Free What Bloody Man Is That by Simon Brett Page A

night. First, I had to do my Bleeding Sergeant build-up, then my Drunken Porter build-up . . .’
    â€˜Must be hell getting yourself into that part.’
    â€˜Yes, character acting’s always difficult. Then I had to do my Third Murderer exercises, then the English Doctor, then . . .’
    They both subsided into stifled giggles.
    But once the run started Charles was made aware of the problems that his multiplicity of parts caused. Not acting problems – he could come up with a sufficient variety of accents and postures with no effort at all – but purely logistical problems. The blocking rehearsals had taken the play scene by scene; it was only when the whole thing was linked together that the difficulties of so many entrances and exits became apparent.
    It soon became clear that Charles Paris would spend almost the entire play running at full tilt round the back of the stage.
    As the Bleeding Sergeant, he entered from the auditorium and exited downstage right (had to be downstage – in any scene featuring Duncan, only Wamock Belvedere got upstage exits). Then, in Act One Scene Seven, Charles had to enter upstage left and cross over to exit upstage right. (Yes, the worst had happened – he’d also been lumbered with the part of that bloody Sewer.) As the Drunken Porter, he entered and exited downstage left. As the Old Man who talked to Ross in Act Two Scene Four, he entered and exited upstage right. The Third Murderer, like the Bleeding Sergeant, entered through the auditorium and, after the despatch of Banquo, went off upstage left.
    There was then a brief respite, which encompassed the interval (Gavin Scholes had predictably followed the traditional practice of placing this immediately after the Banquet Scene), until Charles had to give his Apparition of an Armed Head. For this, following Gavin’s rethink, he made his entrance through a trap door under the stage, to emerge in a haze of dry ice through the Witches’ cauldron (assuming that this particular bit of stage magic worked – an assumption which, at that point, only the director was making with any confidence). The Apparition vanished the same way he’d come.
    The Third Murderer was once again enlisted to help massacre the Macduff family, and for this occasion he entered and exited downstage left. The English Doctor, whose four-and-a-half lines were so pertinent in the definition of Kingship, entered and exited upstage right. The Scottish Doctor, brought in as a consultant on the Lady Macbeth sleepwalking case, also entered and exited upstage right.
    From there on, Charles was into acting soldiers on one side or the other in the final conflict, and for these the entrances and exits (sometimes with and sometimes without chunks of Bimham Wood) were respectively downstage left, upstage right, from the auditorium, upstage left, downstage left and upstage left.
    Basically, it seemed to Charles that each performance would qualify as a heavy training session for a decathlete.
    And that was before he started thinking about costume and make-up changes.
    The Pinero Theatre, Warminster, was only about twenty years old, and of an attractive and intelligent design. Its one drawback was its location which, though it commanded beautiful views over towards Salisbury Plain, was too far out of town for economic health. It was not a theatre which shoppers would pass; anyone who wanted to go and see a play had to make a special expedition. This did not help in the crazy game of knife-edge juggling by which most theatres manage their financial affairs. Arts Council and local council grants come and go, lucrative transfers from the provinces to the West End are rare, and the basic survival of a theatre depends on the time-honoured resource, much cited by Gavin Scholes, of ‘putting bums on seats’. In achieving this, the Pinero was always going to be hampered by its position.
    But those who did make the effort to get to the theatre,