Fic: Past is Prologue [Slings & Arrows]
It’s strange, how some places become home slowly, and some never do, and some are home at once, and some come upon you without you even noticing, until one day you lift your head and wonder how you could ever leave. Those are a bit of a shock. Especially if your balance is already precarious at the time.
Geoffrey has never been one to find home in places. His homes are in people and in language. His permanence is one of kindred souls and words, not things, not locations. Ellen is home, when she hasn’t thrown him out again, and even then. Oliver was, once. Anna is, now, in a strange far-away-in-Bolivia way. Shakespeare’s words, locked in his head, always and forever. The only time he thought he had a place, a home, was in New Burbage, and that was wrong - it came down to words and people or place and time, and words and people won, clear and simple. But here, now, in a tiny theatre where they all trip over themselves backstage because there is no space, and the stage lights blow out with alarming frequency, and the foyer actively resists any attempt to make it look respectable, in a battered odd-proportioned apartment in Montreal where Old Ironsides is ridiculously large and Ellen’s dresser surprisingly small, he is home. Six months flying by the seat of their pants and he’s standing on the stage getting a crick in his neck, having a conversation with a disembodied voice in the ceiling that consists mostly of ‘It’s on. No, that one’s gone. Please tell me that noise wasn’t you getting electrocuted. That one’s fine,’ and suddenly he looks around him and can’t imagine wanting to be anywhere else again ever. And then he has to sit down.
He doesn’t realise he’s stopped talking until the disembodied voice from the ceiling says ‘Geoff? Geoffrey?’ a few times, then gives up and lands with a thud across the stage, resolving itself into Anton, King of Cranky Lights, and says ‘You alright?’
‘Yes. Fine. Completely fine. Perfect, in fact.’ He flops backwards, dangling his legs over the edge of the stage and staring up at the cranky lights, revelling in the discovery. Anton gives him the look that’s become very common among the company when he does things like this. The ‘is he having A Moment?’ one, usually shortly followed by the ‘should we get Ellen or go straight to the men in white coats?’ one. He doesn’t try to explain. Anton is too young, too sane, too grounded in space and time and here and now to understand, and so Geoffrey waves him away and stays put to contemplate the revelation. Ellen will understand, more or less, when he tells her, later, although she’ll roll her eyes and say ‘Geoffrey, that doesn’t make any sense’. Ellen, after all, has known him inside-out for a very long time, and more to the point, Ellen was there when place lost to people, the last time. Anna will understand instantly and completely, because in this one thing, he and Anna are wired exactly the same way. And she’ll give him one of her wistful looks down the phone when he tells her he doesn’t know how it happened, and he’ll try and persuade her to come and stay and run them properly again, and she’ll laugh, and say ‘Soon’ and hang up on him. That’s home too. Her reliably on the other end of the phone, him reliably having a phone, to be on the other end of.
They built this for themselves, maybe that’s how it happened, he and Ellen, and Anna’s magic book of contacts, and their ragtag band of refugees from New Burbage and penniless, crazy, enthusiastic young graduates and apprentices. Ellen charmed and wheedled and prised money out of sponsors, and he shouted at builders and electricians and talked Cheryl into coming for a week to help him sort out the stage, and Nahum into coming for two to just keep them all sane. Nahum is the calmest person Geoffrey has ever met and sometimes he seriously considers poaching him from New Burbage purely for his mental health value. He thinks it probably wouldn’t be hard, considering Nahum likes unadulterated Richard even less than Maria likes Darren. He thinks if, when, Anna comes to them, Nahum might come too. Anna graciously received and proofread and corrected (and filled the mysterious gaps in) funding outlines from internet cafes in La Paz and Sucre, attached lengthy emails full of common sense about seasons and cash-flow interspersed with commentary on Ellen’s inability to type and glorious Granny Conroy-isms, and sent them back as masterpieces of artistic begging. Maria sent them the promise of a visit and Zoe, student of a friend of a friend, tiny and pink-haired and blessed with the miraculous ability to stage manage with no money. And Zoe found them Anton, designer and electrician all in one lanky laid-back package of ripped jeans and smiles, and one day Anton turned up with Jake, a smart-ass Newfie whose job description appears to have become ‘Zoe’s Minion’ but who is capable of fixing almost anything and willing to work for almost nothing so he can say he’s worked for Geoffrey Tennant.
