The Rehearsal

flattened, was mounted on the peeling corridor wall. The collar was still stained black from the blood that ran down from empty eye-sockets and dripped sticky and scarlet off the Head of Movement’s gray unshaven chin.
    The year began in earnest. The production of King Lear had been in part a challenge, presented to frighten the first-years and to show them an inheritance they would have to fight to earn. For a time it worked. In the beginning the first-years looked up at the tutors and older students with a kind of meek reverence, but as the weeks wore on they slowly began to inflate, growing ever larger with purpose and self-belief.
    “I’m an actor,” Stanley was surprised to hear himself say, and after an initial pause he found that the definition pleased and even empowered him. “At the Drama Institute,” he then added, and waited confidently for his interlocutor to say, “Oh, the Institute . That’s supposed to be very hard to get into, isn’t it? You must be rather good.”
    The first few weeks of the year seemed to pass in a flurry. Initially the first-year batch appeared tentative and apologetic and bashful with each other, but in fact each student was carefully carving out a place within the context of the group: those who variously wanted to be thought of as comic or tragic or eccentric or profound began to mark out their territory, fashioning little shorthand epithets for themselves and staking claim to a particular personality type so that none of the others would have a chance. One of the girls might drape herself over her classmates as they walked from Movement down the hall to Voice and say, “God, I love you guys! I love you all!,” just to secure her place as someone who was indubitably sweet . With that place occupied, the others scurried to make known their social or musical or intellectual talents, each defining a little space for themselves that no one else would be able to touch. The other students all said, “Esther is so funny !” and “Michael is so bad !,” and just like that each won the double security of becoming both a person and a type.
    Stanley wasn’t sure what marked him out as a person. He hung back at the beginning of the year and let the other boys claim the roles of the leader and the player and the clown, watching with a kind of uncertain awe as they worked to recruit admirers and an audience. He guessed he wanted to be thought of as sensitive and thoughtful, but he didn’t pursue the branding actively enough and soon those positions were taken. He found himself thoroughly eclipsed by several of the more ambitiously moody boys, boys who were studied in the way they tossed their hair off their forehead, thin boys with paperback copies of Nietzsche nosing out of their satchels, boys wearing self-conscious forlorn looks, permanently anxious and always slightly underfed. Whenever these boys began to speak, the class would peel back respectfully to listen.
    Stanley found himself quietly shepherded into the middling drift of the unremarkable students in the class. Like the rest of them he nursed a small hope that one day he would come into his own and surpass them all, but the hope was half-buried, and in his lessons Stanley rarely bloomed.
    “We’ll make something of you yet,” the Head of Improvisation said to Stanley one morning, reaching over and tapping his chest with her finger. “There’s something in there,” she said, “that one of these days is going to just ripen , overnight. You’ll see.”
    She walked away and left Stanley with the hot echo of her touch on his sternum and a feeling of joyful arrival that stayed with him for the days and weeks following. He applied himself more vigorously to his technique, spurred on by this germ of confidence that swelled his chest to bursting. He began to believe in his own ripening, waiting for it with a pious kind of expectation like a cleric awaiting a response to prayer. He became more patient with his own failures, safe and confident in the knowledge that one day soon he would surely succeed.
    “It’s a strange thing,” the Head of Improvisation said later in the staffroom, pausing to count stitches with the pearly edge of her fingernail and tug the woollen square out flat to check her progress. “It’s a strange thing, how we caress their egos like we do. I see how much it affects them, lights them up, and I feel so responsible, even guilty, like I am handing a loaded pistol to a child.”
    “All