Elegance and Innocence (42 page)

They blink at him. The small brunette with glasses looks as if she might cry.

Boyd swivels round to the rest of us. ‘The first rule of being an actor is to grab the limelight. Make the most daring choices you can. Wherever you are, find a light bulb and stand under it! If you don’t want to be looked at, if you don’t want to be noticed, then you’re in the wrong profession. And for fuck’s sake, do something worth watching! Now that you’ve got our bloody attention, keep it! Right! Off you go!’

They stand, huddled together in the centre of the studio. The brunette starts, hands shaking.

‘“Romeo, Romeo.”’ Barely audible, her voice is brittle and choked with tears. ‘“Wherefore art thou Romeo?”’

‘Stop!’ Boyd barks, jabbing his cigarette out on the floor. He strides over, grasping her by the shoulders. ‘Are you going to cry?’

She nods her head, unable to form the words.

‘Brilliant! Use it! Channel it! Feed it into the language! Finally! I’ve always wanted someone to do something different with this speech! What’s your name?’

‘Louise,’ she whispers.

‘Speak up, girl!’

‘Louise!’ she shouts back, suddenly irritated.

And he smiles. A great, wonderful, warm, open smile.

His eyes gleam. Bouncing into the centre of the room, he flings his arms wide, throws back his head and shouts ‘Louise!’ until the windows shake. Grabbing her hands, he whirls her round. ‘LOUISE!! LOUISE!!’

And she’s giggling, laughing. ‘Wherefore art thou Louise?’

He catches the redhead’s hand. ‘Go on!’

‘“Deny thy father and refuse thy name!”’

‘“Or, if thou wilt not, be but sworn my love,”’

The redhead spins round. ‘“And I’ll no longer be a Capulet!”’

They’ve caught the rhythm; we can feel it.

“‘’Tis but thy name that is my enemy;”’

‘“Thou art thyself, though not a Montague.”’

‘“What’s Montague? it is nor hand, nor foot.”’ They take each other’s hands. ‘“Nor arm, nor face, nor any other part Belonging to a man!”’

And so they dance, turn, vault around the room, throwing the words back and forth, volleyball in iambic pentameter. It becomes in turns breathless, urgent, fanciful – laced with longing, then drenched in desire; everything a young girl with her first crush would be, standing in the moonlight of her own private garden.

‘I want you to remember this.’ Boyd pulls both his Juliets
in closer. ‘I want you to remember what it’s like to be alive, to be young; to have the most wonderful language ever written rolling about in your mouth – the flavour of the words on your tongue and this rhythm, driving you. It’s a sensual experience. Acting’s all about the senses. Well done, both of you.’ He releases them.

They stagger, elated, back to their seats.

‘So.’ He stretches his arms high above his head and yawns. ‘How many Hamlets do we have today?’

Tentatively, I raise my hand.

Imo looks at me.

‘I see.’ Boyd gestures for me to stand up. ‘So, a bit of a Sarah Bernhardt, are we?’

I knew this would be tricky.

‘And what, exactly, is your difficulty with the traditional women’s roles?’

‘They’re boring.’ I’m pretending to be more confident than I am. ‘I’m not good at being young and pretty and … well, that’s all they are; young and pretty.’

He grins. Even sitting, he gives the impression of looking down from a great height. ‘Well, then. Let’s see what you’ve got.’

It’s strange standing in the middle; quite different from how I imagined it. All eyes are on me and my heart feels like it’s going to burst out of my chest, the adrenalin races through my veins. What is it he said? Make the most daring choices you can? Do something worth watching? Scanning
the room, I suddenly spot the old piano. And a brilliant, bold scheme forms in my mind.

I push it towards the centre on its creaking wheels, then sit down and start to play, plucking out the tune to Mendelssohn’s ‘Wedding March’. I’ll slowly build in speed and intensity, a macabre reference to Gertrude and Claudius’s incestuous wedding, and then whirl round and hit them with the first line.

Da da dada … da da dada …

My hands start to shake.

I haven’t played a piano in years.

The tune is only barely recognizable. In fact, it sounds more like the Captain and Tennille than Mendelssohn. But the longer I play, the harder it becomes to break off and swirl round.

I’m stuck.

Shit! I have to stop playing the piano! I have to stop! I’m panicking! I have to stop panicking and I have to stop playing the piano!

I twist round and nearly fall off my seat. A sea of bewildered faces greet me. I feel like a lounge singer. ‘“To be or not to be,”’ I shout, sounding remarkably like the guy who sells the
Evening Standard
outside Baker Street tube station. ‘“That is the question!”’

OK. Calm down. I’ve begun. That’s the main thing.

Only now I’m trapped behind the piano. I try pushing the bench back dramatically. But it makes a hideous,
spine-crunching, scraping noise. The whole room gasps in agony. Once up, I attempt to recover by leaning nonchalantly against the side of it. The lid slams down and I end up screaming like a girl.

Sadistically, Boyd allows me to work my way all the way through. And when I finish he just looks at me, arms folded across his chest. ‘Thank you, Miss …?’ He pauses, waiting for my name.

‘Miss Garlick,’ I mumble.

The speech had seemed a lot more impressive in my room last night.

‘Yes, well, Miss Garlick, I believe you’ve given everyone a valuable lesson about props.’

There’s a twitter of laughter.

I want to die.

‘So, what’s a nice girl like you doing wrestling with a piano?’ He leans back in his chair.

I stare at the floor. ‘I don’t know … I thought it would be … a good idea.’ I sound like an idiot. Why doesn’t he just let me go? Why does he have to keep torturing me?

‘How old are you?’ he asks.

I pause. Is this a trick question? ‘Eighteen,’ I admit.

‘And what do you like to do?’

‘Uh, well, going out, being with my friends …’

‘You like boys?’

