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Authors: Barbara Cleverly
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response.
Was it over now? They longed for it to be over.
The two women stirred uneasily, listening on, wanting to block their ears yet not daring to miss a sound. Their tension, stretched beyond its limits by fear and pity, frayed and fellapart at a further vocal onslaught, unravelling into strands of impatience and anger. Enough! Enough! Was the victim now attempting to call for help? Surely not! The man knew he must die. Why couldn’t he just bow to Fate, give up the ghost and slide away, putting the listeners out of their misery?
Laetitia Talbot, seated in the centre of the first row of marble steps, turned to whisper as much to her companion but closed her mouth, censoring the ungracious comment.
“Lord! Geoffrey’s really hamming it up, isn’t he?” Maud Merriman had no such compunction. “Where on earth does he think he is—the Torture Chamber at Madame Tussaud’s?” Maud’s commanding English voice risked disturbing the action even when produced, as now, in a whisper. She sighed and hunted for the spectacles that dangled on a gold chain on her bosom. She popped them onto the tip of her nose and turned the face of her watch to the dying light from the west but shrugged, unable to read it. “If I rightly remember the play, I reckon we’ve got three hundred lines more to come … Now—
you’ve
got the script, Letty. Aren’t you supposed to be prompting? Just have a look and check I’m right, would you?”
Laetitia knew that she needn’t bother. Maud knew every line of the tragedy by Aeschylus, whether in this new English version of
Agamemnon
they were hearing or in the ancient Greek.
“Good thing they invited
us
to their rehearsal, my dear! They can depend on hearing our informed opinion—delivered with unsparing honesty.” The relish in Maud’s tone promised a stinging application of the renowned Merriman honesty.
“We must tell them to speed things up a bit before the actual performance … Somewhere between lines nine seventy-five and thirteen-forty, I’d say. Wouldn’t you agree, Letty? Mark it up in your copy. No! There! There!” An imperious finger flipped over two sheets of the script in Letty’s lap and pointedwith unerring accuracy to line 975. “One hesitates, of course, to edit dear old Aeschylus and I’m quite certain the suspense is just what the author intended at this point—keeping us on the very edge of these uncomfortable seats—but all the same … An hour and a half should be the
absolute
limit for a modern audience. Great Heavens! This could all take another twenty minutes!” Maud hurried on, not requiring a comment. “Fifteen if they dash through it—longer if Geoffrey indulges himself in another death rattle. Don’t, I beg you, Laetitia, call for an encore! He’s showed off quite enough for one night.”
Maud pulled her woolly cardigan more tightly around her shoulders, shivered, and muttered to herself: “For goodness’ sake! Still moaning on? What’s the matter with you, Geoffrey?
Die
, man! Supper’s in half an hour.”
Offstage, the victim obliged. Geoffrey Melton, M.A. (Oxon.), attaché at the British Embassy, in his guise of Agamemnon, King of Mycaenae, fell silent at last, lying stabbed to death in his bathtub. Letty could envisage the mad scramble backstage to help Geoffrey out of his resplendent purple Agamemnon outfit and into the dark robes of his wife’s lover, Aegisthus, his next role, ready to storm onstage again and throw his weight about. But the audience demanded a sight of the corpse, then as now. Lined up to represent him in the bath was the tailor’s dummy Letty had worked on with such glee that afternoon.
Acquired from a gents’ outfitters in Syntagma Square, the mannequin, once divested of its smart Parisian suiting, had proved a disappointment. Slender, smooth, and white-skinned, it was no stand-in for a leathery Mycaenean warrior just off wartime manoeuvres. Jokily, the stage manager had approached Laetitia with the
Was it over now? They longed for it to be over.
The two women stirred uneasily, listening on, wanting to block their ears yet not daring to miss a sound. Their tension, stretched beyond its limits by fear and pity, frayed and fellapart at a further vocal onslaught, unravelling into strands of impatience and anger. Enough! Enough! Was the victim now attempting to call for help? Surely not! The man knew he must die. Why couldn’t he just bow to Fate, give up the ghost and slide away, putting the listeners out of their misery?
Laetitia Talbot, seated in the centre of the first row of marble steps, turned to whisper as much to her companion but closed her mouth, censoring the ungracious comment.
“Lord! Geoffrey’s really hamming it up, isn’t he?” Maud Merriman had no such compunction. “Where on earth does he think he is—the Torture Chamber at Madame Tussaud’s?” Maud’s commanding English voice risked disturbing the action even when produced, as now, in a whisper. She sighed and hunted for the spectacles that dangled on a gold chain on her bosom. She popped them onto the tip of her nose and turned the face of her watch to the dying light from the west but shrugged, unable to read it. “If I rightly remember the play, I reckon we’ve got three hundred lines more to come … Now—
you’ve
got the script, Letty. Aren’t you supposed to be prompting? Just have a look and check I’m right, would you?”
Laetitia knew that she needn’t bother. Maud knew every line of the tragedy by Aeschylus, whether in this new English version of
Agamemnon
they were hearing or in the ancient Greek.
“Good thing they invited
us
to their rehearsal, my dear! They can depend on hearing our informed opinion—delivered with unsparing honesty.” The relish in Maud’s tone promised a stinging application of the renowned Merriman honesty.
“We must tell them to speed things up a bit before the actual performance … Somewhere between lines nine seventy-five and thirteen-forty, I’d say. Wouldn’t you agree, Letty? Mark it up in your copy. No! There! There!” An imperious finger flipped over two sheets of the script in Letty’s lap and pointedwith unerring accuracy to line 975. “One hesitates, of course, to edit dear old Aeschylus and I’m quite certain the suspense is just what the author intended at this point—keeping us on the very edge of these uncomfortable seats—but all the same … An hour and a half should be the
absolute
limit for a modern audience. Great Heavens! This could all take another twenty minutes!” Maud hurried on, not requiring a comment. “Fifteen if they dash through it—longer if Geoffrey indulges himself in another death rattle. Don’t, I beg you, Laetitia, call for an encore! He’s showed off quite enough for one night.”
Maud pulled her woolly cardigan more tightly around her shoulders, shivered, and muttered to herself: “For goodness’ sake! Still moaning on? What’s the matter with you, Geoffrey?
Die
, man! Supper’s in half an hour.”
Offstage, the victim obliged. Geoffrey Melton, M.A. (Oxon.), attaché at the British Embassy, in his guise of Agamemnon, King of Mycaenae, fell silent at last, lying stabbed to death in his bathtub. Letty could envisage the mad scramble backstage to help Geoffrey out of his resplendent purple Agamemnon outfit and into the dark robes of his wife’s lover, Aegisthus, his next role, ready to storm onstage again and throw his weight about. But the audience demanded a sight of the corpse, then as now. Lined up to represent him in the bath was the tailor’s dummy Letty had worked on with such glee that afternoon.
Acquired from a gents’ outfitters in Syntagma Square, the mannequin, once divested of its smart Parisian suiting, had proved a disappointment. Slender, smooth, and white-skinned, it was no stand-in for a leathery Mycaenean warrior just off wartime manoeuvres. Jokily, the stage manager had approached Laetitia with the
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