Which is also how they got half their company, those who aren’t refugees from New Burbage or returnees from the original Theatre Sans Argent. It scares him, slightly, the fact that these youngsters (crew and cast both) are willing to pin their careers on a man who was not so long ago certifiably mad, and still isn’t all that sane, but on the other hand, all the best stuff happens just before the thread snaps, and they’ll either get very, very good, or they’ll get very, very far away quite fast. So far, they’ve mostly gotten very, very good. He has a mental book of photographs, moments of glory fixed in the pixels of his memory; Puck, green and gold and bronze, giving the closing speech, fragile and upright and indisputably otherworldly; one of the younger actors, backlit on a bare stage, drawing the eye with his stillness before he broke the moment to speak; Zoe and Jake, placing the still-drying sets on opening night, learning that sometimes you just start the show, ready or not; three fairies, bare feet swinging on the edge of the stage, glitter and starlight; he will have a moment of glory for all of them, these bright young unbroken things, in the end. Not necessarily glorious performances, but the moments of truth and honesty that he coaxed out of them, that they coaxed out of themselves, just before the thread snapped and they all went for another ride along the catastrophe curve. And then he’ll send them out, armed with experience and the dubious value of his name on their portfolios and the knowledge that they can always, always, come back.
Maybe this is how it happens, he thinks, for wandering souls like his, the places you have, you build. You become what others return to, and find an anchor for yourself. You bleed and sweat and cry and yell and fight and practice and beg and create something from a broken building and tangled histories, experience and innocence. Build somewhere you can take your stand and make your mark, find your light. Do what you were born to do with words and hands and body and soul, and those you love, and those you like, and those who you bewilder and are bewildered by, and one day you find yourself standing on a stage beneath a rank of lights trying to figure out which one is causing every fuse in the building to blow at odd intervals and you look around you and you nearly fall over with the realisation that you can forever call this home.
Ellen
Things change. The world turns, everything changes. One tiny event in life and everything follows on logically and rationally into something entirely different to what you were expecting. Or one tiny event in life happens and everything follows irrationally and illogically into something completely different to what you were expecting. Or the love of your life goes crazy and everything follows... It doesn’t really matter. Any way, you end up in Montreal, typing up funding applications and trying to remember how to cope with real life.
Ellen’s never been very good at real life. The Theatre Sans Argent’s been a bit of a crash course in practicality. But certain things are already second nature, like charming influential people, and lying through her teeth about the location of her artistic director, both of which are invaluable abilities when said artistic director cannot actually be relied upon to behave in a manner likely to encourage said influential people to sponsor your theatre. She could have told Richard that letting Geoffrey anywhere near sponsors who didn’t already know him was a stupid idea, except she wouldn’t have because she can’t stand Richard, which is entirely besides the point. And that is why she spent her first month in Montreal, on what was technically her honeymoon, arranging lunches with boutique owners, going to dinner with businessmen who undoubtedly had never seen Shakespeare performed in their lives, and working her way steadily through Anna’s magic book of contacts, and her own mental list of actors, directors and favours owed. She persuaded Henry Breedlove to come and play Oberon, and promised her soul to Nadine if she would come direct Much Ado About Nothing so that she and Sophie could bully Geoffrey into playing Benedick. Writers she’d worked with in readings at New Burbage promised her new plays, if Geoffrey would direct. She even poached two sponsors from the festival, making the flattering discovery that they’d been sponsoring it for her and Geoffrey’s presences, not Richard’s persuasive abilities. When she told Geoffrey, who was on the phone to Anna at the time, he said ‘No.’
And she said ‘No what?’
And Anna, by this time on speaker, said tinnily but firmly, ‘No you may not phone Richard and gloat. I will phone Richard and gloat.’
Ellen couldn’t really argue with that.
