The Supporting Actor

/, Literature, Blesok no. 39/The Supporting Actor

The Supporting Actor

* * *

As usual, The Supporting Actor started living with his new role. He rehearsed for hours, working day and night, and the watchman relented, leaving him alone for nights on end on the dark stage. “The last role,” thought The Supporting Actor, “and I have to play it perfectly.”
He listened to the echo of his words, his own voice in the empty hall, and everything contributed to the creation of the Ghost, just as the old actor had created that image in his head. As the premiere approached, he rehearsed more and more. He lost weight, he became thin, but he was overjoyed, because sometimes he discovered and mastered a new detail, something that built upon the character and moved him closer to the ideal.
However, when the director arranged the stage, he hit upon an idea that stunned The Supporting Actor. He imagined that the upper part of the stage should include a mechanism to which the Ghost would be tied with a rope. So, floating above the stage, he would be more believable. At the end of the scene in which the Ghost recites the lines demanding that Hamlet swear to take revenge, the middle part of the stage would open up. The ghost would drop down, and his last words would be spoken from underground.
The Supporting Actor was now greatly tormented.
It was no longer possible for him to rehearse his role alone, because the stage worker who operated the mechanism left at the end of rehearsals. He asked him to stay after these rehearsals, but he did that only once. He started to despair. He stood on the stage, gazing upward, from where he was supposed to recite his lines while tied with the rope, swinging as if flying. His despair grew as the premiere approached. He was constantly tormented by the notion that he must find a way to fly, that being the only way to fulfil what he had so long yearned for, to create a never-before-seen role. Once the watchman found him high up on the set, on the terrace of the fortress, trying to fly. He flapped through the air, started his lines, but his voice disappeared in the crash that echoed in the empty room when he fell.
“What have you done?” the watchman yelled, running to help him. The Supporting Actor clenched his teeth, and, instead of moaning in pain because of his injured leg, uttered these words:
“I am thy father’s spirit,
Doom’d for a certain term to walk the night… ,”
”Listen, you fool,” the watchman now screamed, “you’ll kill yourself and get me in trouble!”
He kept yelling and pushing him toward the exit, while The Supporting Actor resisted. He must not leave the stage. No. He should try once again, a thousand more times, especially now that he had almost flown and perfected his role. True, he had fallen. Yet for a moment, a significant moment, a fraction of a second, he managed to stay in the air and resist the fall.
When the theater door closed behind him and he heard he merciless turning of the key in the lock, a sound that unmistakably separated him from the stage, he leaned against the wall and slowly slid outside until he was sitting down. The freshness of the night air shook his body, but it was as if it wasn’t his body. He recited:
“Unhousel’d, disappointed, unanel’d,
No reckoning made, but sent to my account
With all my imperfections on my head.”

* * *

The opening night came.
Visibly excited, The Supporting Actor put on his costume before anyone else. It was a white cape covered with phosphorescent material, which, when lit by the spotlight that followed him in his flight through the air, reflected magically. He gazed at himself in the mirror for a long time. His face was pale. When he applied his makeup it assumed a ghostly appearance. He sat in front of the mirror and patiently waited for his cue. He kept rehearsing his lines.
The ghost of Hamlet’s father stepped onto the stage.
The appearance of the ghost astounded the audience. He paused on the platform of the fortress and. slowly, in surreal flight, glided to the floor.
Whither wilt thou lead me? Speak, I’ll go no further,” Hamlet said.
Mark me,” the Ghost said in a miraculously surreal voice, and he rose up. He circled Hamlet, disappeared behind the curtain for a moment, returned, and continued floating, lightly quivering.
“… My hour is almost come
When I to sulph’rous and tormenting flames
Must render up myself.”


