffled, his gloved hand touching his bulging shirt, bowing in an unwieldy manner to the audience and to the cast. He moved forward and the theatre was abruptly silent--silent, but for an obscure and intermittent thudding in the dressing-room passage. Clem Smith said something to the A.S.M. and rushed away, jingling keys.

"Hah," said Dr. Rutherford with a preliminary bellow. "Hah--thankee. I'm much obliged to you, ladies and gentlemen, and to the actors. The actors are much obliged, no doubt, to you, but not necessarily to me." Here the audience laughed and the actors smiled. "I am not able to judge," the Doctor continued with a rich roll in his voice, "whether you have extracted from this play the substance of its argument. If you have done so, we may all felicitate each other with the indiscriminate enthusiasm characteristic of these occasions: if you have not, I for my part am not prepared to say where the blame should rest."

A solitary man laughed in the audience. The Doctor rolled an eye at him and, with this clownish trick, brought the house down. "The prettiest epilogue to a play that I am acquainted with," he went on, "is (as I need perhaps hardly mention to so intelligent an audience) that written for a boy actor by William Shakespeare. I am neither a boy nor an actor, but I beg leave to end by quoting it to you. 'If it be true that good wine needs no bush--' "

"Gas!" Parry Percival said under his breath. Martyn, who thought the Doctor was going well, glanced indignantly at Parry and was astonished to see that he looked frightened. " '--therefore,' " the Doctor was saying arrogantly, " 'to beg will not become me--' "

"Gas!" said an imperative voice off-stage and someone else ran noisily round the back of the set

And then Martyn smelt it. Gas.

iv

To the actors, it seemed afterwards as if they had been fantastically slow to understand that disaster had come upon the theatre. The curtain went down on Dr. Rutherford's last word. There was a further outbreak of applause. Someone off-stage shouted: "The King, for God's sake!" and at once the anthem rolled out disinterestedly in the well. Poole ran off the stage and was met by Clem Smith, who had a bunch of keys in his hand. The rest followed him.

The area back-stage reeked of gas.

It was extraordinary how little was said. The players stood together and looked about them with the question in their faces that they were unable to ask.

Poole said: "Keep all visitors out, Clem. Send them to the foyer." And at once the A.S.M. spoke into the Prompt telephone. Bob Grantley burst through the pass-door, beaming from ear to ear.

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