There is, to be sure, a certain positive virtue in the rule that forbids any unauthorized person to be permitted to pass from the auditorium to the stage by ways of the pass-door between the two. But, like any rule, it must be administered with discretion. The keeper of the pass-door at the War Memorial Opera House is a gentleman known as the “Colonel,” to whom, I feel, “orders is orders,” without the leavening of either discretion or plain “horse sense.”
On the opening night of Sadler’s Wells, a list of names of the persons authorized to pass had been given to this functionary by checking the names on the theatre programme. When Dame Ninette de Valois, D.B.E., D. Litt., Director of the Sadler’s Wells Ballet, attempted to go back stage after the first act of The Sleeping Beauty, she was stopped at the pass-door by the guardian “Colonel.”
Very simply she told him, “I am Ninette de Valois.”
That meant nothing to the “Colonel.”
“Madame’s” name, he pointed out, was not checked off. It was not even printed on the “official” staff. In another part of the programme, there it was in small type. But the “Colonel” was adamant. Horatio at the bridge could not have been more formidable. He was a composite of St. Peter at the gate and St. Michael with his flaming sword.
While all this was going on, I was in the imposing, marble-sheathed front lobby of the Opera House, in conversation with critics and San Francisco friends, sharing their enthusiasm, when I suddenly felt my coat tails being sharply pulled. The first tug I was sure was some mistake, and I pretended not to notice it. Then my coat tails were tugged at again, unmistakably yanked.
“What is it?” I thought. “Who is it?”
I turned quickly, and found a tense, white-faced “Madame” looking at me, as she might transfix either a dancer who had fallen on his face, or a Cabinet Minister with whom she had taken issue.
“What’s wrong?” I asked.
“The man,” she said, pointing in the direction of the pass-door, “wouldn’t let me through.” Crisply she added, “He didn’t know who I was. This is disgraceful, absolutely disgraceful. Unforgivable, I must say.”