Later Stanley would arrive at the opinion that girls were naturally more duplicitous, more artful, better at falsely sheathing their true selves; boys’ personalities simply shone through the clearer. It was that female art of multitasking, he would conclude, that witchy capacity that girls possessed, that allowed them to retain dual and triple threads of attention at once. Girls could distinguish constantly and consciously between themselves and the performance of themselves, between the form and the substance. This double-handed knack, this perpetual duality, meant that any one girl was both an advertisement and a product at any one time. Girls were always acting. Girls could reinvent themselves, he later thought, with a sour twist to his mouth and his free hand flattening the hair on his crown, and boys could not.
Which would be harder for the tutors, he wondered now, choosing between the girls or choosing between the boys? Did they have a different set of criteria for each, a different benchmark that took into consideration this fundamental difference between these unitary blunted boys and these many-headed Hydras, the girls? He realized with a kind of underwater flinch that all the girls in the room were beautiful, all of them glossy and svelte like variations on a theme. The boys, by contrast, were mostly odd and ordinary, not yet grown into their faces and their shoulders and their hands, some of them greasy and brash, some of them thin and spotted and hoarse. Looking around, it seemed to Stanley as if the boys were here to audition for ten different character parts in a play, and the girls were all auditioning for a single role. He got up and moved away.
The room was a mess: costume racks, painted flats, trunks, scaffolds and ladders, swollen cardboard boxes, paint cans, shrouded furniture. On the auditorium wall there were shelves and shelves of faceless polystyrene heads wearing helmets and bonnets and crowns, and in the corner a rusted suit of armor standing with his pelvis forward and his hands upon his hips.
Every five or ten minutes another number was called. The caller was a sharp gray woman who struck each name off her clipboard with relish, and watched them between strikes with pity and mild curiosity, as if they were gladiators dressed up to die.
“Number 5,” she called now.
Number 5 jumped to his feet and trotted nervously out of the room. The others watched him go.
“What if this is part of the test?” said Number 14 once the door had shut. “What if they’re videoing us now and watching us on live feed just to see how we bond?”
“What if there isn’t even an audition at all?” said Number 61. “We just get taken out of the room one by one once they’ve watched us for long enough, and then they tell us to go home.”
“Like rats,” said Number 14, as if in summary. They fell silent.
A few of the boys were pacing around the room, trying to stamp out their nervousness and peering at the framed photographs on the wall just for something to do. The photographs showed the class groups that had passed through the Institute, year by year, becoming sharper and more focused as the technology advanced, so the most recent groups shone wetly with a crispness and a brightness that the older classes did not possess. Stanley looked at the faces of all these people who had been opened up, awakened, broken and prevented from forming a crust, and wondered how many of them had now surrendered and become ordinary. In the photographs they looked hard and confident, bright in their theater makeup and their pinned-up costumes, and flushed with the thrill of opening night. He followed the photographs along the length of the wall and saw soldiers, monks, orphans, pirates, housewives, gods, samurai, and a group of silent watchmen in stern feathered masks that for some reason made him shiver.
“Number 33, you’re up,” came the call.
When they all had first arrived, the Head of Acting swept in, distracted and tilting his face oddly as if he was used to wearing bifocals.
“One of the questions we are going to ask you today,” he said briskly, “is why you want to attend this Institute, and why you want to become an actor. I am telling you this in advance so you can think hard about your answer. Let me say that all I am looking for is a truthful answer to this question. I do not want you to tell me that the theater fills you with a noble and holy passion just because you think that is the answer with which you can win. I want you to tell me the truth.
“Let me explain what I mean,” said the Head of Acting, still looking at them down the length of his long nose. “I auditioned for a place at this Institute nearly forty years ago. When I arrived for my audition and waited in this Green Room like you are all waiting here now, I was not filled with a noble and holy passion for the theater. I only knew that drama school sounded like more fun than university, and I thought it would probably mean less work. I was wrong about the work,” he added, and smiled faintly.
“The real reason I enrolled in any tertiary education at all was that I knew that teenage girls always like university boys better. I had been a scrawny and awkward and unsuccessful teenager and I wanted a second chance. I thought I would enroll in some college, buy a car and try for a girlfriend.
“I am telling you this about myself,” the Head of Acting said in his calm distracted way, “because I don’t want you to stand in front of the panel and lie. I want you to tell the truth, even if the truth is boring or embarrassing or contemptible. I don’t care what you say, as long as it’s you and as long as it’s real.” He swept a look over them all, smiled a tiny smile and said, “Good luck.”
Stanley moved from the Class of ’61 photograph to the Class of ’62 photograph and suddenly saw the Head of Acting. He was young and a little thinner but wore the same unfocused expression, as if he was watching something over the photographer’s shoulder that none of the others could see. They were all dressed in military uniforms, and the Head of Acting was kneeling at the front with a rifle in his lap, his peaked cap pushed back on his head, showing a darkly oiled curl of hair. Stanley leaned in for a closer look, and wondered if this square-jawed soldier ever found a girl.
February
From the damp-smelling foam-lined pit underneath the trapdoor ran a low reinforced passage left and right, and beyond the orchestra pit was another passage that ran underneath the first rows of the stalls in the audience. These passages invisibly framed the orchestra pit, forming a kind of underground moat that offered two quick and unseen paths between the wings on either side of the stage. The outer passage crawled between the ancient foundations of the auditorium, lit along the floor by a dusty string of fairy lights that sometimes winked on and off if the control box was accidentally knocked. The tunnel was narrow and low, the mortar bleeding thickly from between the cement bricks and brushing rough on either shoulder as you passed, the dry itch candyfloss of under-floor insulation wisping out between the joists. The inner passage was lined with gib-board, and narrower still: if two actors met in the middle they had to perform a quick shuffling rotating embrace, like an animate turnstile revolving in the dark.
The secrets of the auditorium were revealed to the first-years in the second week of the school year. They filed silently through the passages, inspected and tested the trap, hoisted themselves up into the flies, and dropped, awkward and untrusting, both hands clutching at the flying harness and craning nervously to check the winch. They walked across the stippled bridge that connected the fly-floors, looking down at the stage far below and reaching out to touch the thick braided cables that ran back and forth. The flies were at least twice the height of the proscenium arch, and the Head of Acting showed them how an entire panel of scenery could be flown up into the space above the stage to hang there, ready and waiting for the cue to drop. He activated the lift in the orchestra pit and they watched the floor of the pit rise up to meet the level of the stage. He showed them the heavy motorized chain underneath the false stage floor that activated the revolve, and then he switched the revolve on and they let themselves be carried around in silent powerful orbit, standing braced like stiff-legged pawns as the red mouth of the auditorium flashed by again and again.