He hated making the cuts, but he knew that he could not complain. At the beginning he had grumbled a great deal – indeed expressed a pained amazement – until he had made himself less
than welcome in Alexander’s offices. He knew that there was no point in claiming that if the play had needed cuts he would have made them before he finished it. Every day now he made
excisions, and he thought it strange that after a few hours he remained the only one who noticed the gaps, the missing moments.
During the rehearsals he had little to do. He was both thrilled and disturbed by the idea that only half the work was his, the other half belonged to the director, the actors and the
scene-makers. Overseeing the work was the element of time and that was new to him. Over the proscenium arch there was an immense, invisible clock to whose ticking the playwright must attend, its
hands moving inexorably on from eight thirty, as precise as the audience’s patience. In that busy period of two hours, if the two intervals were taken into account, he must present and solve
the problem he had set himself, or be doomed.
As the play came to seem more distant from him, and more real, as he watched the first rehearsals on stage, then the first dress rehearsals, he became sure that he had found his metier, that he
had not begun too late to write for the theatre. He was ready now to change his life. He foresaw an end to long, solitary days; the grim satisfaction that fiction gave him would be replaced by a
life in which he wrote for voices and movement and an immediacy that through all his life up to now he had believed he would never experience. This new world was now within his grasp. But suddenly,
especially in the morning, he would become certain that the opposite was the case, that he would fail, and he would have to return, willingly and unwillingly, to his true medium: the printed page.
He had never known such days of strange shifts and excitements.
He felt only affection for the actors. There were times when he would have done anything he could for them. He arranged for hampers of food to be delivered backstage during the long days of
rehearsal: cold chicken and beef, fresh salads, potatoes in mayonnaise, fresh bread and butter. He loved watching the actors eat, relishing those moments when they returned from their appointed
roles to civilian life. He looked forward to years ahead when he would write new parts and observe them create the parts and play them every night until the run was over and they would fade back
into the pale world outside.
He also felt that as a novelist he had fallen upon evil times, any indication of his being hugely wanted by any editor or publisher was declining. A new generation, writers he did not know and
did not prize, had taken universal possession. The sense of being almost finished weighed him down; he had been producing little, and publication in periodicals, once so lucrative and useful, was
becoming closed to him.
He wondered if the theatre could be not only a source of pleasure and amusement, but a lifeline, a way of beginning again now that the fruitful writing of fiction seemed to be fading.
Guy
Domville
, his drama about the conflict between the material life and the life of pure contemplation, the vicissitudes of human love and a life dedicated to a higher happiness, was written to
succeed, to match the public mood, and he awaited the opening night with a mixture of pure optimism – an absolute certainty that the play would hit home – and a deep anxiety, a sense
that worldly glamour and universal praise would never be offered to him.
Everything depended on the opening night. He had imagined every detail, except what he himself would do. If he stood backstage, he would be in the way; in the auditorium he would be too
agitated, too ready to allow every groan or sigh or fall of silence to disturb him or elate him unduly. He thought that he could hide himself in the Cap and Bells, the public house closest to the
theatre, and Edmund Gosse, whom he trusted, could slip out at the end of the second act and let him know how it was going. But two days before the opening he decided the plan was absurd.
He would have to do something. There was no one he could have supper with because he had invited everyone he knew to the opening, and most of them had accepted. He could travel to a nearby city,
he thought, view the sights and then return on an evening train in time for the applause. But nothing, he knew, could take his mind off his prospects. He wished that he was halfway through a book,
with no need to finish until the spring when serialization would begin. He wished he could work quietly in his study with the haunting grey morning light of the London winter filtered through the
windows. He wished for solitude and for the comfort of knowing that his life depended not on the multitude but on remaining himself.
He determined, after much indecision and discussion with Gosse and Alexander, that he would go to the Haymarket to see the new play by Oscar Wilde. It was the only way, he felt, in which he
would be coerced into quietness between eight thirty and ten forty-five. He could then make his way to St James’s Theatre. Gosse and Alexander agreed with him that it was the best plan, the
only plan. His mind would be elsewhere at least some of the time, and he could arrive at St James’s Theatre at the enraptured moment when his play had ended or was close to ending.
