Gleeson Hattie Steals the Show

The BRAND NEW Theatreland Whodunnit - the backstage cosy series readers are loving!
1. Auflage 2025
ISBN: 978-1-83501-006-8
Verlag: No Exit Press
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 304 Seiten

Reihe: A Theatreland Mystery

Autoren/Hrsg.

Gleeson, Patrick

Leseproben

Prologue

The door did very little to advertise its presence. From the mouth of the alley that led unobtrusively off Shaftesbury Avenue, all you could see above the cluster of bins was the box with the frosted glass sides that housed a dim bulb and from which the black lettering that spelled out STAGE DOOR had rubbed off many years before.

But it was a door that didn’t need much signposting. If you knew what you were looking for it was precisely where you’d expect it to be, at the rear of the Revue Theatre. And if you didn’t know what you were looking for, you probably had no business with a door like that anyway.

Hattie Cocker did indeed know exactly what she was looking for, having passed through this door many times over the course of her career. She didn’t need to look for it at all; she could simply instruct her legs where to go once she got off the bus at Piccadilly Circus and allow them to make the journey on autopilot. Or at least, that was her expectation. It turned out that her legs had developed an unfortunate confusion concerning the relative placements of the Revue and the Apollo – she had a great deal of practice at walking to both – and so it was only when she was raising her hand to press the doorbell of the stage door of the latter that she realised her legs had brought her to the wrong place.

This minor situational mishap addressed, she still managed to ring the correct doorbell a full five minutes before the time she had agreed to arrive, thanks to her innate habit of building in contingency buffers to all travel plans, and after a short wait was duly admitted by a familiar face.

‘Hallo, lovely,’ Donna greeted her with a broad smile that somehow lacked warmth.

‘All right?’ replied Hattie, with as much positivity as she could muster. She liked Donna, she really did, it was just… well, never mind that now. ‘It’s nice to be back here.’

‘Which show did you do?’ enquired Donna.

‘It was an Ayckbourn… Man of the Moment, I think?’

‘That never ran here. You’re thinking of the Gielgud,’ Donna corrected her, a trifle sharply.

That was it, wasn’t it? It was almost impossible to have an interaction with her without coming away feeling like you’d been slightly told off by teacher. A manner like that was no bad thing, professionally, but it always made social chit-chat slightly strained.

‘You’re right, I’m sure. It must have been something else. It’ll come to me.’

Donna nodded. ‘Thanks for helping out,’ she offered, perhaps by way of reconciliation.

‘You know me. I never turn down paid work if I can help it,’ said Hattie as she signed in on the clipboard hanging by the door. There were only a handful of names on the sheet that weren’t marked as signed out: Donna of course, a Lel Nowak, which was a name that rang a bell, and then someone called Colin McDermot, which was a name that definitely didn’t. Lots of other people had been around at some point then left again (there had been a matinee performance earlier in the day), so the building was quiet, although Hattie could hear muffled voices from somewhere in the auditorium.

‘Well I’m very grateful. Everyone else is so busy at the moment.’

It wasn’t meant as a barbed comment. Probably. Of course Hattie was more likely to be free for a gig at short notice than other stage managers. She was in the very unusual position, thanks to her current gig tutoring at a drama school, of being a jobbing stage manager whose evenings were normally free. And of course, she only had that gig because Donna, the previous SM tutor, had missed the industry so much she’d gone back to it, leaving a vacancy. So it was only fair that Donna might call on Hattie for a favour, as Hattie was in a rare position of being able to oblige.

It was just that Hattie had only had to take the SM tutoring gig because she’d found it increasingly difficult to find regular work. In this industry it was all about who you knew, and once injury forced Hattie off the touring circuit she realised that her social-professional circle in London had mostly retired or moved away. It didn’t matter of course, as the tutoring put food on the table, but still, she didn’t like being reminded of how she’d slightly lost her footing.

‘Shall we get on with it, then?’ asked Donna.

She led Hattie along a low-ceilinged corridor that jinked left and right a few times, opening out suddenly to a much larger space, the bulk of which was walled off by some extremely makeshift-looking timber-and-canvas ‘flats’ – the tall, narrow panels that are the building blocks of theatre scenery. Hattie knew that on the other side those flats were carefully finished and painted with enough delicacy that, from a dozen yards away, under stage lighting, they looked like the solid walls of an imposing cityscape. Like everything in theatre, scenery could be as flimsy and ramshackle as you liked so long as the bit the punters saw looked the part.

There were still voices coming from somewhere. The sounds came from above, raised but distant, although Hattie could make out none of what was actually being said. Perhaps some actors were running lines in a dressing room. They worked their way along the back of the set, then ducked through a gap between two overlapping flats to emerge abruptly onto the stage, where an angled floor and some clever forced perspective tricks made a six-metre rectangle feel like an expansive swathe of London’s South Bank. Even under the harsh fluorescent working lights it was still quite something.

‘Who designed the—’ she began, but was interrupted by Donna who called out, sharply: ‘Excuse me!’

Hattie followed her gaze up to the balcony that ran round the backstage area, from which the various pulleys that ‘flew’ scenery in and out were operated. Much of it was obscured by long black drapes that hung all the way from the ceiling to the sides of the stage, and from behind one of those drapes were coming occasional metallic clonking sounds.

‘There shouldn’t be anyone on the fly floor at the moment. Come down please!’ commanded Donna sternly. The clonking stopped. They waited in silence for a few moments, listening for any further sounds, before Donna relaxed. She turned back to Hattie, rolled her eyes and muttered, ‘A couple of stage hands dragged a massage chair up there to sit in while waiting for their cues, and now the crew spend half their time fighting over getting turns in it. Honestly, you wouldn’t think they’ve all been doing this for six months with the way they go on. There’s no discipline with some of this lot.’

Hattie made a sympathetic face. Donna was a famous stickler for discipline, and while this was entirely right and reasonable, Hattie felt she could be slightly more free with the dressing-downs than she needed to be. Was being up on the fly floor between the matinee and the evening show really such a terrible sign of decadence?

‘Now, we’ve got cue lights on all the entrances except upstage left. That’s because…’

Donna launched into an extremely thorough overview of everything that Hattie would need to know the following week while Donna was away. The show, a musical called The Guilty, had opened earlier in the year. It was produced by feted impresario Sir Geoffrey Dougray, and while the reviews were positive, the general consensus was that it wasn’t quite the smash hit return to form that Geoffrey had been chasing ever since the last of his run of hits in the early 2000s. It was booked to run in the West End until November, and the rumour was that it was unlikely to be extended. Instead, it would be packaged off on a regional tour, and then either taken abroad or retired. A perfectly respectable production, in other words, and therefore a huge disappointment to Sir Geoffrey.

Donna was taking a week off mid-run, to look after her daughter after some surgery of some sort that had been unexpectedly scheduled at short notice. Hence the need for someone to step in and stage manage the show during her absence. Hattie was now here to get the full rundown from Donna, and would in a couple of hours’ time shadow her during the evening performance, so that she could be ready to take over the next day. It was quite a lot of bother for what was, from a stage manager’s perspective, a very straightforward production. But over-preparedness was the watchword of her profession, and Hattie and Donna did these things by the book.

When Donna had finished her introduction, she took her round the rest of the set to help get her familiar with everything, pointing out which exits led to where, along with the various trip hazards, props tables and other minutiae with which an SM concerns themselves. As there was one moment where an actor needed to enter through the auditorium from behind the audience, Donna twitched aside the lush stage curtain so they could poke their noses out at the rows of seats. All was quiet out there, as the ushers had long since finished sweeping up spilled snacks from the stalls and had now gone on break. In fact...