My wife touched my arm. ‘It’s starting late,’ she said.
I looked at my watch and my heart missed a couple of beats. She was right. Seven thirty-five. So what had happened? Had Tirian failed to turn up? Was somebody ill? I looked around me. So far so good. Nobody else seemed to have noticed. I waited, sweatily, for the play to begin.
At last, the house lights dimmed. I took a deep breath. The curtain went up.
ACT I
The action of the play takes place in the office of Dr Alex Farquhar at Fairfields, an experimental hospital for the criminally insane. The office is cosy and old-fashioned. It seems to belong to the sixties, perhaps to the world of Hammer Horror.
A large, cluttered desk dominates the room. A window looks out onto fields, trees and a low wall. On the other side, a door opens into a cupboard. Incongruously, a complete human skeleton stands on a frame in one corner.
Sitting in the chair in front of the desk is Mark Styler, a writer in his early thirties. Casually dressed, his face is pale and his haircut is a little odd … otherwise he’s the archetypal ‘expert’， as seen on TV.
He’s been kept waiting. He looks at his watch, then takes out a digital recorder and switches it on. He records.
STYLER: Recording. Six fifteen. Thursday. July twenty-second.
And so it began.
I’m not sure I breathed during Styler’s opening monologue, watching him walk around the office, recording his thoughts as he had done a hundred times before. I knew what I was waiting for. Mindgame is, at least in part, a comedy. It had to sell itself as such to the audience and my experience on the road had taught me that the first laugh was crucial. After that, everyone could relax.
It came when Styler moved away from the window and examined the bookshelves.
STYLER: Dr Farquhar arranges his books in alphabetical order. I wonder if I can trust him?
It wasn’t a particularly funny line but for some reason it had always hit the spot with the audience and it did the same now. I heard the ripple of laughter spread through the darkness and something pricked at the back of my neck. I thought, for the first time that evening, that it was going to be all right.
The next hour sped past and it seemed to me that the play went as well as it possibly could. Nobody fluffed their lines. The set worked. The laughs arrived more frequently, and as the action became darker, I could feel the tension in the house. Nurse Plimpton was attacked. Mark Styler was tricked into putting on a straitjacket. Dr Farquhar walked towards him with a scalpel. Curtain. Applause. Interval.
I went outside once the house lights had come up. There was no point hanging around in the bar as, this being a first night, people would largely be keeping their opinions to themselves, so there would be nothing to overhear. And if anyone did say anything memorable, my family would pick it up and report back to me. After the tension of the opening moments, I needed some fresh air. It was an unpleasant night. Although this was April, a wintery breeze was blowing down the Strand and there was a sheen of rain making the pavements gleam. I noticed Ewan Lloyd had come out too. He was standing at the corner of the theatre, dressed in a black astrakhan coat buttoned up to the neck, and I went over to him.
‘How do you think it’s going?’ I asked him.
He grimaced. ‘Tirian missed out two lines in the first scene,’ he said. ‘And the bloody projector got stuck again.’
The projector was used to make the picture on the wall change from one image to another during the performance, but it had to happen slowly so the audience didn’t notice. It had seemed fine to me, and I hadn’t noticed the missing lines. It struck me that Ewan was even more nervous than I was, but then this was his first London production for some time.
‘Otherwise it’s OK,’ he went on. ‘I think they’re enjoying it.’
‘The critics?’
‘I mean the audience. You can never tell with the critics, sitting there, making notes. Did you see that Harriet Throsby from the Sunday Times is in the house?’ I was surprised by the hatred in his voice.
‘Is that so surprising?’
‘I’d have thought she’d have sent an assistant rather than coming herself. We’re an out-of-town production.’
‘Maybe that’s a good thing.’ I was thinking we might get a more prominent review if she wrote it herself.
‘Nothing about that woman is good. Nothing! She’s a complete bitch, and you might as well know that I’ve never had a good review from her.’ Ewan hadn’t raised his voice. His anger was all the more striking for being expressed in such a subdued way. He stared out at the rain, which was falling harder now. ‘Some of the stuff she writes is pure vitriol,’ he went on. ‘She chooses her words carefully, rancid opinions carefully laced with deeply personal insults. They say she started life as a journalist but wanted more power. That’s what it’s all about. I don’t think she even likes theatre.’