Theatre Season
 |
| image generated by Craiyon |
Theatre season is not what you think it is.
It is not the eleventh-hour tuning of an orchestra, now redirecting focus towards finding a footing in the score, like the high-strung entries in the Grand National being marshalled along the start line.
It is not the tawdry gilt of the footlights that flakes off the moment you exit the stage and are enveloped in the darkness of the wings.
It does not even mark the beginning of theatre season, but rather its October end.
It is a withdrawal to carpenters workshops, where the bare bones of next year's stages, from which the entire world will be made anew, are sawn and nailed together.
It is a retreat to the costume workshops of East London where poor women with pinched fingers - who arrived in the UK from Eastern Europe, and who never saw so much as a glimpse of Marie Antoinette, or touched the hem of Madame Pompadour's ballgown, or a gazed upon a Parisian street in any era - sew costumes fit for the French aristocracy, in the crumpled, slow-burning glow of last year's scenery – dramatic horizons as near as the wall of a drawing room, or as far away as the karst hills of Guilin, turning to ash under their own dying light.
It is damp Victorian rehearsal studios, where the rib-caged radiators are either cold as stones pulled from the sunless void of deep space, or blasting out an intense heat like the massed furnaces of hell - and where there is always a faint miasma – a cracked waste pipe somewhere under the floorboards, or the gag-testing aroma of over-salted mashed potato emanating from a nearby residential home for the elderly, whose owners have been told by the inspector that they must do better.
It is the start of a hunt that once saw gunfire reverberate around St Paul's Cathedral and that left numerous small scars and chips in the holy masonry. Though the hunt no longer takes place on the brow of Ludgate Hill, and the guns echo elsewhere, what is killed is nonetheless returned to Cheapside, to premises that lie within reach of the northern shadow of the cathedral dome.
~
We were at the funeral of Anne Demetriou who looked well over 100 years old without her make-up on, and around 70 when she was powdered and painted, though there was no hiding that turkey neck. The truth of the matter is buried in her long-absent birth certificate and was, I suspect, pitched somewhere in-between these two figures.
At her request, she was buried naked in a coffin intended for somebody twice her size, wrapped in her bright-pink, 18 metre-long, feather boa. An open casket. I would have expected nothing less.
“I am amazed that they managed to fit it all in,” I said to Jo Meen, recalling Anne's attempts at corralling the outsized scarf in the small backroom of her house in Clerkenwell, fighting to get the door closed, as if she were quarantining a live boa constrictor.
“Well, I'll let you in on a little secret, dear...” he said.
He reached into the snarled mouth of his purse, with its buggered zipper, and removed a short cord of bright-pink feathers, which he used to lightly dab the corners of his tearless eyes.
“....Cuts had to be made.”
The boa looked like something you'd see at the Blitz club in 1980. Pearl Arthur, who had tagged along (she never once passed on the opportunity to stand in the presence of a celebrity, even a dead one) said that she wanted one just like it. She went cool on the idea after Meen told her where the feathers came from.
“Vegan guilt,” he said caustically after she had adjourned to the ladies. “What, did she think the feathers were handmade in a factory somewhere by tiny Chinese orphans?”
There was nothing artificial about these feathers. Once they had been the prize possessions of a dynasty of gulls who soared around the spires of St Paul's, a pale pastel tone garnishing the undersides of their wings. In the evening the cathedral would shake these faded vestiges of the sunset out of its architecture, as the birds moved onto the Thames nearby, where they roosted in relative safety on the barges that were moored close to the Embankment walls.
“Too many cats prowling around on the rooftops after dark,” said Meen.
He smiled devilishly with crooked lips that showed off his incisors.
We split a tab before the funeral – a tiny red heart that he carefully tore in half, licking his fingers afterwards. I fancied that I saw the ghosts of those slain birds congregating in the wooden eves of the church of St Mary the Saviour, the way that gulls will sometimes amass inland when there are storms out to sea.
They die showy deaths. It is no wonder the acting crowd took a shine to them. Their pale plumage turn bright pink - almost day-glo.
From the 1721 onward, a two-day hunt took place on the first Tuesday and Wednesday in October, marking the commencement of the aforementioned theatre season. It was started by a local playhouse owner, named Harold Daines, whose party became so boorishly drunk that they shot at the gulls with bows and arrows for almost two days, without too much in the way of sleep. Afterwards the feathers of the fallen birds were harvested and distributed among the acting community.
So began a tradition.
A former actor, named William Millard, who had been crippled by a fall from a carriage, and who had subsequently opened a costume tailory on Cheapside, expanded his business to incorporate a feather brokers.
In 1841, a statue of St Mark that occupies the north tower of St Paul's was blinded in the left eye by a stray shot. Rather than turn the other saintly cheek, the church took the opportunity to oust the hunters, who had become a nuisance. Thereafter the hunt decamped to an estate owned by the Padjinton family, located outside the village of Barden in North Yorkshire. A quarter-size replica of St Paul's was constructed for the occasion (a grand folly, one might say). Every September, a 'quantity' of gulls from around St Paul's are captured and driven north for the hunt (the church has been unable to halt this practise which lingers in the London by-laws). Their bodies are returned to Millard's on Cheapside for plucking, with the feathers being distributed among those actors who are willing to receive them.
Anne Demetriou began building her boa from the age of four, supplementing the generations of gull feathers earned from her own stage work with donations from her morbidly curious peers.
During the 1980s, a satellite population of the colony established itself on the rooftops around the London Stock Exchange where they were christened 'Broker Gulls'. All kinds of superstitions have been built up around these birds by those who walked the trading floor and its digital successor. To this day, you will still see city workers wearing bright pink feathers in the lapels of their suit jackets, though this is not as common a sight at it once was.
~
After the funeral, Meen, Arthur and myself lined up on a damp stone bench in the churchyard. In hindsight I think that it might have been a long gravestone. A man from that non-profit organisation that isn't The Salvation Army, but who dress in very similar attire came round rattling his dueller's tin. They use the money to pay for paupers funerals. I wish that I could recall the name of the charity. It was started by a Lord who had fallen on hard times when his son was killed in a duel. They would make collections after duels to pay for the costs of burying the dead or healing the injured, and were often asked to officiate over the duel itself, as they were regarded as reliable and impartial.
Arthur announced that she was cold and that she was going home to Pinner to eat a roast dinner with her family.
After she had rounded the corner, Meen said that he was still far too high to venture back to Chiswick and deal with David's silent disapproval for the remainder of the day.
Out the back of the church, we descended a flight of river stairs onto London's gravid plain. The stumps of the pontooned shack, from where Victor Wijngaarden had once cast his laudanum net wide across the district, were just becoming visible, poking out in the low tide.
Centuries before Wijngaarden, the Anglo Saxons had attempted, without success, to conjure growth from the reluctant soil. In all those centuries the only purpose those crumbs of bony shingle have been good for is as a deathly expulsion from the muzzle of a firearm – a hand cannon, or shotgun of some variety. The spiritual descendents of Daines' October hunting parties used it in this manner on the inland gulls.
Under the Gothic oils of stained-glass, I scooped a handful of the washy shot from the tideline and feebly cast it across the skin of running water that was graven by the tidal current and by its own seaward flow.
The Thames carried on unperturbed.
~ Sam Redlark
 |
| image generated by Craiyon |
Comments
Post a Comment