Witness account · 3 min read · Set in The Meridian Hall ·
The Bell Before the Tape
The interval bell rings one cough ahead of the reel, and three signatures have timed it.
- reliability: corroborated
- witness: "Leslie Fane, theatre steward"
I am the steward at Meridian Hall. I keep the front of the house and the fittings book, and this matter is written in the fittings book, so you may go and read it there under its file line. The house runs to recorded performance now: the orchestra reel, struck off a live night in the week of the Misprint and kept by the hall ever since. The interval is called by the house bell, wired to the sound desk and cued off the tape counter at mark eleven-eight, not by hand and not by any person in the building.
At every performance since the reel went in, the interval bell rings a cough's length ahead of the tape. Not a second by the rule; a cough by the ear, the short kept-down kind a man does into his collar in the stalls. The head of act two on the reel opens on room tone with the player's own cough in it, common as muck and on the tape since the night it was cut. The bell is cued to the counter, which is cut and dried; the cough is cued to nothing at all; and the bell comes in ahead of the cough every time we run it, and we have run it sixty-odd performances since.
I have timed it at fourteen performances with the house stopwatch against the counter. The gap sits at one cough, mean of fourteen, never under the cough and never over it. Douglas Renn, who mans the desk, has keyed the cue by hand off the counter and the bell still lands where it lands. Joan Pell, out front, has stood in row F with her eyes shut and placed it the same, and Joan has no stake in the wiring one way or the other.
The house electrician read the circuit correct and initialled it. Renn's own test card says the desk picks nothing out of the air, there is no microphone open in the hall at the interval, and the bell has no ear that anyone can find. Nobody can tell me what the bell is listening to, and the electrician's answer was to tighten two glands and leave, which is an answer you can bank.
So for corroboration: Renn signed the sheet in the fittings book, and Pell signed it, and the electrician's initials stand on the circuit line, and the Board filed the matter under AUDIBLE CLOCK, EARLY BY A COUGH. That is what confirmation looks like when it comes to a steward: three hands, a file number, and the bell keeping its head start at every performance since.
The audiences have never once marked the gap, which is my work done to standard, and I go on timing it weekly because the book wants a number and I write the same number. The reel was cut off a live night; the cough is the player's; and the bell manages to be ahead of the recorded cough by exactly one cough, every time, in a hall where nothing is listening. My question goes into the book under the timing each week, small and unwitnessed: what is the bell matching — the cough that is on the tape, or the night the cough was still in the hall?