Waiting

Backstage. Echoes halt and brook direct permission to advance across the threshold and register their intrusive ripple, through the offended crowd of ghosts which occupy the empty seats. There he is, a stately vision, Noel Coward, being merry. “I agree with you my friend, but who are you and I against so many?”

A drum taps a twitchity drum.

Memory. Fantasy. Illusion.
The dirt and ropes back stage are tantalizing. The meta world beyond illusion. Dracula is Henry Irving. I, Bram Stoker, his stage manager, drained and broken by this demonic genius, the monstrous autocrat, the living flame of incandescent declamation, a maniacal shaman bringing the eyes of the dead out of his magic topper, once more to bear lugubrious witness from the vortex of their circle. “Get rid of the actor and replace him with an Uber marionette.”

A drum taps a wintry drum.
Not with a bang. Not with a bang.
Now I am Godot, here in the wings. Waiting for my cue. Waiting to go on. Waiting, waiting. I was with you all along. Darling buds of dismay.

“You lot will be the death of me,” said Tadeusz Kantor as he fell to the floor, passing through the stage door clutching his heart, naked as a lamb.
The old man, Meyerhold, sits in a chair. Stars wheeling above him, the majestic firmament fretted with golden dapples. He says nothing. Noel Coward, the spirits of the living, the dead, the fictional and the pseudonymous, Rattigan, Browning, Harlequin, Alec Guinness, Tommy Cooper. Eric, Ernie, Hilda Rosetta Tharp. Lily the caretakers daughter, literally run off her feet; they all pass before him, in kabuki, audition macabre. As the snow falls, falling softly on the living and the dead. A drum taps. Rage rage. A drum taps. Softly now, you’ll prick awake, the hawthorn ghost in dripping pink and diesel moonlight, scattered howling, horse in snow.

Citizens. The opera house has gone dark. Junkies vaunt her walks, let’s haul them off the streets and rig them with grease paint, let them tear their pants off and piss torrents upon the stage.

Master. Master...
Not you again.
I agree with you my friend.,
Get rid of the actor.
What do you think of the show so far?
You lot will be the death of me...

Mr Godot Sir!
Yes?
You’re on.
Am I now…