to avoid further complications, I gestured pointedly at my watch and turned energetically to the dressing-rooms. The remaining cast members, beaming with pride, followed joyfully on my heels. Just before the door closed I heard S. still casting his charms over his admirers. ‘That’s how we always talk,’ he was saying.
Our performance went very well, as I’d been sure that it would. There was no question of anyone’s forgetting his lines – not a single slip, not even so much as a stutter. Our acting was inspired, and we enjoyed it. One by one, the most sublime scenes from the greatest works of drama unrolled before the audience, each culminating in a monologue that fulfilled the function of a Greek chorus. But the force did not flow from our technique, our mastery of the texts or our confidence on stage. It flowed mainly from the fact that every line we uttered was imbued with truth – the truth of our own feelings and experience. In speaking the lines it was as if we were talking about ourselves. Just as the crowd of students had taken up that ‘No more’ and endowed it with a meaning of their own, so now we were singing our own song, with the words of the classics as our text.
It was a song of anger and rebellion, bitterness and resentment. Not this, it said – youth should not be like this! School should not be like this, the world should not be like this! Prometheus chained to his rock was a young teacher we had adored, fired for ‘excessive liberality’ in the classroom. The unyielding, uncompromising Creon personified the narrow-minded Tapeworm. Every silly and pathetic Shakespearean creature represented the Eunuch or his like. But the Misanthrope I reserved for myself: Alceste was me. It was with special relish that I spoke the lines of his final speech:
May you always be true to each other, and know
All the joys and contentments that love can bestow.
As for me, foully wronged, maligned and betrayed,
I’ll abandon this world where injustice holds sway
And retire to some tranquil and far-away place
Where honour’s a virtue and not a disgrace.
But I put even more intensity into Hamm’s monologue from Endgame – perhaps because these were the closing lines of our performance. I took a few steps forward, stared piercingly at the audience, in particular at the jury, seated at a long table with S., their chairman, in the middle, and began with tremendous calm:
Me to play.
You weep, and weep, for nothing, so as not to laugh,
and little by little . . . you begin to grieve.
I cast a long, lingering look around the room and went on:
All those I might have helped. Helped!
Saved. Saved!
The place was crawling with them.
Then I turned on the assembled company with a thunderous glare and launched with fury into the attack:
Use your head, can’t you, use your head, you’re on
earth, there’s no cure for that. Get out of here and
love one another! Lick your neighbour as yourself!
Out of my sight and back to your petting parties!
Having spat this out, I sank into a kind of gloomy apathy and spoke the final two sentences softly, as if more to myself than to the audience:
All that, all that!
The end is in the beginning and yet you go on.
I let my head sink slowly down, and then came the blackout, during which we all hurried offstage.
The storm of applause that broke out left no room for doubt as to the results of the competition. And, indeed, we were not left long in suspense. The good news, at that stage still unofficial, was brought to us about an hour later, in the foyer, where we ran into the members of the jury as they emerged from their deliberations. It was S., of course, who announced it – predictably, in the following form:
Most excellent, my spirit! Thou didst well
And worthily perform. The prize is yours.
‘I don’t believe it,’ I replied, finally putting an end to this Shakespearean back-and-forth. ‘It’s too beautiful to be true . . .’
‘You’ll soon see for yourself,’ he said, likewise reverting to prose. ‘Prospero never lies. At most . . . he might play tricks,’ he added with a roguish wink, and proceeded to honour us each in turn with a shake of the hand and a solemn ‘Congratulations’.
I was happy. Here it was, granted at last – the thing I’d dreamed of so often. The reality of which I was a part, which I had in a sense created, was indeed on a par with the stuff of legend. I felt like a hero whose deeds would go down in history. I was not, however, allowed to feel this way for long.
A few days later, when official news of our victory reached the school, the Tapeworm ascended the stage at morning assembly (which on Saturdays always included a summing-up of the week) and proceeded to favour us with a speech. It went more or less as follows: ‘It is my pleasure to inform you all, as well as the School Board, that our drama group has won first prize at this year’s Festival of School and Amateur Theatres. We congratulate them; we are delighted.’
‘There, you see, sir?’ shouted our Haemon, unable to contain himself. ‘And you didn’t want to approve it!’
‘You’re mistaken,’ replied the Tapeworm with a complacent smile. ‘What I didn’t want to approve was something quite different, something that certainly wouldn’t have won you any prizes. Fortunately your leader’ – his eyes sought me out and he pointed in my direction – ‘turned out to be a sensible boy. He took my advice and made the necessary changes.’
‘That’s not true!’ I couldn’t let such a brazen lie pass. ‘We played everything according to the script!’
‘The e-men-ded script,’ he enunciated, wagging a playful finger at me to defuse the tension in the air: I was, after all, publicly accusing him of lying. ‘But enough of this squabbling over trivialities,’ he concluded magnanimously.
The Tapeworm’s move was not without effect. Although in principle people believed me, not him, seeds of doubt had been sown: the deputy head had his faults, but it was hard to believe him capable of such deceit. So we were constantly baited and teased – jokingly, but in an annoying way – with questions like, ‘Well, was it censored or not?’
Listless and irritated, I waited for the prize-giving ceremony. Obviously, I thought, there’s nothing to be hoped for from the school; I should have given up on that a long time ago. That’s not where I’ll get the appreciation I deserve. It was only a few days before events confirmed how right I was.
The prize-giving was scheduled for Sunday at five. It was to include presentations of brief extracts from the selected performances, and would take place not at the theatre
