BACKSTAGE. Where the magic of theatre and the show yet to come is prepared before the big night; where the seamless wonder of the show exposes its guts and bones — her world, though she’s just someone playing a part that no one ever really sees or appreciates.
She shouldn’t be up here tonight, not so close to show-time, and most definitely not in the wings. But she couldn’t resist — not on a night like this. She’s willing to risk the ire of the actors, the stage hands, and even the Deputy Stage Manager himself. On show night, don’t let anyone persuade you that the Stage Manager or the Director or the Producer are in charge; as the curtain prepares to go up, the real power belongs to the Deputy Stage Manager, and he is not to be crossed.
She takes a quick, furtive glance around. No sign of him; and everyone else is too busy with their allotted pre-show tasks. She smiles. Maybe she’s going to get away with being up here after all, at least for a little while. Soon the show will begin.
Dare she take a look out on to the stage beyond the wings? She can’t resist. She peeps, and, even though from the wings she can see all the joins and trickeries of the production, still it is wondrous: a panorama of possibilities, where great and small work out their parts in the world’s tragedy and comedy.
Yes, she thinks, all the world is a stage, and tonight this stage is the whole world. A world of light and shadows, of stars and darkness, of city and land, where hope and doubt, failure and love will play out.
“WHO left this here? Who left this here?”
The voice is dry, throaty, and fierce, a voice like heavy boots crunching across gravel. The voice of a heavy-set, middle-aged man with greying, receding hair, his forehead fixed into a permanently lined frown. He eyeballs a thin young man standing by the props table.
“Er . . . me, DSM,” the young man manages to say. The DSM’s face seems to swell and bubble with frustration and near rage before he says, “Why . . . ?” The beat of silence which follows is ominous. “Why on the props table?”
“Because we need it, DSM?” the young man suggests, feebly.
The DSM picks up a handful of the crisp, yellow straw and examines it. Dust is released into the air, and the young man stifles a sneeze. The DSM looks at him in exasperation. How will he ever get this props table clear in time for Curtain Up?
Then he thinks, this is the lad’s first show. Cut him some slack. He pushes the handful of straw into the young man’s hand, and says: “On the stage, lad. How many times do I have to tell you? Put it in the manger” — and then adds, more sharply, “And get this table set properly for Act One, eh? Where are the shepherds’ crooks?”
The young man gulps and points towards a group of shepherds pretending that their staffs are swords, play-fighting like second-rate Douglas Fairbanks Juniors.
As the boy scurries off into the darkness, the DSM puts his head in his hands. Of all the seemingly countless productions of which he’s been part, this is easily the most stressful. There’s so much at stake. The show has too many moving parts. Everyone says “Never work with children and animals,” and this has both.
The thought of trying to get the cattle and sheep and other diverse creatures on stage at just the right moment makes him shudder. He’s responsible for every one. He wants to pray. He adjusts his headset, moves the mic a little closer to his lips, closes his eyes, and asks for a miracle.
“WHO’s in tonight?”
The old woman nearly jumps out of her skin. She stops peeping out of the wings and turns towards the voice. A young woman says, “Sorry, I didn’t mean to startle you,” and then, “Do I know you? Have we met?”
The old woman is not ready to say just yet. “I don’t think so. Have I seen you in something?”
The younger woman half-frowns, half-smiles, as if she’s both glad and insulted to have been asked.
“I’m the Understudy . . . again.” She pats her pockets. “I need a fag. Want to come?”
The old woman follows the Understudy through the shadows of the cavernous backstage, where it is getting busy now. They weave their way past technicians testing various bits of equipment, and an animal keeper trying to keep some sheep in check; they see the actor who plays the Innkeeper mumbling his lines. On the evidence of his flushed face, he seems to be rather the worse for wear, probably having sampled too much of his own wares. The shepherds are bickering over the correct positioning of their headdresses.
The two women press on, weaving deeper into the backstage until they find where the smokers go. It’s good to step out of the pressure-cooker atmosphere for a moment.
“WHOSE understudy are you?”
The Understudy laughs, a bitter, short laugh. “Are you teasing me?”
“Not at all. Honest question.”
In the same tone, the Understudy says, “I can do any of the roles, pretty much.” She rummages through her bag and pulls out a pack of cigarettes. “Want one?”
“No, thanks.”
The Understudy lights up and, jabbing the cigarette towards the old woman for emphasis, says, “There are some people who’d love to be the understudy. They think it will be their big break. Ha! When you’re understudy, you basically know everyone’s part. You’re there at every bloody rehearsal, and you have to watch your Lead’s every move and gesture. You know everything, and you’re nothing.
“You need to be able to go on at a moment’s notice — but you never see your name up in lights. And the worst of it is that it takes everything not to hope that the Lead can’t go on. . . ”
”How can you bear it?”
“How do you think? But we take the roles we can, don’t you find?”
“I guess.”
“You didn’t say what you do.”
“No,” says the old woman. “No, I didn’t, did I?”
THIS is it, thinks the DSM. Showtime. Curtain Up. He feels the tension in his bones. Quietly he whispers into his headset’s mic, “Curtain up, and stand by SFX cue 1, stand by LX cues 1, 2 & 3. . . Stand by smoke cue 1.” He sinks into his chair. ”SFX cue 1 and LX cues 1, 2 & 3, and smoke — go!”
As the action unfolds, and he slowly, carefully, and determinedly begins to cycle through his cues, he relaxes. All his pent-up nervous energy flows into the beautiful and focused present; he is doing what he was born to do. The show is unfolding magically, and everyone is playing their part.