What she could argue about, loudly and passionately and at length, is the fact that she appears to have become confidante of the young company, for reasons completely unclear to herself or Geoffrey, who thinks it’s hysterical. She’s been many things in many companies, but this one is new. Nahum, when she complained about it to him during his visit, pointed out that she is the only real grown up on the permanent company, that while Frank and Cyril are wonderful, they’re part time, and there are things the youngsters will only come to a woman with. Then he patted her arm and said, in his calm, assured, amused way, ‘You will cope,’ and went off to help Geoffrey argue with the builders some more. Paragon of intelligence and common sense that Nahum is, he was right. So when Anton appears in front of her and her funding applications and says in tones of faint desperation, ‘Geoffrey’s lying on the stage being weird, the lights are still broken and I’m going to lose my mind and go back to school to be an accountant,’ she doesn’t laugh, much. She makes come him sit down on the back fire escape, hands him a cigarette and starts listing all the reasons that cranky wiring is not the thing to lose your mind and ditch your vocation for. It’s strange, being the patient one, the sensible one who keeps their head and knows where their towel is, especially in this cranky little theatre that wants to kill them all, where quite often having hysterics is completely justifiable.
The patience is sorely needed, too, since Geoffrey’s already short fuse got considerably shorter while the building was being refitted, and hasn’t yet stretched back out to normal length. Someone has to stay calm, and apparently it’s going to be her, unless they manage to poach Nahum as well as the sponsors. Anna would do it, but they don’t have Anna yet, won’t have Anna for a while, and so Ellen is the one to look serene and reassure the bystanders when Geoffrey goes off on one, like the dress for The Dream, when everyone fluffed every line, and Henry finally brought it to a head by losing his blocking completely and standing on a fairy. And when Geoff finally wound down enough to announce that they could probably just re-enact this, call it a comedy and get away with it, and, oh, if the fates had anything more in store could they get it over with now, so that he could have the nervous breakdown before they opened, all the lights went out and Puck fell off the stage. Geoffrey howled, Zoe swore, Anton threatened to go be an accountant and Ellen scraped Puck off the floor and kept the peace. They did the show with backstage lights on and three spots, the fairies shimmered in the dim light at the edges of the stage like fireflies and Puck gave the performance of a lifetime.
They’ll keep Puck, whose name is Noèmie, and who hasn’t been called by it once since she was cast as Robin Goodfellow, if they can. She’s sweet, catlike, quick, all long limbs and big eyes, and plays everything they hand her with conviction and grace. Ellen intends to be selfish, and she thinks Geoffrey will be too. Gabriel is livewire, voice and gestures and sudden stillness, reminds her of long ago and far away, before things changed, but he has a place at New Burbage next year. Geoffrey will hand him over to Darren with good grace and a glowing reference, because he’s not vindictive and Ellen will kiss him and tell him to be himself as hard as ever he can, because she is, and Gabriel’s enough like Geoffrey to drive Darren mad. Tom and Lucas will stay with them, and so will Sara. They want to be here, Theatre Sans Argent, more than they want anything else, dedication strong enough to survive parental misgivings and being broke and cold and tired and yelled at. They’re the start of their soul, the ones who will faithfully play the dukes and lords and ladies and fairies and mechanicals the way Frank and Cyril have for thirty years. Sophie will leave them, soon enough, silver and gold and good fortune, Charles and Geoffrey’s names carrying her upward, and Ellen’s number in her pocket so she can always come home.
Thinking about who to keep and who to send on, and where to send them, and what phone numbers to give them when they do is another startling aspect of her new life, like typing and keeping her head and being nice to the children. It’s strange, this responsibility, this knowledge that you are anchoring careers, lives, worlds. Nobody teaches you how to do this. They teach you to write applications, to move, to speak, to act, but not to make a life and a theatre and a company out of nothing at all. Nobody teaches you what you do when everything you ever thought you were changes overnight. She doesn’t know what she’s doing, it’s the most epic learning curve she’s ever been on in her life, improvising dialogue and blocking all the way along and yet she completely understands how, when she goes to check on Geoffrey, still lying on the stage, he can say quietly, soberly, shining with joy, ‘I realised this was home today.’ She knows. She’s known for a while.
