Free Overture to Death by Ngaio Marsh

productions when he was a medical student.
    “I never knew what I was going to say,” he said cheerfully. “I’m capable of saying almost anything. It was always all right on the night. A bit of cheek goes a long way. One can bluff it out with a gag or two. The great thing is not to be nervous.”
    He himself was not at all nervous. He uttered such lines of the French Ambassador’s as he remembered, in a high-pitched voice, made a great many grimaces, waved his hands in a foreign manner, and was never still for an instant.
    “I leave it to the spur of the moment,” he told them. “It’s wonderful what a difference it makes when you’re all made-up, wtth funny clothes on. I never know where I ought to be. You can’t do it in cold blood.”
    “But, Dr. Templett, you’ve got to,” Dinah lamented. “How can we get the timing right or the positions, if at one rehearsal you’re on the prompt and at the next on the o.p.?”
    “Don’t you worry,” said Dr. Templett. “We’ll be all right. Eet vill be—’ow you say? — so, so charmante.”
    Off-stage he continually spoke his lamentable broken English, and when he dried up, as he did incessantly, he interpolated his: “ ’ow you say?”
    “If I forget,” he said to the rector, who was prompting, “I’ll just walk over your side and say, ‘ ’ow you say?’ like that, and then you’ll know.”
    Selia Ross and he had an irritating trick of turning up late for rehearsals. Apparently the, youngest Cain’s big toe still needed Dr. Templett’s attention, and he explained that he picked up Mrs. Ross and brought her to rehearsal on his way back from Cloudyfold. They would walk in with singularly complacent smiles, half an hour late, while Dinah was reading both their parts and trying to play her own. Sometimes she got her father to read their bits, but the rector intoned them so carefully and slowly that everybody else was thrown into a state of deadly confusion.
    Miss Campanula, in a different way, was equally troublesome. She refused to give up her typewritten part. She carried it about with her and read each of her speeches in an undertone during the preceding dialogue, so that whenever she was on the stage the others spoke through a distressing mutter. When her cue came she seldom failed to say, “Oh. Now it’s me,” before she began. She would often rattle off her lines without any inflexion, and apparently without the slightest regard for their meaning. She was forever telling Dinah that she was open to correction, but she received all suggestions in huffy grandeur, and they made not the smallest difference to her performance. Worse than all these peculiarities were Miss Campanula’s attempts at characterization. She made all sorts of clumsy and ineffective movements over which she herself seemed to have little control. She continually shifted her weight from one large foot to the other, rather in the manner of a penguin. She wandered about the stage and she made embarrassing grimaces. In addition to all this, she had developed a frightful cold in her nose, and rehearsals were made hideous by her catarrhal difficulties.
    Jocelyn was the type of amateur performer who learns his lines from the prompter. Unlike Miss Campanula, he did not hold his part in his hand. Indeed, he had lost it irrevocably immediately after the first rehearsal. He said that it did not matter, as he had already memorized his lines. This was a lie. He merely had a vague idea of their sense. His performance reminded Dinah of divine service, as he was obliged to repeat all his lines, like responses, after the rector. However, in spite of this defect, the squire had an instinctive sense of theatre. He did not fidget or gesticulate. With Dr. Templett tearing about the stage like a wasp, this was particularly refreshing.
    Miss Prentice did not know her part either, but she was a cunning bluffer. She had a long scene in which she held a newspaper open in her hands. Dinah discovered