I flush. ‘Yeah.’

‘So pretty much the same stuff Hamlet likes: girls,
hanging out with friends, being at school and away from home … normal student stuff. Only, of course, Hamlet isn’t eighteen, he’s thirty.’

‘Oh.’ This is obviously important. I only wish I knew why.

He looks at me, tilting his head to one side. ‘Doesn’t that seem strange to you? You see,’ he continues, not waiting for my answer (perhaps already knowing that there isn’t one), ‘long before the play begins, way before his father’s murdered, there’s already something wrong with Hamlet. He enters, fucked.’

I’m not really getting this.

‘That’s what’s so interesting. The hero of our tale is a loser. The most famous play in the world is about a guy who can’t pull himself together, doesn’t have a job, can’t get the girl and who takes four hours to accomplish something he was told he needed to do in the first twenty-five minutes! And then he dies!’

I nod as if it’s all starting to make perfect sense.

It isn’t.

He leans forward eagerly. ‘To be or not to be isn’t about indecision – it’s about failure. He goes through the whole speech, thinks about every angle of the question and then ends up back where he started. So why does the world love Hamlet, Miss Garlick?’

I shrug my shoulders, inwardly kicking myself for not learning Juliet instead.

‘Because’ – he speaks with sudden intensity, his face illuminated with feeling – ‘very few of us relate to what it’s like to be a hero. But everyone understands what it’s like to fail.’

Boyd stares at me, searching my face for some flicker of recognition.

He’s lost me. I avert my eyes, concentrating on the worn surface of the wooden floorboards, hoping he’ll release me soon. I can sit down and be anonymous.

‘Of course, there’s a lifetime between eighteen and thirty,’ he concedes quietly.

‘OK, right!’ he shifts gears. ‘Let’s get this speech moving.’ Standing up, he fishes around in his pocket and throws me a coin. ‘Forget the piano, OK? Let’s keep it simple. Heads you live. Tails you die. Go on – toss it.’

I throw the coin into the air, slapping it down on the back of my hand. ‘Tails.’

‘Is that what you wanted?’

‘I don’t know.’

Boyd goes over, pulls Lindsay Crufts to his feet. ‘Here’s the deal,’ he tells me. ‘You can either kill this guy or kill yourself.’

I blink at him. ‘I’m sorry?’

‘Go on, flip the coin! Heads, you kill him. Tails, you kill yourself.’

Reluctantly, I flip the coin again. ‘Heads.’

‘Brilliant!’ He gives me a shove. ‘Off you go!’

I look at him, horrified. ‘What do you mean?’

‘Go on! Kill him!’

I turn to Lindsay. He smiles politely.

‘Come on! What’s wrong with you!’ Boyd claps his hands. ‘Time’s ticking! Let’s go! Stab him! Strangle him! Hit him over the head with a chair! Do something!’

I’m completely paralysed. ‘No!’

‘Why not?’

‘I can’t!’

‘Then kill yourself!’ Boyd’s circling me, fencing me in. ‘Go on! Do it! Those are the choices – him or you!’

‘I can’t!’ I feel trapped, panicky. ‘I can’t do either!’

‘So say it! Start!’

To be or not to be: that is the question:

Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer

The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,

Or to take arms against a sea of troubles,

And by opposing end them? To die: to sleep:

No more; and, by a sleep to say we end

The heart-ache and the thousand natural

shocks

That flesh is heir to, ’tis a consummation

Devoutly to be wish’d
.

‘That’s it! Keep going!’

I press on, the language coming fast and easy now. The speech that five minutes ago had seemed like a nightmare of dragging time, tumbles out with a new urgency.

To die, to sleep;

To sleep: perchance to dream: ay, there’s the rub;

For in that sleep of death what dreams may come

When we have shuffled off this mortal coil
,

Must give us pause. There’s the respect

That makes calamity of so long life;

For who would bear the whips and scorns of time
,

The oppressor’s wrong, the proud man’s contumely
,

The pangs of despised love, the law’s delay
,

The insolence of office, and the spurns

That patient merit of the unworthy takes
,

When he himself might his quietus make

With a bare bodkin? who would fardels bear
,

To grunt and sweat under a weary life
,

But that the dread of something after death
,

The undiscover’d country from whose bourn

No traveller returns, puzzles the will
,

And makes us rather bear those ills we have

Than fly to others that we know not of?

Thus conscience does make cowards of us all;

And thus the native hue of resolution

Is sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought
,

And enterprises of great pith and moment

With this regard their currents turn awry
,

And lose the name of action
.

Before I know it, it’s over; done. And for the first time I feel as if I’m in control, driving the words forward instead of racing to catch up. It’s an exhilarating, intoxicating sensation – like being behind the wheel of powerful sports car. I wasn’t sure I could do it. And now I want to do it again.

Boyd’s rocking back on his heels. ‘Well, that’s more like it!’

The door to the studio creaks open and Robbie, still wearing last night’s clothes and clutching a takeaway coffee, tries to steal in.

Boyd swirls round. ‘Ahh! An Ophelia! My, my! You’ve
definitely
been picking the wrong sorts of herbs! And what’s this?’ He plucks the coffee cup from her hand, tosses the plastic lid to one side and slurps loudly. ‘Mmm! Milk
and
sugar! Perfect for a hangover, wouldn’t you say?’

She smiles uncertainly and I retreat to my seat.

Wrapping a paternal arm round her shoulders, he leads her gently into the centre of the room. ‘Let me explain to you how this one goes. You can be late but you’d better be good. If you’re crap, you’d better make certain that in future you’re on time. So my dear (and, by the way, it’s nice to know I’m not the only person in London who takes personal hygiene with a pinch of salt), I’d very much like to hear your audition speech.’