The Children's Book - A. S. Byatt [307]
“Someone should make Tom grow up,” said Dorothy.
“He is grown up,” said Olive, and then, in a small voice “I know, I know.”
“I’ve got to go. I’ll miss my train.”
“Come back soon.”
“I’ll see how it fits in,” said Dorothy.
43
Olive dreamed that a theatre was a skull. She saw it loom in a foggy, sooty street, pristine white and smiling. There was nothing surprising in this shape. She floated in, somehow, between the teeth, and was in a dome full of bright flying things, birds and trapeze artists, angels and demons, fairies and buzzing insects. She was supposed to do something. Sort them, catch them, conduct them. They clustered round her head like the playing-cards in Alice, like a swarm of bees or wasps. She couldn’t see or breathe, and woke up. She wrote down the dream. She wrote “I see I have always thought of the theatre as the inside of a skull. A book can be held by a real person, in a train, at a desk, in a garden. A theatre is something unreal everyone is inside.” She was both entranced, and sometimes exasperated, by the exigencies of August Steyning. He had a skeleton of a theatrical performance to which things must be fitted. There needed to be curtains at the end of acts, there needed to be development, and a climax. “Your story is like an interminable worm,” he said to Olive. “We must chop it into segments and reconstitute it. We must see what theatrical machinery we have, and we must use it. There must be music.”
Anselm Stern said what was needed was music like Richard Strauss. No, no, said Steyning, something English and fairylike, something between “Greensleeves” and The Ring of the Nibelung. There was a young musician collecting English folk songs who would know what was wanted.
The play was to open with the shadowless boy meeting the Queen of the Elves—who would also have no shadow. The lighting was complicated. They argued over whether they should dramatise the Rat taking the shadow, and decided to save the Rat for a later encounter. Steyning named the boy Thomas—he was to evoke True Thomas, he was not a fairy prince, or a prince of any kind, said August Steyning, and Olive concurred. He would wade in blood, which could be done with red lighting, and the Queen would give him a silver apple branch, as a talisman, and as a source of imperishable food, as happened in Celtic myths. She would also give him a coal-ball which would protect him in his hour of need. It is a pity, said Steyning, that we can’t make the ferns and trees in the coal come magically to life again. He drew the back wall of the stage as he saw it—he drew it in charcoal, he rubbed in the coal dust to make his effects. The backcloth was a stratified black and grey series of ledges, going diagonally down. He discussed with Anselm Stern the possibilities of making animated creatures and tiny folk dance and run along the ledges. Stern said a puppetmaster could stand behind and move many, successively. They could appear and disappear. Steyning drew ferns and dragonflies with his charcoal, grey in grey. Olive said that the plants in the coalface did sometimes come to life—or death—they exhaled the gases of arrested decay. This was the horror called Choke Damp which killed quite suddenly. Dampf, yes, said Anselm. I know of that. And then, said Olive, there is White Damp, which is said to smell of sweet flowers—of violets—in fact it is carbon monoxide. And the third, and worst, is Fire Damp—which also comes from the decaying ancient vegetables—it comes seeping from the rocks or hissing out from fissures.
She stopped, remembering bad things.
Steyning was drawing. A demon made of flowers, a demon made of twisting ropes, a fiery devil with a flaming crown on a flaming mane. “I could make those,” said Wolfgang.
“There is the Fireman,” said Olive. “The miner in soaked white linen, who holds up a long rod with a candle, to burn off the Fire Damp.”
“It is like a ballet,