The DSM has that curious feeling that he always has during a show: of being both present and absent; of feeling somehow disembodied, yet utterly in the moment. A part of his mind appreciates just how extraordinary the unfolding drama is — after all, it’s hard not to become breathless in the face of a story that shows God himself being born into a groaning and troubled world; but he daren’t lose sight of the cues and the book, his annotated script. His whole being tonight is defined by the book. He is the cue, and the cue is him.
AS THE Understudy and the old woman return backstage, they sense it: the intense, focused energy of showtime. There is no slackness now. Every actor, technician, and stage hand moves with purpose. There is a honed understanding of where each person needs to be at every moment. They might have been working on this show for millennia. . .
“We should get out of here,” the Understudy says.
“You don’t think you’ll be going on?”
“Not as a lead, no. I’d have been called by now. I’ll just be wanted as meat on the stage. Third Sack of Spuds. Bewildered Villager. Something like that.”
“You could sneak on with the angels? There’s so many of them no one would notice,” says the old woman, with a twinkle. The Understudy is about to snap back, but sees that the old woman is joking, and grins. She says, “Oh, they’d notice. Ever since I was cast as the Lead’s understudy they’ve refused to go on with me. I think all of them wanted that part. They’re a savage and jealous bunch, those angels.” She smiles, and the old woman smiles back, and says, “We can’t miss this. I know a place where we can see it all.”
“THIS is incredible,” the Understudy says, in a whisper. “Just incredible. Are we allowed up here?”
They’re standing on a gantry behind the lighting rig, high above the unfolding story on the stage below. From here, she can see every detail of the action as it unfolds.
“It’s worth the risk,” the old woman says, quietly.
“The DSM you mean?” the Understudy asks.
“No,” the old woman says. “No, I mean all this.” She gestures to the scene on the stage below.
Her gesture takes in shepherds — some sleeping, some talking; others gazing up at the night sky. She smiles as an angel walks towards them with tremendous news. She shares the audience’s response to the shepherds’ shock and awe when a heavenly choir sings “Glory to God in the highest”; their roar at a moment of low comedy as a young shepherd is caught with his robe up, doing his most human private business, just as the night is turned into almost-day when the heavenly choir launch into their routine.
“This is joy,” she whispers. This, she thinks, is the great drama of love.
“Who are you?” the Understudy asks, with increasing unease.
“I’m just the Dresser,” says the old woman, her eyes still on the action below. “I get people ready to go on, and make sure they’re properly dressed to play their part. I try to make them look their best.”
Then she looks directly at the Understudy and says, “I hold their secrets, too. My privilege and my burden is to know what lies behind every person’s mask.” She smiles, and adds, “And still love them for all that.”
For a second, the Understudy feels the urge to get away from this odd woman, but her attention is caught by the action below them as the Dresser says, “Look! This is it!”
FOR the first time that night, the DSM is beginning to relax. The show has unfolded flawlessly, even if the donkey did defecate as it first came on stage. Every cue has been hit exactly on the mark. He dares to take his eyes off the book, and lifts his head up, stretching his stiff neck.
Then he sees them. Up on the gantry: two women treating a precarious walkway as the best box in the universe. Panic flows through his veins. This could ruin everything. For the first time that night, there’s something out of his control. There’s no time to think; he simply runs.
WHEN this is over, I need to get into shape, he thinks, as he labours up the ladder to the gantry. Once there, he realises that lack of fitness is the least of his troubles. From up top, the gantry feels like it’s 50 miles above the stage. Why didn’t he just stop and think before coming up here — get Security to deal with this? He might hate heights, but he steels himself to get these idiots down before something disastrous happens. Keeping his eyes focused on them, he begins to walk, not daring to picture the drop to the world below.
As the DSM reaches them, and prepares to launch into a hissed tirade about irresponsibility and regulations and Don’t they know who he is, the Dresser turns and says calmly, “There are no more cues now. All we can do is watch.”
And the DSM realises that, in his panic to get up here, he dropped his book, and, to his shock, finds himself obeying this old woman. Gulping back his vertigo, he looks down at the scene beneath them.
FROM where they stand, they see how a stage is the world entire, and the players are people caught up in the truth of that world. They witness the exhaustion of the Holy Family as they arrive in Bethlehem, and find no place to stay except a stable.
They feel the anxiety of first-time parents-to-be; the fear of a man who still has doubts about the wisdom of trusting a woman who says that she is to bear God’s Son; the tiredness and the fierce hope of the mum-to-be — and they witness the birth itself. A difficult birth, a wondrous birth, full of risk, and of labour pains deep into the night.
Finally, they see the joy of delivery, and the tenderness that can be known only by exhausted, loving bodies. They are present at that first moment of intimacy before the world comes crashing in. The Dresser, the Understudy, and the DSM witness God arrive as a babe who has no need for script or cue.
“I THOUGHT I wanted the star role,” the Understudy says, “but . . .”.
“But”, the Dresser says, “sometimes there are other places we’re called to be.”
“I shouldn’t be up here. I should be on the book,” the DSM says, absently.
The Dresser pats him kindly on the back and says, “I don’t think the script will be much use from now on.” She points towards the newborn in the cradle. “I think it’s in his hands now. I suspect he’s going to be good at improvisation.”
Canon Rachel Mann is Area Dean of Bury and Rossendale, Assistant Curate of St Mary’s, Bury, a Visiting Teaching Fellow of the Manchester Writing School at Manchester Met University, and a Visiting Scholar of Sarum College, Salisbury.