Geoffrey has never been one to find home in places. His homes are in people and in language. His permanence is one of kindred souls and words, not things, not locations. Ellen is home, when she hasn’t thrown him out again, and even then. Oliver was, once. Anna is, now, in a strange far-away-in-Bolivia way. Shakespeare’s words, locked in his head, always and forever. The only time he thought he had a place, a home, was in New Burbage, and that was wrong - it came down to words and people or place and time, and words and people won, clear and simple. But here, now, in a tiny theatre where they all trip over themselves backstage because there is no space, and the stage lights blow out with alarming frequency, and the foyer actively resists any attempt to make it look respectable, in a battered odd-proportioned apartment in Montreal where Old Ironsides is ridiculously large and Ellen’s dresser surprisingly small, he is home. Six months flying by the seat of their pants and he’s standing on the stage getting a crick in his neck, having a conversation with a disembodied voice in the ceiling that consists mostly of ‘It’s on. No, that one’s gone. Please tell me that noise wasn’t you getting electrocuted. That one’s fine,’ and suddenly he looks around him and can’t imagine wanting to be anywhere else again ever. And then he has to sit down.
He doesn’t realise he’s stopped talking until the disembodied voice from the ceiling says ‘Geoff? Geoffrey?’ a few times, then gives up and lands with a thud across the stage, resolving itself into Anton, King of Cranky Lights, and says ‘You alright?’
‘Yes. Fine. Completely fine. Perfect, in fact.’ He flops backwards, dangling his legs over the edge of the stage and staring up at the cranky lights, revelling in the discovery. Anton gives him the look that’s become very common among the company when he does things like this. The ‘is he having A Moment?’ one, usually shortly followed by the ‘should we get Ellen or go straight to the men in white coats?’ one. He doesn’t try to explain. Anton is too young, too sane, too grounded in space and time and here and now to understand, and so Geoffrey waves him away and stays put to contemplate the revelation. Ellen will understand, more or less, when he tells her, later, although she’ll roll her eyes and say ‘Geoffrey, that doesn’t make any sense’. Ellen, after all, has known him inside-out for a very long time, and more to the point, Ellen was there when place lost to people, the last time. Anna will understand instantly and completely, because in this one thing, he and Anna are wired exactly the same way. And she’ll give him one of her wistful looks down the phone when he tells her he doesn’t know how it happened, and he’ll try and persuade her to come and stay and run them properly again, and she’ll laugh, and say ‘Soon’ and hang up on him. That’s home too. Her reliably on the other end of the phone, him reliably having a phone, to be on the other end of.
They built this for themselves, maybe that’s how it happened, he and Ellen, and Anna’s magic book of contacts, and their ragtag band of refugees from New Burbage and penniless, crazy, enthusiastic young graduates and apprentices. Ellen charmed and wheedled and prised money out of sponsors, and he shouted at builders and electricians and talked Cheryl into coming for a week to help him sort out the stage, and Nahum into coming for two to just keep them all sane. Nahum is the calmest person Geoffrey has ever met and sometimes he seriously considers poaching him from New Burbage purely for his mental health value. He thinks it probably wouldn’t be hard, considering Nahum likes unadulterated Richard even less than Maria likes Darren. He thinks if, when, Anna comes to them, Nahum might come too. Anna graciously received and proofread and corrected (and filled the mysterious gaps in) funding outlines from internet cafes in La Paz and Sucre, attached lengthy emails full of common sense about seasons and cash-flow interspersed with commentary on Ellen’s inability to type and glorious Granny Conroy-isms, and sent them back as masterpieces of artistic begging. Maria sent them the promise of a visit and Zoe, student of a friend of a friend, tiny and pink-haired and blessed with the miraculous ability to stage manage with no money. And Zoe found them Anton, designer and electrician all in one lanky laid-back package of ripped jeans and smiles, and one day Anton turned up with Jake, a smart-ass Newfie whose job description appears to have become ‘Zoe’s Minion’ but who is capable of fixing almost anything and willing to work for almost nothing so he can say he’s worked for Geoffrey Tennant.
