legends · 5 min read ·
Understudy
An understudy learns the lead's lines before she is given them, and the lighthouse set has a figure who knows hers.
**Prompt book — The Tide Clock, Ardmore Community Theatre**
*Act Two, scene four. Director's notes in red. Stage manager: T. Fennell.*
· · ·
The Ardmore Community Theatre was the kind of building that had been a chapel, then a cinema, then a theatre that did not quite pay for its heating. Its stage had a trapdoor no one had used since the 1970s, and a prompt corner stacked with spare flats that smelled faintly of size glue and wet wool.
Ruth Lindqvist had been cast as understudy for the lead, a role that required her to learn every line and every blocking mark but never to step onto the stage unless the lead was ill. She had done understudy work for six years. She was good at it. She had a notebook full of cross-hatched marks that meant *ready* and a habit of mouthing the cues in the wings.
The lead, Janet Osei, had been ill twice in three weeks. Ruth had been called in both times. The second time, the audience had applauded her at the curtain, and Janet had watched the applause from the prompt corner with a face like a cracked plate.
On the Tuesday of the final week, Janet did not come in at all.
· · ·
"Take it from the top of two," said the director, Malcolm Shreve, from the dark of the stalls. "Ruth, you have the blocking. Nobody needs the book."
Ruth went to her mark, center stage, under the single working light. The set was the interior of a lighthouse, all grey board and rope. The prompt corner was empty except for the stage manager, Teddy Fennell, who sat cross-legged with his script open and his pencil in his teeth.
She began the speech. It was the one the audience waited for, the scene where the keeper tells his daughter that the tide will not turn back.
She got through the first half and found that the next line was already in her mouth. It was not her line. It was the line the lead had been saying for the last three weeks, in Janet's voice, with Janet's catch on the second syllable.
She stopped.
"Keep going," Malcolm said.
"I know the line," Ruth said. "I don't know why I know it."
She said the line. It came out in her own voice, but when she reached the catch on the second syllable, her throat closed on it exactly as Janet's did, and she felt the word land in the back of her mouth like a stone from another mouth.
· · ·
**Prompt book — annotation (T. Fennell, in pencil)**
The director's note, in red, next to the scene: *Ruth to speak without book.* Underneath it, in pencil, the stage manager has written: *Ruth is speaking lines in the wrong order. She is giving the response before the cue. Nobody has cued her.*
On the next page, a stage direction in the lead's handwriting that was not in the script: *Stand where the light reaches the edge of the rope. Do not look up. The understudy is watching the audience. The audience is watching the understudy.*
· · ·
They ran it again. Ruth went to her mark. The light found her. The stage manager's pencil was still in his teeth, and he stopped chewing it when she began.
This time the lines came in order. Her entrance. The keeper's speech. The turn to the daughter. The director, out in the dark, said nothing, and the silence was the right kind, the kind that means an actor is doing something correct without knowing why.
At the end of the scene, the light should have gone down. It didn't. It stayed on her, a hard white circle on the boards, and beyond its edge the stage was dark in the way a room goes dark when someone has closed the door on it.
Something moved in the dark at the edge of the rope. It was a figure in a long coat, standing at the foot of the lighthouse stair with its back to the audience. It was turned, slightly, toward Ruth.
She said, quite calmly, "I'm not finished."
The figure turned its head.
It had Janet's face. It also had Ruth's, very slightly, the way a face does when two people have been practising the same expression in the same mirror. Its mouth moved, and Ruth heard the next line, and it was hers, not the keeper's, not the daughter's. It was the line she had been saying for six years in the wings, mouthing cues to herself, the one that said *I'm ready, I'm ready.*
Malcolm's voice came out of the dark, a little too loud, a little too calm. "Ruth. Come off, please."
She didn't move. The figure took a step toward the light.
· · ·
**Prompt book — stage manager's last entry (T. Fennell)**
Opening night. The house was full. Janet was back in her seat in the second row, face pale, holding her programme on her knees. She said she had dreamed of the lighthouse and woke with her mouth full of someone else's cue.
Ruth did not come out for the curtain call. The company searched the wings. The trap was closed. The light over the lighthouse stair was still on, and the rope was still grey, and the figure in the long coat was standing exactly where Ruth had been standing for the last scene, with its back to the audience and its face turned toward the light.
Someone in the front row asked if the understudy was ill.
Janet stood up. She said, very clearly, that she was the lead, and she knew the lines, and she would take the scene from the top. Then she walked up the steps and into the light, and her voice came out of her mouth in a rhythm I could not match, and at the foot of the lighthouse stair the figure in the long coat stepped back to make room for her.
The audience applauded. I wrote the cue in my book, in pencil, very small.
*Understudy: ready.*
I have never been able to erase it.