This, he thought, as he prepared himself for the evening, is how the real world conducts itself, the world he had withdrawn from, the world he guessed at. This is how money is made, how
reputations are established. It is done with risk and excitement, the stomach hollow, the heart beating too fast, the imagination fired with possibilities. How many days in his life would be like
this? If this, the first play of his which he believed could make his fortune, should end triumphantly, the opening nights of the future should be softer and less inflamed. And yet he did not stop
wishing, even as he waited for the cab, that he had embarked just now on a new story, that the blank pages were ripe and waiting for him, that the evening was empty and he had nothing to do but
write. The will to withdraw was strong in him as he set out for the Haymarket. He would have given anything now to be three and a half hours into the future, to know the result, to bathe in the
praise and the adulation, or to know the worst.
As the cab made its way to the theatre he felt a sudden, strange, new, fierce desolation. It was too much, he thought, he was asking too much. He forced himself to think about the scenery, the
golden lighting, the costumes, and the drama itself, and those who had accepted the invitations, and he felt only hope and excitement. He had chosen this and now he had it, he must not complain. He
had shown Gosse the list of those who would fill the stalls and dress circle and Gosse had said that such a galaxy of aristocratic, literary and scientific celebrity would gather in St
James’s Theatre as had never before been seen in a London playhouse.
Above them would be – he hesitated and smiled, knowing that if he were writing now he would stop and see if he could find the right tone – above them would be – how should he
say it? – the people who had paid money, the real audience whose support and applause would mean more than the support and applause of his friends. They were, he almost said it aloud, the
people who do not read my books, that is how we will know them. The world, he smiled as the next phrase went through his mind, is full of them. They are never at a loss for kindred company.
Tonight, he hoped, these people would be on his side.
Instantly, as soon as he set foot on the pavement outside the Haymarket, he became jealous of Oscar Wilde. There was a levity about those who were entering the theatre, they looked like people
ready to enjoy themselves thoroughly. He had never in his life, he felt, looked like that himself, and he did not know how he was going to manage these hours among people who seemed so jolly, so
giddy, so jaunty, so generally cheerful. No one he saw, not one single face, no couple nor group, looked to him like people who would enjoy
Guy Domville
. These people were out for a happy
conclusion. He winced now at the arguments with Alexander over the less than happy ending of
Guy Domville
.
He wished he had demanded a seat at the end of a row. In his allotted place he was enclosed, and, as the curtain rose, and the audience began to laugh at lines which he thought crude and clumsy,
he felt under siege. He did not laugh once; he thought not a moment was funny, but more importantly, he thought not a moment was true. Every line, every scene was acted out as though silliness were
a higher manifestation of truth. No opportunity was missed in portraying witlessness as wit; the obvious and shallow and glib provoked the audience into hearty and hilarious laughter.
If
An Ideal Husband
were feeble and vulgar, then he was clearly the only one who thought so, and when the first interval came, his longing to leave was profound. But the truth was that he
had nowhere to go. His sole consolation was that this was not an opening night, there was no fashionable crowd, no one whom he recognized and no one who recognized him. Most consoling of all, there
was no sign of Wilde himself, loud and large and Irish as he was, or of his entourage.
He wondered what he could have done with such a story. The writing, line by line, was a mockery of writing, an appeal for cheap laughs, cheap responses. The sense of a corrupt ruling class was
shallow; the movement of the plot was wooden; the play was badly made. Once it was over, he thought, no one would remember it, and he would remember it only for the agony he felt, the pure, sheer
tension about his own play going on just a short walk away. His drama was about renunciation, he thought, and these people had renounced nothing. At the end, as they called the actors back for
further bows, he saw from their flushed and happy faces that they did not appear to have any immediate plans to amend their ways.