Which is also how they got half their company, those who aren’t refugees from New Burbage or returnees from the original Theatre Sans Argent. It scares him, slightly, the fact that these youngsters (crew and cast both) are willing to pin their careers on a man who was not so long ago certifiably mad, and still isn’t all that sane, but on the other hand, all the best stuff happens just before the thread snaps, and they’ll either get very, very good, or they’ll get very, very far away quite fast. So far, they’ve mostly gotten very, very good. He has a mental book of photographs, moments of glory fixed in the pixels of his memory; Puck, green and gold and bronze, giving the closing speech, fragile and upright and indisputably otherworldly; one of the younger actors, backlit on a bare stage, drawing the eye with his stillness before he broke the moment to speak; Zoe and Jake, placing the still-drying sets on opening night, learning that sometimes you just start the show, ready or not; three fairies, bare feet swinging on the edge of the stage, glitter and starlight; he will have a moment of glory for all of them, these bright young unbroken things, in the end. Not necessarily glorious performances, but the moments of truth and honesty that he coaxed out of them, that they coaxed out of themselves, just before the thread snapped and they all went for another ride along the catastrophe curve. And then he’ll send them out, armed with experience and the dubious value of his name on their portfolios and the knowledge that they can always, always, come back.
Maybe this is how it happens, he thinks, for wandering souls like his, the places you have, you build. You become what others return to, and find an anchor for yourself. You bleed and sweat and cry and yell and fight and practice and beg and create something from a broken building and tangled histories, experience and innocence. Build somewhere you can take your stand and make your mark, find your light. Do what you were born to do with words and hands and body and soul, and those you love, and those you like, and those who you bewilder and are bewildered by, and one day you find yourself standing on a stage beneath a rank of lights trying to figure out which one is causing every fuse in the building to blow at odd intervals and you look around you and you nearly fall over with the realisation that you can forever call this home.
Ellen
Things change. The world turns, everything changes. One tiny event in life and everything follows on logically and rationally into something entirely different to what you were expecting. Or one tiny event in life happens and everything follows irrationally and illogically into something completely different to what you were expecting. Or the love of your life goes crazy and everything follows... It doesn’t really matter. Any way, you end up in Montreal, typing up funding applications and trying to remember how to cope with real life.
Ellen’s never been very good at real life. The Theatre Sans Argent’s been a bit of a crash course in practicality. But certain things are already second nature, like charming influential people, and lying through her teeth about the location of her artistic director, both of which are invaluable abilities when said artistic director cannot actually be relied upon to behave in a manner likely to encourage said influential people to sponsor your theatre. She could have told Richard that letting Geoffrey anywhere near sponsors who didn’t already know him was a stupid idea, except she wouldn’t have because she can’t stand Richard, which is entirely besides the point. And that is why she spent her first month in Montreal, on what was technically her honeymoon, arranging lunches with boutique owners, going to dinner with businessmen who undoubtedly had never seen Shakespeare performed in their lives, and working her way steadily through Anna’s magic book of contacts, and her own mental list of actors, directors and favours owed. She persuaded Henry Breedlove to come and play Oberon, and promised her soul to Nadine if she would come direct Much Ado About Nothing so that she and Sophie could bully Geoffrey into playing Benedick. Writers she’d worked with in readings at New Burbage promised her new plays, if Geoffrey would direct. She even poached two sponsors from the festival, making the flattering discovery that they’d been sponsoring it for her and Geoffrey’s presences, not Richard’s persuasive abilities. When she told Geoffrey, who was on the phone to Anna at the time, he said ‘No.’
And she said ‘No what?’
And Anna, by this time on speaker, said tinnily but firmly, ‘No you may not phone Richard and gloat. I will phone Richard and gloat.’
Ellen couldn’t really argue with that.