And the ghost resumed his circling of Hamlet, flying to the edge of the stage, then shooting upwards like an arrow.
No one in the audience could breathe. No one in the theater had seen such an illusion before. They assumed it was technical artifice, but the Ghost looked so real that those watching opened their mouths in awe. The director was also perplexed. They had achieved no such effect during rehearsals. Really. The Supporting Actor had then floated above the stage hanging on a rope, but the best they could do was swing him up and down, lifting him and lowering him. Now this. This was a miracle, perfection…
If anyone had looked above the stage and seen the face of the stagehand that operated the mechanism and the rope on which The Supporting Actor was supposed to be dangling, they would realize there was something strange occurring.
At first he became angry when The Supporting Actor stepped onto the stage, because he did not hook himself onto the rope. Swinging it left and right, he tried to warn him, but The Supporting Actor paid no heed to this signal. “What is the old fool doing?” he thought. “He’ll ruin the show.” But he was flabbergasted when The Supporting Actor flew without the aid of the rope. Against all the laws of physics, he flew. And not only that. He soared up among the hooks, approached him, and, while floating, stuck out his tongue. The worker would surely have crashed onto the stage if he had not been firmly buckled into his seat.
The young actor playing Hamlet was also obviously baffled. He continued speaking, but it was more of an unclear, frightened stammer. The ghost continued:
“But that I am forbid
To tell the secrets of my prison-house,
I could a tale unfold whose lightest word
Would harrow up thy soul, freeze thy young blood,
Make thy two eyes like stars start from their spheres.”

“God!” Hamlet screamed. But he was not responding with his lines but with a shriek of fear, after which the young actor fell onto the stage.
However, no one was watching him any more.
The ghost of Hamlet’s father floated or flew above the stage until he appeared directly over the orchestra seats. The operator of the lights followed him with the spotlight, but he lost him now. However, the costume of The Supporting Actor emitted its own light. He flew low above the heads of the audience, and a faint breeze tousled the hairs of the stunned viewers.
“But virtue, as it never will be mov’d,
Though lewdness court it in a shape of heaven,
So lust, though to a radiant angel link’d,
Will sate itself in a celestial bed
And prey on garbage.”

He flew to the gallery, then to the ceiling, and from there his crystal voice echoed even clearer. The people turned their heads as if bewitched by the sight. It was amazement mixed with vague fear, a supernatural feeling.
“Even though somebody has made a fool of me,” the director thought, “he should be congratulated.” He thought that somebody from the technical crew had prepared this surprise without his knowledge or control, in cahoots with The Supporting Actor, whom he had always considered a bit crazy.
Finally, The Supporting Actor landed on the stage. Hamlet, who had come to his senses, continued the dialogue. The moment was approaching when the Ghost was to be swallowed underground, and the stage was already opening. The Supporting Actor floated above that spot and spoke the last lines of his role.
“The glow-worm shows the matin to be near
And gins to pale his uneffectual fire.
Adieu, adieu, adieu. Remember me.”

Instead of dropping below the boards, The Supporting Actor seemed to change his mind, and he flew up again. He soared over the orchestra and spiraled higher and higher toward the ceiling of the theater. Finally he stopped, bowed several times in midair, showing deep respect, and he disappeared through the ceiling.
First there was silence, then cries of wonder spread through the hall when the Ghost of Hamlet’s father, the ordinary Supporting Actor, slowly, as if immaterial, went through the ceiling. Slowly, miraculously, and without a sound. First his head, then his shoulders, his body, and his bare feet.
Somebody clapped. Then everybody in the audience took up the applause, which into a long wave. Five minutes, ten minutes, maybe longer. The clapping wouldn’t stop.

* * *

The director could barely move through the astonished audience in the crowded lobby. The people were confused. They wanted an explanation, an interpretation of the event. He rushed toward the dressing rooms. The actors and all the other theater workers behind the stage were puzzled. With their eyes and mouths wide open, they shook their heads when he asked them about The Supporting Actor. Nobody had seen him. They were astonished and frightened, having been witnesses to a supernatural sight. In the hall, a cleaning lady told him that The Supporting Actor was in his dressing room.
“He’s there,” the cleaning lady said. “I wanted to enter several times, to clean, but he has been sitting in front of his mirror for an hour and won’t move.”
The director ran to the dressing room. Indeed, The Supporting Actor, still in the costume of Hamlet father’s ghost, was sitting in front of his mirror. His face, reflected in the mirror, was composed. The director approached him and called to him. He didn’t move.
“You’ve performed a miracle,” the director said. “Such a thing has never happened in any theater in the world. Nobody can repeat it either.”
The Supporting Actor looked into the smoothness of the glass surface calmly, without blinking. His face, not like a dead man’s, gleamed radiantly, like a man wreathed in final glory.

Translated by: Elizabeta Bakovska

2018-08-21T17:23:23+00:00 December 1st, 2004|Categories: Prose, Literature, Blesok no. 39|0 Comments