Sidney Chambers and The Shadow of Death (The Grantchester Mysteries)

talking to himself again. ‘Vanity, vanity, all is vanity, saith the Preacher,’ he muttered as he walked towards the Arts Theatre for the first rehearsal of a modern-dress production of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar .
    Why had he agreed to take part, he wondered? At least his was only a small part, that of Artemidorus, ‘sophist of Cnidos’, who tries to warn Caesar that a group of conspirators are about to kill him. There were two scenes, very few lines and, as Inspector Keating pointed out, ‘you can be in the pub by the interval’.
    Sidney had convinced himself that his performance was more to do with civic responsibility than with pride. This was, after all, the theme of the play: how to live an honourable life and protect the greater good. To take part in such a drama, he said to himself, was no more than his duty. There was no point in getting into a state or worrying about what people might think. In any case, his ego, he reassured himself, was far smaller than that of Julius Caesar: a man who had, in fact, been assassinated precisely because of vanity.
    Derek Jarvis, the coroner, was the director. He had decided to set the play in the 1930s and make much of the similarities between Julius Caesar and Mussolini. The part of Caesar was taken by Lord Teversham with his sister, Cicely Teversham, as Caesar’s wife, and Ben Blackwood as Mark Antony.
    As soon as he discovered that he was going to be dressed as an Italian blackshirt Sidney forbade both Amanda and Inspector Keating from attending a performance. There was only so much teasing he could take. Why couldn’t they have done South Pacific instead, he wondered? Then he could have persuaded Amanda to join the chorus and appear in a hula skirt. It would be a lot more entertaining than sharing the stage with a collection of amateur thespians dressed up as fascists.
    ‘I thought you did enough performing in church,’ Keating had teased. ‘You want to watch it. People will start talking.’
    ‘I think I am on safe ground.’
    ‘This is the way they draw you in, Sidney. Next year you’ll be in the panto. I can just see you as Widow Twanky.’
    ‘I will be doing no such thing,’ Sidney replied, his sense of humour deserting him. ‘This will be my only appearance on the boards.’
    Mrs Maguire had been equally sceptical. ‘People will think you’ve got too much time on your hands, Canon Chambers. Either that or you are showing off. No one likes a show-off.’
    ‘I am doing it to feel part of the community,’ Sidney replied, ‘that is all.’
    ‘You are already part of the community. You should be out walking the dog instead of consorting with people who should know better.’
    ‘But then,’ Leonard Graham chipped in unhelpfully, ‘if they did The Two Gentlemen of Verona Dickens could take a starring role as the dog Crab. There would be no trouble catching him “a pissing” under the Duke’s table. He does it often enough.’
    ‘There’s no need to be vulgar,’ said Mrs Maguire.
    ‘My dear Mrs Maguire, I am quoting from Shakespeare. It’s bawdy rather than vulgar.’
    ‘I don’t care what it is. It’s still rude. But at least it would get that wretched animal out of the house and spare the lino.’ Mrs Maguire still refused to call Dickens by his name. Clearly it was going to take her a long time to recover from the latest incident of the laddered stocking.
    Mrs Maguire was, however, correct in her analysis of how much time the production would take. Sidney spent hours in rehearsal simply hanging about. He had never realised that most of an actor’s life involved waiting around. It made him tense. He remembered the impatience of the prayer – ‘Come Lord, quickly come’ – and thought that this was a sentiment that could be applied to the all too secular Lord Teversham, who frequently missed his entrances, and who had so much difficulty in remembering his lines that his scenes took far longer than anyone else’s. Indeed, Sidney thought, such was the intolerance of the other cast members that he began to wonder if they might even take a modicum of pleasure in seeing their local aristocrat lying in a pool of blood.
    There were six weeks of rehearsal before the first night in late October, and much discussion about the inherent themes of the play, such as honour, pride, loyalty and political opportunism. Sidney found it an instructive process, as these were qualities that could also prove useful in understanding the machinations