The Twist of a Knife (Hawthorne and Horowitz Investigate #4)(5)

Maureen had already typed up an outline of the tour that they were planning and slid it in front of me. Bath, Southampton, Colchester, York – they were all good-sized cities with excellent theatres, and I should say at once that Ahmet was as good as his word. He managed to entice a well-known director, Ewan Lloyd, to come on board and over the next few weeks I received regular updates. The money had been raised. Jordan Williams was interested in the part of Dr Farquhar. The theatres had been signed up. They were starting work on the designs. Jordan Williams had accepted the part of Dr Farquhar. A rehearsal space had been booked. I’m condensing the events of several months into just a few lines because I want to get on to what happened in London, but I can’t overstate how exciting this all was for me. It was my earliest dream, my first ambition, still somehow alive.

This is the plot of Mindgame:

Mark Styler, a journalist and ‘true crime’ writer, is visiting a lunatic asylum called Fairfields where he hopes to interview a notorious serial killer, Easterman, for a book he is writing. First, he has to persuade the unwilling and unhelpful director of the institute, Dr Farquhar, to allow him access to his patient. Quite quickly, Styler comes to realise that not all is as it should be at Fairfields. For no good reason, there’s a full-length human skeleton hanging in Dr Farquhar’s office, and his assistant, Nurse Plimpton, is clearly frightened of something and tries to warn Styler to leave while he still can. As the action continues, the sense of uneasiness erupts into violence until it is revealed that the lunatics have taken over the asylum. The real Dr Farquhar is dead. Styler is trapped.

My big idea – and my nod to Shaffer – was that since nothing was as it seemed, this should be literally true for the audience.

So, as the play continues, the set plays a series of tricks. A door that had opened into a cupboard suddenly leads into a corridor and later into a bathroom. The view out of the window is gradually blocked as a wall rises up, brick by brick. The pictures on the walls change subject. The curtains change colour and the furniture is secretly replaced. Originally, the play was called Metanoia, a word used in psychology to describe the abandonment of the false self … but this was quickly jettisoned by Maureen. ‘Why should I pay to see it when I don’t even know what it means?’

Mindgame opened in Colchester and did surprisingly well. It got some good reviews in the local press and the audiences loved it. I can say this with confidence because I watched several performances in the first week and got into the habit of slipping into the bar in the interval to hear what people were saying. The first act ends on a knife-edge. Easterman has escaped and assumed the identity of Dr Farquhar. He has murdered Nurse Plimpton. Holding a scalpel, he advances on Mark Styler, who is helpless, strapped into a straitjacket. There seems to be no possible escape. Curtain. And it worked. I listened to people chatting and they really were engaged, wondering what was going to happen next. There were no walkouts.

For the next five months, from November through to March, the play faded into the background as it continued its tour and I got on with my other work. It was easy to forget that it was happening at all unless Ahmet happened to ring me – which he did occasionally when there were good reviews or when things went wrong. The big news, though, came at the end of February. After going through the box-office receipts with his accountant, he had decided to open in the West End and somehow he had managed to raise the money for an initial twelve-week run at the Vaudeville, a handsome nineteenth-century theatre in the Strand, not far from Trafalgar Square. There would only be three weeks’ rehearsal. One of the actors had decided to drop out. But Ewan Lloyd was still on board as director. We would open in the second week of April.

Before I knew it, we were rehearsing in a converted warehouse in Dalston and this time I was allowed to join in. The rehearsal room was exactly what I would have imagined: a large, empty space with a triple-height ceiling and flaking walls, a kitchen area with an assortment of mugs, a kettle, tea and biscuits. Four plastic chairs were arranged in a circle for the director and cast and made me think of an AA meeting. The shape of the set had been chalked out on the bare floorboards, with traffic cones used for the doors and windows. The various props had been arranged on trestle tables. Styler’s straitjacket hung on a rail. There were more chairs at the edge of the room for the assistant director, the lighting designer, the costume assistant and various other backstage staff. The atmosphere was always highly charged … intense.

It was during this time that I got to know Ewan Lloyd and the cast a little better. I won’t say I was part of the team. I was sitting in the outer circle. But we did occasionally have a drink together once we’d finished for the day and something vaguely resembling a friendship sprang up between us.

When I’d first met Ewan, I’d assumed he was gay. He was quite effete, dressing like Oscar Wilde with a wide-brimmed hat and a scarf. If he’d smoked, I could imagine him using an ebony cigarette holder. I was quite surprised when Ahmet told me that although Ewan was now divorced, he had been married to an actress and they’d had four children.

Ewan was in his late forties and completely bald, although it looked as if he had shaved off his hair rather than lose it strand by strand. He was quite fastidious, almost prissy, when he was talking about his work and it didn’t help that he spoke with a slight stutter. He wore glasses with very thin frames and he would use them like a conductor’s baton, tapping the script or jabbing them at me when he was making a point. Maureen had shown me his CV and I had seen that he had worked in a number of well-respected theatres, although I couldn’t help noticing that his CV had become a lot thinner in recent years. He had mounted several productions with a fringe theatre company in Antwerp, but had returned to England to direct Macbeth for Ahmet.