Judith Read Free

honest and even gentle with one another. And so at the end of this second act, when Judith and Holofernes went off to the alcove to go to bed or to the beheading or whatever it was, they had their arms round one another and it was as if they might really be in love, as they were supposed to be in the script and as I suppose they were in life; but they were not going to die; perhaps they would not even have to pretend to die; perhaps they would have a nice time even; this was, was it not, the unique theatrical experience.
    There was a long interval in which no one quite knew what was happening, neither behind the stage nor I suppose in front;no one talked about it much; what was there to say? what had happened did not seem to be much within the area of what could be talked about. Judith and Holofernes had barricaded themselves in her dressing-room; perhaps in fact they were making love; they did not come out; there was the sound, after a time, of someone crying. Eventually the stage manager got into the dressing-room, and when he came out he said the performance was over. He went in front of the curtain – the audience had remained largely seated during the interval – and announced that the leading lady was indisposed. It was interesting that he said it was the leading lady who was indisposed: I thought – You mean, she takes the responsibility? I sat on a fallen pillar at the side of the stage and wondered if I might have my chance now of taking over from Judith; but I did not think I would be asked to; and I found that I did not mind if I was not. In a sense I had taken over something (but what?) when I had stepped out of context and had helped Holofernes. But this had not helped, of course, the continuation of the play.
    The play ran for a few more nights, or a week even, and then it folded. I mean the audience on the night had been enthralled, but they probably could not remember except as a joke what they had been enthralled by; and the actors anyway could not or did not reproduce it. Judith and Holofernes went through the motions – half in the old style, half in the new – but they could not gather again the effects of that night, which perhaps after all had depended on chance and unique circumstances. So audiences, finding nothing now that they could enjoy, let alone put into words, became hostile to the actor and actress; and people stopped coming to the play.
    For myself – I was not sure if I wanted to go on being an actress: but then no one, for a time, asked me to. No one talked to me about the scene when I had stepped forwards and freed Holofernes’s ball: no one talked about the scene afterwards when Judith and Holofernes had acted as if they were not acting. I suppose I don’t quite know how to talk about this either. But this is the point, isn’t it? – you can’t talk much inreal life about how things might be all right. When the play folded, Judith and Holofernes just sent me, from the two of them together, an enormous bunch of red roses.
    My dream in coming to London (I had spent time on the way at a university on the West Coast of America) had been that here I would find people who were sophisticated and witty – who were not in the business of owning a percentage of everyone else. To some extent I found this with theatre people; but they still seemed to have their eyes on bits and pieces of others; not so much it is true for the sake of money, as out of some need or even demand to be appreciated.
    When I did not get any work in the theatre I got that job as a sort of companion at the house in Ruskin Square: this was when you (and you?) first saw me. I used to take that dog for walks in the square.
    The people I came across here were not trying to be elegant or witty: they were interested in money; but for the most part they were obsessed by gossip about people.
    One group that I kept on hearing about which did seem likely to be at least witty was one that