The Body in the Mobile Library by Peter Bradshaw

Author:Peter Bradshaw [Bradshaw, Peter]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Eye Books Ltd
Published: 2024-02-04T15:30:24+00:00

Career Move

Hollywood would always be his first love, but Satan also adored the London West End stage and, like all intelligent theatregoers, deplored the current prevalence of musicals and the paucity of new writing. In fact, he made a point of attending first nights of original plays. He would often wait discreetly in the bar until a few moments before curtain-up (scheduled half an hour earlier than usual, of course, to give the newspaper critics time to write their reviews) hoping to catch a glimpse of the author himself, sneaking about, chatting nervously to supportive friends and acquaintances, anxiously scanning the auditorium to see who was ‘in front’ – and oh, how Satan loved those quaint theatrical terms!

This is where he was to be seen now, at a London theatre for a premiere, dressed in a comfortably fitting dark jacket and pale chinos, his thick, grey-black hair swept straight back from his forehead, spectacles looped casually into an open shirt-front. He looked like a visiting Canadian academic, and as the house lights dimmed, it was an air of quiet authority and purpose which allowed him to rise from his aisle seat in the stalls, walk out into the corridor and through a door marked ‘private’ (actually holding the door open for a bona fide member of staff who smiled and said thank you) and from there into the wings, in whose shadows he was able to observe the play’s author closely. Satan savoured this man’s desperate need for success as he tensely watched the action from the side of the stage, silently mouthing every syllable of his dialogue as it was being performed.

The author’s name was Anthony Marcus, a talented dramatist with a number of works commissioned by the National Theatre – though the last of these was fully a decade previously. There were also some television credits and an unproduced movie screenplay. He was in his late thirties, married with three children. This current play, now getting its West End transfer after a moderately successful appearance at Chichester, was entitled Caring, and concerned a thirtyish married woman who has an affair with the family’s Croatian male nanny. A well-known television actress played the lead; the role of the nanny, or ‘manny’ as he was whimsically described, was taken by a young comedian, who had become famous through appearances on a television panel game. The play had been notable for the fully nude sex scene just before the interval, which had been getting a gratifying combination of laughs and gasps, and so it proved again that evening.

When the final curtain came down, there was much applause and whooping from a packed house: the PR had taken care to give away tickets to make sure every seat was taken.

Satan stepped quickly out of the wings into the corridor that led to Dressing Rooms One and Two, and by darting up a tiny flight of cramped steps that led round to a fire escape, he was able to scramble quickly down into

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