As he walked across St James’s Square to learn his own fate, the complete success of what he had seen seemed to him to constitute a dreadful premonition of the shipwreck of
Guy
Domville
, and he stopped in the middle of the square, paralysed by the terror of this probability, afraid to go and learn more.
Later, over years, he would hear hints and snatches of what had occurred. He never discovered everything, but he knew this much: that the clash between the invited audience and those above them
who had paid was as unbridgeable as the gap between himself and the audience at the Oscar Wilde play. The paying public, it seemed, had begun to shift and shuffle, cough and whisper, even before
the first act was over. In the second act they laughed when Mrs Edward Saker appeared in her large and expansive period costume. And once they began to laugh, they began to enjoy being offensive.
It was not long before the laughter turned to jeers.
He learned later, much later also, what happened when Alexander uttered his last lines: ‘I’m the last, my lord, of the Domvilles.’ Someone from the gallery had shouted,
‘It’s a damned good thing you are!’ They hooted and roared and when the curtain came down they catcalled and yelled abuse as those in the stalls and dress circle applauded
enthusiastically.
That night he entered the theatre by the stage door, meeting on arrival the stage manager, who assured him that all had gone well, his play was a success. Something about the way it was said
made Henry want to enquire further, find out the scale and quality of the success, but just then the first applause came, and he listened, mistaking the catcalls for roars of approval. He glimpsed
Alexander, noted how stiff and serious he was as he came off the stage and waited for a moment before returning to take his bow. He moved closer to the side of the stage, certain that Alexander and
the other actors were triumphant. The whistles and roars, he still believed, indicated special approval of one or two of the performers, Alexander surely among them.
He stood and listened, close enough to the wings for Alexander to see him as he walked off from taking his bow. Later, he was told that there were wild shouts of ‘Author! Author!’
from his friends in the audience, but they were not wild enough for him to hear. Alexander heard them, however, or so he later said, because on catching the author’s eye he approached him,
his face solemn, his expression fixed, and led him slowly and firmly by the hand onto the stage.
This was the crowd he had imagined over those long days of rehearsal. He had imagined them attentive and ready to be moved, he had imagined them still and sombre. He had not prepared himself for
the chaos of noise and busy fluttering. He took it in for a moment, confused, and then he bowed. And when he lifted his head he realized what he was facing. In the stalls and in the gallery the
members of the paying public were hissing and booing. He looked around and saw mockery and contempt. The invited audience remained seated, still applauding, but the applause was drowned out by the
crescendo of loud, rude disapproval which came from the people who had never read his books.
The worst part was now – when he did not know what to do, when he could not control the expression on his own face, the look of panic he could not prevent. And now he could make out the
faces of friends – Sargent, Gosse, Philip Burne-Jones – still gallantly applauding, futile against the yells of the mob. Nothing had prepared him for this. Slowly, he moved off the
stage. He did not attend to Alexander’s speech to calm the audience. He blamed Alexander for leading him onto the stage, he blamed the crowd for booing, but more than anyone he blamed himself
for being here. There was no alternative now, he would have to leave by the stage door. He had dreamed so much of moments of triumph, mingling with the invited guests, pleased that so many old
friends had come to witness his theatrical success. Now he would walk home and keep his head down like a man who has committed a crime and is in imminent danger of apprehension.
He waited in the shadows backstage so that he would not have to see the actors. Nor did he wish to leave just yet as he did not know whom he might see in the streets around the theatre. Neither
he nor they would know what to say, so great and so public was his defeat. For his friends, this night would be entered into the annals of the unmentionable, pages in which he had so studiously
avoided having his name appear. As time passed, however, he realized that he could not betray the performers now. He could not give into his own horrible urge to be alone in the darkness, to escape
into the night and walk as though he had written nothing and was nobody. He would have to go to them and thank them; he would have to insist that the repast planned after the triumph of his play
should go ahead. In the half light he stood preparing himself, steeling himself, ready to suppress whatever his own urges and needs might be. He made his hands into fists as he set out to smile and
bow and imagine that the evening in all its glory had been due entirely to the talents of the actors in the great tradition of the London stage.