• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 2089 0

props workers, without paying them. Indeed, Steyning said to Olive, they pay you. They sat down with Anselm Stern and Wolfgang at the dinner table in Nutcracker Cottage and elaborated a plan. Steyning’s first idea had been to use the tale of the stolen child—or possibly of the stolen wet-nurse—who is spirited into the Fairy Hill, and needs to be rescued. This, he explained, would mean that you could “see into the hill” if the marionette theatre could be—a closed, curtained world—in the midst of the human theatre. Anselm Stern said that they might use those versions of the universal Cinderella story—Catskin, Allerleirauh—in which the princess, fleeing her father, finds a prince, only to have him spirited away by a witch, at the ends of the earth and put into a magic sleep of forgetfulness. He had always been particularly drawn to those tales of a resourceful heroine covering the earth in her search, asking guidance of the sun, the moon, the stars, the winds. Wolfgang said he was interested in making life-size masks and puppets. He had had an idea of making a whole audience of great dolls and scarecrows, who would be there at the beginning, and sit quite still, and then suddenly—dangerously—join in the action. Besiege the fortress, maybe. Maybe be invoked by the many-furred girl. Olive said

“There is something in my mind. A search for a real house in a magic world. A search for a magic house in a real world. Two worlds, inside each other.”

“The Wizard of Oz,” said Steyning.

“Humphry says that is an allegory about Bimetallism and the Gold Standard, with its road of gold ingots and its silver shoes.”

“It has a little wizard in a huge machine,” said Stern. “Which is good for marionettes, or other puppets.”

“The fortress is like the Dark Tower in Sir Roland to the Dark Tower Came,” said Olive. “A lightless block.”

“There is a lot one can do with lighting,” said Steyning. “Even in a barn, without a conflagration.”

“These small pieces of tales are like a kaleidoscope,” said Stern. “Without end to be reshaped, differently ordered.”

It was an odd play. It grew like a vegetable from its story-seeds, and the metaphors in Olive’s mind. The early days of the camp were spent on construction and reconstruction. Marian Oakeshott appeared and took charge of an army of wardrobe workers, who brought old clothes and new bales, and cut, and stitched, and decorated. Wolfgang had a workshop for life-size puppets and mask-construction, in which he involved Tom, who was full of inventiveness. The workshop was in an old barn where bales of straw still stood about, and Tom began to make a strawman. This creature turned out not to be benign, like the one in The Wizard of Oz, but vacant, swollen and menacing. He had a huge boll of a head, with black tunnel-eyes and a mouth stitched with string, jaggedly. This head lolled and revolved above a larger-than-life-size bale of a body, with swivelling dropsical legs, and short, useless arms, no more than fringes of sticks at the shoulders. Wolfgang said it was full of horror, and should be one of the enemies met on the way. I’ll act it, said Tom. It can burn up. It should burn up, said Steyning, admiring it, but we can’t risk it, not in a barn full of children and dolls.

“Blasebalg,” said Anselm Stern. “I do not know the English.”

“Bellows,” said Steyning. “Of course. Straws in the wind. A small tourbillon, leaving nothing.”

“And I shall be a Wolf-man,” said Wolfgang. “Someone has brought a coat of fur and a fox with some paws, and I was going to use them for Allerleirauh, but I shall make me a wire Beast, with a hot red tongue and a how-do-you-say, zuckender Schwantz, and great tearing nails.”

“Twitching tail. Claws,” said Steyning.

“Ja, claws. I shall be killed with a sword.”

“Our heroine doesn’t have a sword. She is a girl, not a woman.”

“Why?”

“Because she has been promised to my sister Hedda, and because my sister Dorothy will have nothing to do with it.”

“Cold iron,” said Steyning. “Those who go out against the Good People, or the Pharisees, must go armed with cold iron. She takes a kitchen