What she could argue about, loudly and passionately and at length, is the fact that she appears to have become confidante of the young company, for reasons completely unclear to herself or Geoffrey, who thinks it’s hysterical. She’s been many things in many companies, but this one is new. Nahum, when she complained about it to him during his visit, pointed out that she is the only real grown up on the permanent company, that while Frank and Cyril are wonderful, they’re part time, and there are things the youngsters will only come to a woman with. Then he patted her arm and said, in his calm, assured, amused way, ‘You will cope,’ and went off to help Geoffrey argue with the builders some more. Paragon of intelligence and common sense that Nahum is, he was right. So when Anton appears in front of her and her funding applications and says in tones of faint desperation, ‘Geoffrey’s lying on the stage being weird, the lights are still broken and I’m going to lose my mind and go back to school to be an accountant,’ she doesn’t laugh, much. She makes come him sit down on the back fire escape, hands him a cigarette and starts listing all the reasons that cranky wiring is not the thing to lose your mind and ditch your vocation for. It’s strange, being the patient one, the sensible one who keeps their head and knows where their towel is, especially in this cranky little theatre that wants to kill them all, where quite often having hysterics is completely justifiable.
The patience is sorely needed, too, since Geoffrey’s already short fuse got considerably shorter while the building was being refitted, and hasn’t yet stretched back out to normal length. Someone has to stay calm, and apparently it’s going to be her, unless they manage to poach Nahum as well as the sponsors. Anna would do it, but they don’t have Anna yet, won’t have Anna for a while, and so Ellen is the one to look serene and reassure the bystanders when Geoffrey goes off on one, like the dress for The Dream, when everyone fluffed every line, and Henry finally brought it to a head by losing his blocking completely and standing on a fairy. And when Geoff finally wound down enough to announce that they could probably just re-enact this, call it a comedy and get away with it, and, oh, if the fates had anything more in store could they get it over with now, so that he could have the nervous breakdown before they opened, all the lights went out and Puck fell off the stage. Geoffrey howled, Zoe swore, Anton threatened to go be an accountant and Ellen scraped Puck off the floor and kept the peace. They did the show with backstage lights on and three spots, the fairies shimmered in the dim light at the edges of the stage like fireflies and Puck gave the performance of a lifetime.
They’ll keep Puck, whose name is Noèmie, and who hasn’t been called by it once since she was cast as Robin Goodfellow, if they can. She’s sweet, catlike, quick, all long limbs and big eyes, and plays everything they hand her with conviction and grace. Ellen intends to be selfish, and she thinks Geoffrey will be too. Gabriel is livewire, voice and gestures and sudden stillness, reminds her of long ago and far away, before things changed, but he has a place at New Burbage next year. Geoffrey will hand him over to Darren with good grace and a glowing reference, because he’s not vindictive and Ellen will kiss him and tell him to be himself as hard as ever he can, because she is, and Gabriel’s enough like Geoffrey to drive Darren mad. Tom and Lucas will stay with them, and so will Sara. They want to be here, Theatre Sans Argent, more than they want anything else, dedication strong enough to survive parental misgivings and being broke and cold and tired and yelled at. They’re the start of their soul, the ones who will faithfully play the dukes and lords and ladies and fairies and mechanicals the way Frank and Cyril have for thirty years. Sophie will leave them, soon enough, silver and gold and good fortune, Charles and Geoffrey’s names carrying her upward, and Ellen’s number in her pocket so she can always come home.
Thinking about who to keep and who to send on, and where to send them, and what phone numbers to give them when they do is another startling aspect of her new life, like typing and keeping her head and being nice to the children. It’s strange, this responsibility, this knowledge that you are anchoring careers, lives, worlds. Nobody teaches you how to do this. They teach you to write applications, to move, to speak, to act, but not to make a life and a theatre and a company out of nothing at all. Nobody teaches you what you do when everything you ever thought you were changes overnight. She doesn’t know what she’s doing, it’s the most epic learning curve she’s ever been on in her life, improvising dialogue and blocking all the way along and yet she completely understands how, when she goes to check on Geoffrey, still lying on the stage, he can say quietly, soberly, shining with joy, ‘I realised this was home today.’ She knows. She’s known for a while.