Chapter Three Seacombe, Cornwall
Chapter Three
Seacombe, Cornwall
There was a high wind the night Shakespeare’s Macbeth opened at The Aphrodite Theatre in Seacombe.
It raced around the sandstone walls of the sturdy Edwardian building, moaning like a demon, rattling the sash windows and agitating the twin towers that remained unmoved beneath their domed hats.
Drizzle danced in the golden halos of the streetlamps and soaked the pavements as punters navigated their way around puddles in their hurry to reach the big wooden doors that opened promptly at six thirty.
Joseph Lightwater, the director, popped into the foyer to gauge the temperature and was delighted by the sight of so many people.
In his mid-fifties, he was of average height and stockily built, with a slight paunch he was wont to pat after a hearty meal and a pint of beer in The Wily Fox.
His greying hair was receding in the usual places and the deep lines on his brow exposed a tendency to worry, but his light blue eyes were bright with vigour and his full lips quick to smile.
Trotsky-style spectacles and thick stubble gave him the intellectual air of a dedicated creative, and the brown corduroy jacket he wore over jeans and trainers had been patched at the elbows, for Joseph rarely spent money on himself, and certainly not on fashion.
After a successful run of comedy, he’d been a little apprehensive about producing such a serious play, but it didn’t seem to be putting anyone off.
Neither was the weather. He’d been down on the beach that morning walking his dog, and the wind had almost blown them both away.
The gale had picked up and by late afternoon the rollers that had come crashing onto the coast were the biggest he’d ever seen.
However, he knew it wasn’t simply the play that was drawing people to the theatre that stormy night, but the leading lady, Isadora Nash, who was an American film star of international fame.
Still beautiful at forty, and apparently very much in demand, she had declared on a recent podcast that she wanted to go back to her roots and do a season of theatre.
On hearing that, Joseph had immediately called her agent.
The fact that his theatre was in a provincial town in Cornwall seemed to work to his advantage for the agent told him, earnestly, that Isadora didn’t want the glamour of New York or London, but something gritty and authentic – he decided to take that as a compliment.
There was, however, nothing gritty and authentic about Isadora Nash, but what did that matter when her name would fill the theatre night after night?
Theatres, these days, struggled to make ends meet.
To Joseph Lightwater, for whom the theatre was a lifelong passion, Isadora Nash felt like a gift from God.
The gift from God, Joseph soon discovered, was an exceedingly difficult woman.
He had met many actresses in the thirty odd years he’d been in the business, and besides the occasional diva, most were charmingly eccentric.
Isadora, unfortunately, was a toxic combination of insecurity and arrogance – nasty to women she classed as competition and haughty to those she deemed unimportant.
She wafted around backstage with the entitlement of a multi-award-winning actor.
The truth was that in spite of the many films she had starred in, she had never won a single accolade.
That must have irked, Joseph reflected. He knew that people who felt they hadn’t quite made it were always unhappy, and unhappy people were never nice.
The likes of Meryl Streep and Dame Judi Dench were, apparently, delightful.
As he made his way backstage, he dismissed Isadora’s tricky character as inconsequential. She was a good actor and would make a compelling Lady Macbeth, and that was all that mattered. The audience would love her, even if the company didn’t.
Joseph loved the buzz of a theatre an hour or two before the curtain went up.
He adored the heightened energy as the crew raced about doing the final checks on lighting and sound; the stage management team made sure that everything was in its place on stage, and in the wings at the ready for the various scene changes; wardrobe and make-up were busy attending the actors; and Madge, the octogenarian beverages manager, who had worked at The Aphrodite since she was a girl, moved slowly up and down the corridors pushing a trolley of tea, coffee and sandwiches which she made herself in the kitchen at the back.
Joseph savoured the unique smell: a mixture of historic carpet, paint, wood, stale perfume, dust burning on the hot lights and, embedded in the fabrics, cigarette smoke from the time when smoking was permitted inside.
A theatre smelt like nowhere else, and it took him back to his am-dram days when, as a boy, he had started at the bottom at a small theatre in Exeter doing everything from sweeping and shifting furniture to assisting stage designers with a pot of paint and a big brush.
He’d tried his hand at acting but had never been good enough to qualify for a leading role – or, indeed, any role.
So, he’d worked his way up to the coveted position of assisting directors, quietly harbouring the dream of one day becoming a director himself.
At last, at the ripe age of thirty-two, he’d put on his first play, Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest, in the theatre in Exeter where he’d grown up.
He’d befriended Rupert Everett while working on the set of Another Country eight years before and managed to persuade him to play the lead.
Rupert, riding high on a heady wave of global acclaim, was both generous-spirited and shrewd.
He’d waived his fee in exchange for a small percentage of the takings and guaranteed that the production was an enormous success.
It had been a win-win for both of them. From that moment on, Joseph had produced and directed plays.
He knew he never wanted to do anything else.
His big break came when Emma, his wife of fourteen years, had declared that she wanted to move to Seacombe for the sake of their two children who she believed would benefit from provincial life and sea air.
Joseph, whose work took him to theatres all over the country, wasn’t keen at first to move out of their comfortable townhouse in Exeter where his roots had been laid down since childhood.
But on the day Emma dragged him to visit possible homes in Seacombe, he had just happened to be having a pint in the local pub while Emma nipped into the chemist, when he’d noticed an elderly woman at the table behind him.
Initially, she drew his eye because of her charisma – she was like an old lighthouse whose beacon still shines brightly and is impossible to ignore.
Then the emphatic way she moved her hands combined with the rich timbre of her voice had further piqued his interest. He just knew she had trod the boards.
He cocked an ear and listened. It wasn’t long before he was proved right.
‘I’m going to sell the theatre,’ she said with a dramatic sigh typical of someone for whom small gestures exaggerated on stage had become second nature.
‘I’ve run out of steam and the place just loses me money.
I’m going to retire to my house by the sea and ruminate on the good old days. ’
Joseph had swung round and introduced himself.
With his genial smile and boy-next-door good looks, he was the sort of man people found approachable and immediately likeable.
The woman’s beady chestnut eyes had lit up and she’d taken him in with interest. ‘Leila Frost,’ she had said in a gravelly voice, and put out a hand.
Her long nails were scarlet to match her lips, her hair an unruly mop of greying brown curls.
When she smiled there was an echo of mischief in it, and Joseph guessed she must have once been a formidable flirt.
Her companion was a plain, scrawny woman with platinum blonde hair pulled into a tight bun and sharp blue eyes who, at sixty-five, still edited the local newspaper.
Infected by his charm and vitality, they had invited him to join their table.
He’d accepted enthusiastically, pulled up a chair and ordered himself another beer and a couple of glasses of Pinot Grigio for the ladies.
By the time Emma returned with her paracetamol Joseph had accepted Leila’s challenge to revive her theatre.
His first play would be his lucky play, The Importance of being Earnest, only without Rupert as the lead.
By then Rupert had moved on to bigger and better things.
Twelve years later Joseph was still there.
Joseph knocked on the wooden door, distinguishable from all other doors by the illustrious name emblazoned in big black letters on the brass nameplate: Edward Rye, aka Macbeth. ‘Come in, my dear Joseph,’ came a booming voice in crisply articulated Received Pronunciation.
‘Hi,’ said Joseph, poking his face around the door.