Big Night

His heart beat quickly and with an irregular rhythm. It had done so since childhood, since he first noticed the strange continuous thumping sensation in his chest, like a bird trying to escape a cage, flapping its wings furiously against the bars, looking for an exit. Whenever he got excited or nervous, the bird in there would go crazy, like a winged prisoner who had had just about enough of captivity.

He was getting excited. He was getting nervous.

Those around him remained voiceless and motionless, being respectful of his routine, of his craft. He had worked hard on his craft. So hard.

And tonight was his big night.

The biggest crowd ever assembled to watch him perform; just a smidgen over three thousand. Three thousand and eleven, to be precise — those eleven mattered as much as the three thousand. Three thousand and eleven, to see him? Little old him? He could hardly believe it — it was no wonder his heart was beating in that fast, strange way. It had taken him a decade and a half to accumulate such an audience. A long decade and a half. A backbreaking, agonising decade and a half.

From his station by the curtain at stage right, he could not make out the faces in the crowd; the stage lights prohibited it. They were in darkness, and soon he would be the only one in light. All the attention would be on him. And he, he would be the first to concede, deserved it.

The rehearsals. The hard work. The dedication. The sacrifices. All of it was about to pay off. No one out there, or even back here, could ever know the amount of work that had gone into that moment. They could never appreciate such a thing, but they would appreciate his performance. And they would cheer, and stand when they clapped, and whoop and whistle, and ask for more, for encores. Unquestionably some scented bouquets of flowers and singular red and white roses would be flung over the lip of the great wooden stage, over the heads of the band in their pit, to land respectfully by his feet. He would only pick the best among them to take backstage with him; the prettiest, the fullest of life. Those were the only ones he deserved, really, the only ones that suited him.

It was nearly time. The red light above his head flickered and turned orange. In seconds it would turn green, and he would be out, out there, with them. He looked at the faces of those gathered around him, his team, his support. He loved each and every one of them, wholly and truly, and he knew they felt the same way — he could tell by the way they looked at him with so much reverential pride and joy in this, his greatest of moments. He could not have done it without them; he would not be here without them, nor they he. It was beautiful in its symbiosis.

One, two, three.

The light turned green. He nodded a final self-assured nod, took a breath which filled the deepest recesses of his lungs and stepped from behind the rich burgundy curtain.

The crowd knew the deal: they kept quiet as he walked across the stage, his brown leather brogues clicking on the burnished floor. The time to make noise and celebrate him was after he had finished, not before. They were a classy bunch. Well-heeled and sophisticated. The prefect crowd. His crowd.

He stopped, faced forward, confidently cleared his throat, making sure his mouth was adequately moist, chose his favoured spot in the middle distance to concentrate on, and began…

I am that merry wanderer of the night.
I jest to Oberon and make him smile
When I a fat and bean-fed horse beguile,
Neighing in likeness of a filly foal:

He moved to the left - as he had rehearsed countless times - and raised his voice. His eyes were still on the same dark abstracted spot, above the heads of the audience. One, two, three.

And sometime lurk I in a gossip’s bowl,
In very likeness of a roasted crab,
And when she drinks, against her lips I bob
And on her wither’d dewlap pour the ale.
The wisest aunt, telling the saddest tale,

A little bit further to the left. One, two, three.

Sometime for three-foot stool mistaketh me;
Then slip I from her bum, down topples she,
And ‘tailor’ cries, and falls into a cough;
And then the whole quire hold their hips and laugh,
And waxen in their mirth and neeze and swear

Eyes dead centre now, levelled with the invisible middle seat of the front row. Sotto voce. One, two, three.

A merrier hour was never wasted there.

His body released its inner tension and he exhaled slowly. Now was the moment…

Silence. Utter silence. A silence that was whole. A silence that was consuming.

This crowd that he had held in such high esteem moments earlier, respected them for their taste and tact, was not reacting to his performance. Not a cough, or an awkward readjustment in a chair. Not a whimper.

Maybe they didn’t realise it was over, he hurriedly thought, the sweat beginning to dampen his shirt beneath the arms. No – they were too smart for that. They had come for his readings of Shakespeare; they knew when one ended. Or perhaps - his mind moved cautiously to a different, more appealing thought - they were so awestruck by his performance, they are still absorbing it. If so, it would break like a dam soon, in a torrential pour of applause and cheering.

One, two, three.

Nothing. Still nothing.

The rage hit him all at once. There was no steady build up, no grating irritation, no foreshadowing to himself. Just pure, unbridled rage. Righteous in its origins — the most potent kind of anger.

He leapt from the stage, into the crowd, screaming at them, berating them for being uncivilized and not knowing true art, true beauty when they saw it.

‘What’s wrong with you people, huh? You fucking pigs! Don’t you know Shakespeare? Don’t you appreciate him? And me? Don’t you appreciate me? Don’t you know what it takes to do what I do? What it has taken me to get you all here? The years and years. Ingrates! Fuck you all.’

He viciously waded into them, swinging widely and without proper aim, hitting them where they sat, across faces and shoulders and chests. None stood up to escape his anger; none stood to run away. They all stayed in their seats, taking his beatings and his insults. And they all stayed perfectly silent.

He looked up and saw faces behind the stage, where he had just come from: his manager, his director, the producers, the rest of the cast. They were all staring blanky at him.

Climbing back onto the stage, he ran to confront them, his shoes hammering on the wood, echoing in the hush.

‘Why won’t they cheer?’ He grabbed his managers shoulder and shook him. ‘Why won’t they cheer? It’s my big night! Why won’t they fucking cheer?!’

His manger’s plastic head slipped from its neck bracket and fell to the floor with a clatter. It rolled away from the barrage of questions and the tall statuesque white mannequin that had moments earlier been its body, rolled onto the stage, to the edge, where it came to rest, its dead eyes looking over a vast audience of other dead-eyed mannequins. And from behind, from the only living thing in the theatre, came the familiar shouts, the screams, the banging, the rage, and soon the tears — there were always tears at the end of the big night.