legends · 4 min read ·
Covering the Lead
An understudy goes on for a lead who is ill, and finds himself in a play whose audience filled the house before the curtain.
An understudy is an insurance policy that has to turn up to rehearsal. You learn a part you will probably never play. You sit in the stalls for the notes, you cover for the lead when they're sick, and you go home on a night bus at eleven. My career has been mostly understudying. I like to say I've given nine hundred performances, none of them on a stage.
The Alexandra Theatre is an old house, a Victorian proscenium arch, red plush and gilt and a ceiling like a wedding cake. I was covering the leading man in a revival of a play I won't name, a drawing-room thing set in the thirties. I knew every line. I could do his blocking asleep.
On the tenth night of the run I went up to the dressing room at six, as I did every evening, to hang my coat. I was early. The theatre was empty. On the way up I went through the stage door and across the back of the stage, through the dark between the flats and the ropes, and I heard a voice.
A man's voice, quietly, from the stalls, reading. Deadpan, an actor's reading, line by line. I stopped. I thought the director must be giving notes. I looked. There was no one.
"...and if you think I came all this way to be told what I may and may not say..."
It was not our play. I knew the play. This was a different one, written in the same style, in the same period, with the same drawing-room diction, but with words I had never heard. I stood in the dark and listened to a scene. Two people, a man and a woman, arguing over a letter. It was very good. It had real heat.
"...Then I shall say it again, Margaret. He is not coming back."
A woman's voice answered. Exactly my own pitch and timbre, only older. "Then we had better stop setting his place."
I stood very still. It was not coming from the stalls. It was coming from the stage, from the set. From a point in the middle of the drawing room where there is a chaise longue and a gramophone.
I looked at the set. Our set. A well-furnished room, with French windows, a fire. Lit by a single working light, a bulb on a pole that is left burning all the time, the ghost light, so that no one falls into the orchestra pit in the dark. And in the thin gold light that fell across the chaise longue, I saw a script, lying open.
I picked it up. A typed script, on yellowed paper, the cover limp as cloth. The title was the same as the play I was in. But the first page read, in the cast list, in the old typeface, *THE MAN: understudy*, and my name.
I turned the pages. The text was nothing like ours. It was all about a man who comes to a house to take over a role that belongs to another. An understudy. He has learned the lines. He has waited a long time. And on the last page, the stage direction: *The lead does not arrive. The understudy goes on.*
Underneath, in pencil, someone had written: *It is the same play. It was always the same play. Don't tell them.*
I put the script back. I went upstairs. I hung my coat. In the corridor I met the stage manager, and she said, bright and breathless, "Thank God you're early. Callum's gone down with a chest. He's gone home. You're on."
I should say that this is what every understudy dreams of. It has never happened to me. I was shaking. I put on the costume, which was too big. I went on at half past seven.
The audience was good. Warm, quick. I got a laugh on the first line, and another on the second, and for the first act I was more alive than I had ever been in my life. In the second act I came to the scene, the letter, the argument, and heard the leading lady speak a line that was not in our script.
It was the line from the other play. *He is not coming back.*
I knew the response. I said it. My own voice. My own words, the ones I had heard in the dark. And the audience, in the red plush stalls, leaned forward as one body, and in that instant I looked out past the footlights and saw that the seats were filling.
Faces, row on row, in clothes from a different decade. All of them looking at me. And in the front row, in the seat nearest the stage, a pale man in a dinner jacket, with the ruined face of a man who has not been on stage for ninety years, leaning forward, mouthing every word.
At the interval, in the wings, I found the stage manager. "Where's Callum?" I said.
"He's in his dressing room," she said. "He's been sick all night. He'll be back for the curtain call."
"Callum is in the show?"
"Of course he is," she said. "You're his understudy. You're in the wings. Aren't you?"