New Albion Read Free

chimes thrice, and I know that I must sleep. I pray for sleep to come, for the happy circumstance that I may see you in my dreams.
    Monday, 9 September 1850
    I was delighted to inform Mr. Farquhar Pratt of his rise in commission for each new play he writes. He seemed to be expecting the news that he would no longer be playing his traditional line of business on our boards as well, and he accepted it with stifled resignation. We were standing by my desk at the stage-left arch after the other actors had gone downstairs. Pratty seemed smaller than usual. He was never a large man, but with his waistcoat off and his trousers pulled high over his faded white shirt he appeared no more than five feet tall.
    He was looking at the scuffed stage floor as though searching for some lost article. “But who will play the old men?”
    I cleared my throat and tried to find an innocuous phrasing. “The suggestion was that Mr. Simpson might be able to do it.”
    There was a shadow of hurt in the old man’s face for a moment – theatre people are such open books! “Kean was wise enough to die early,” he murmured. “Have I told you about my time with the eminent Kean?”
    “I seem to have heard something about it,” I said. Indeed I had heard many parts of it, almost ad nauseam, nearly every day for the last six months. How Kean used to gauge his performances by the number of females who fainted in the stalls. How he would deliver Lear in a ranting singsong fit to crack the cheeks of the storm on one evening and how he would be performing back flips as Arlecchino the next.
    “An enormous talent,” Pratty began in reverentially hushed tones, “but he drank himself to death.” I must confess that I had not heard this part of the story before or anything that could be said to be critical of the great thespian. Farquhar Pratt’s face was as craggy as the inside of those Roman caves at Chiselhurst. “I had often thought what a great waste of genius that had been,” he went on, “but now I begin to understand that it is preferable to die young than to grow old in this business.”
    Fourteen years in a London theatre have taught me that one can never go wrong by stroking the egos of artistes. “You have many many years in front of you, Mr. Farquhar Pratt,” I said, “as the well-respected playwright that you are.”
    He studied the scratched hardwood again with searching eyes until, at last, he said, “What’s to be done then, Mr. Phillips? I cannot complain that this is unexpected.” He chuckled morosely, the way I would imagine that a condemned man chuckles before the gibbet. “What’s to be done then, eh?” he repeated, but he did not wait for an answer. “We shall simply have to make a go of it, I suppose, shan’t we?” He laughed again, softly. His grey eyes met mine for an instant, and then he turned and picked his way down the stairs to the dressing room.
    Tuesday, 10 September 1850
    Another milestone in the changing of the guard. Mr. August Levy retired from the theatre today. I believe he saw his future before him when Ernest Holman was hired, some months ago, direct from Bath and with excellent references, to play the comic gentlemen opposite Elias Bancroft. These were the parts that Mr. Levy used to play with such abandon in his heyday. Well I remember, six short years ago, during the Shakespeare Festival and a performance of a butchered version of Hamlet , when he and Mr. Bancroft as gravediggers removed innumerable waistcoats in preparation for their labours and danced a final somber hornpipe on Ophelia’s grave when their scene was finished.
    Mr. Levy had chosen to go out of his own volition and on his own terms, unlike Mr. Farquhar Pratt who seems to be hanging on at all costs. “I’m seventy-two years old,” Mr. Levy said to me the other day. “I get winded going up the stairs from the Green Room.”
    For his part, Mr. Wilton has tried to do right by a man who has given his soul to the theatre. When