Death Of A Hollow Man by Caroline Graham Page A

idiots.”
    A week passed. None of the rehearsals went well, and the first couple of run-throughs were absolutely dreadful. But it was at the dress rehearsal (so everyone later told Barnaby) that things really came to a head.
    As Esslyn strode around the stage with his spring-heeled tango dancer’s walk in his blue-and-silver coat, so his performance grew in glossy fraudulence. He had stopped acting with—indeed, he hardly even looked at—his fellow players and strutted and posed in splendid isolation. Backed up by his myrmidons, he continued to snipe at David and Nicholas.
    Nicholas was coping with all this very well. His earlier talk with Deidre had been the first of several, and he was now groping his way toward what he believed would be a truthful, intelligent, and lively rendering of the part of Mozart. He was halfway through the opening scene and playing to the back of Salieri’s neck when Esslyn suddenly stopped what he was saying and strolled down to the footlights.
    “Harold?” Harold, his face marked with surprise, climbed out of his seat and walked forward. “Any particular stress on che gioia?”
    “What?”
    “Sorry. To be frank, my problem is … I’m not quite sure what it means.” Silence. ‘‘Perhaps you could enlighten me?” Long pause. “I’d be most grateful.”
    “Now who’s being cattivo, ” murmured Clive.
    “Don’t you know?” said Harold.
    “I’m afraid not.”
    “Do you mean to tell me that you’ve been saying those lines over and over again for the last six weeks and you don’t know what they mean?”
    “So it appears.”
    “And you call yourself an actor?”
    “I certainly call myself as much of an actor as you are a director.”
    An even longer pause. Then, softly on the air, it seemed to everyone present, came a feint reverberation, like the roll of distant drums. Harold said, very quietly, “Are you trying to wind me up?”
    “Didn’t think it was necessary,” muttered Donald. “Thought he ran on hot air.”
    “Of course not, Harold. But I do think—”
    “I’m not going to translate it for you. Do your own homework.”
    “Well, that seems a bit—”
    “All right, everyone. Carry on. And no interval. We’ve wasted enough time as it is.”
    Esslyn shrugged and sauntered back to his previous position, and the reverberations rippled away into a silence shot with disappointment. The second confrontation, you could almost see everyone thinking, and it’s over before it really gets going. But their frustration was short-lived, for a few minutes later Esslyn stopped again, saying, “Do you think it’s true he’s never really laid a finger on Katherina?”
    “Of course it’s true!” shouted back Harold. “Why on earth should he tell himself lies?”
    Then there was a query on court etiquette, on the timing of the Adagio in the library scene, and on the position of the piano-forte. Harold once more made his way to the footlights, this time with a savage tic in one eyelid.
    “If you’ve noticed all these hiccups before,” he said icily, “may I ask why you left it till this late stage to say so?”
    “Because I’m not in charge. I was waiting for you to pick them up. As you’re obviously not going to, I feel, for the good of the play and the benefit of the company, I have to say something.”
    “The day you have any concern for the rest of the company, Esslyn, will be the day pigs take to the skies.”
    After this, as if the earlier interruptions had been just appetizers, the merest titillations, things started to go more splendidly wrong. Kitty’s padding would not stay up. The more it slid about, the more she grabbed at it. The more she grabbed at it, the more she giggled, until Harold stood up and yelled at her when she promptly burst into tears.
    “It’s not so easy,” she wept, “when you’re already pregnant in the first place.”
    “How many places are there, for godsake?” retorted Harold. “Wardrobe!” He stood tapping his foot