CHAPTER XIV. With a Stock Company,

[Original]

WAS most miserable with the company I had now joined. What it was like may be gathered from the following:

“Dear Jim: If I stop long with this company I shall go mad (not very far to go, perhaps you’ll say!). I must get out of it soon. It’s the most wretched affair you could possibly imagine. Crummies’s show was a Comédie Française in its arrangements compared with this. We have neither stage-manager nor acting-manager. If this were all, I shouldn’t grumble; but we have to do our own bill posting, help work the scenes, and take the money at the doors—not an arduous task this last. There are no ‘lines.’ We are all ‘responsibles,’ and the parts are distributed among us with the utmost impartiality. In the matter of salary, too, there is the same charming equality; we all get a guinea. In theory, that is: in reality, our salaries vary according to our powers of nagging; the maximum ever attained by any one having been fifteen shillings. I wonder we got any, though, considering the audiences we play to. The mere sight of the house gives one the horrors every night. It is so dimly lighted (for, to save expense, the gas is only turned a quarter on) that you can hardly see your way about, and so empty, that every sound echoes and re-echoes through the place, till it seems as though a dozen people are talking in a scene where there are only two. You walk on the stage, and there in front of you are, say, twenty people dotted about the pit, a few more are lolling listlessly over the gallery rails, and there are two or three little groups in the boxes, while, as a background to these patches of unhappy humanity, there stares out the bare boards and the dingy upholstery. It is impossible to act among such surroundings as these. All you can do#is to just drag through your part, and the audience, who one and all have evidently been regretting from the very first that they ever came—a fact they do not even attempt to disguise—are as glad when it is over as you are. We stop a week in each town and play the same pieces, so, of course, there is no study or rehearsal now. But I wish there were; anything would be better than this depressing monotony.

“I might have guessed what sort of a company it was by his sending me the parts he did. I play Duncan, Banquo, Seyton, and a murderer in Macbeth; Tybalt and the Apothecary in Romeo and Juliet; and Laertes, Osric, and the Second Player in Hamlet—and so on all through. None of us play less than two parts in the same piece. No sooner are we killed or otherwise disposed of as one person, than we are up again as somebody else, and that, almost before we have time to change our clothes. I sometimes have to come on as an entirely new party with no other change than the addition of a beard. It puts me in mind of the nigger who borrowed his master’s hat with the idea of passing himself off as ‘one of them white folks.’ I should think that if the audience—when there are any—attempt to understand the play, they must have a lively time of it; and if they are at all acquainted with our National Bard, they must be still more puzzled. We have improved so on the originals, that the old gentleman himself would never recognize them. They are one-third Shakespeare, and two-thirds the Renowned Tragedian from Drury Lane.

“Of course, I have not had my railway fare, which I was promised after joining, and I’ve given up asking for it now.