The Rehearsal

students stormed the stage in a mass rescue. But lately, year by year, the acting students had been losing something—a readiness to act , he thought, without irony. Take this year—a shirt, a bit of hair and the water-trough, and one student crying into his shirtsleeve afterward from the pain of it.
    Sometimes the Head of Movement wanted to strike them, to rush down on to the gymnasium floor and slap them and shake them until they stirred and snapped and fought back; sometimes he felt almost driven mad by this cling-film sheet of apathy that smothered them and parceled them and stopped their breath until they were like dolls in shrinkwrap, trademarked and mass produced.
    He tossed his head. They were cushioned, that was all. They needed a wakeup.
    Down on the floor Stanley had invisibly passed the leadership to his partner, who was now drawing away from him and fanning out, the two of them black-tee-shirted against the wooden floor like a symmetrical inkblot on an aged card. Not quite symmetrical. The male movements could never quite match the female, and vice versa: there was always something missing, some bright edge that gave the deception away. The Head of Movement sighed and looked at them all in panorama for a second, the silken apathetic crowd of sleepwalkers who had watched their classmate get stripped and shorn and nearly drowned, and had done nothing. He thought, How can I possibly wake them up? And then he thought, Who will awaken me?
    June
    “I am here to tell you about the end-of-year devised theater project,” the Head of Acting said briskly, “which is by far the most important event in the first-year calendar.”
    The Head of Acting always commanded a fearful unmoving silence whenever he spoke. He did not need to raise his voice.
    “First of all I must stress that you will be completely on your own. The tutors will not oversee rehearsals, scripts, lighting rigs, costume designs or concept discussions. This is your project. When we arrive in the auditorium at eight in the evening on the first of October, we want to be surprised. And shocked. We want to see why we chose you out of the two hundred hopefuls who auditioned. We want to leave feeling proud of our own good taste.
    “I might add that this project has an impressive legacy at the Institute: the work that has been dreamed up as part of this project has many times been later reworked into greater productions, some of which have toured internationally. You have big shoes to fill.”
    The Head of Acting brightened now, as he always brightened when talking about past students. His admiration and approval was only ever retrospectively bestowed, a fact which these first-year students did not yet know. In their ignorance they gazed fiercely up at him and champed at this new and shining chance to prove themselves.
    “It is a tradition at the Institute,” the Head of Acting continued, “that on closing night the cast will choose one prop from their production to be handed on. The prop they choose will serve as the driving stimulus for the production the following year. Last year’s production, titled The Beautiful Machine , received from the previous year’s students a large iron wheel. In the original production the wheel had been part of a working rickshaw. In Beautiful Machine the wheel was redressed as the Wheel of Fate and became a central visual component of the beautiful machine itself.”
    One of the boys was nodding vigorously to show he had seen The Beautiful Machine in production and remembered the wheel very well. The Head of Acting smiled faintly. He said, “The cast of Beautiful Machine , last year’s first-year students, have chosen a prop from their production that will become the locus of yours. I have it here in my pocket.”
    He paused for a long moment, enjoying the tension.
    “Does anyone have any questions, before I leave you all to conduct your first meeting?” he asked.
    Nobody could think of a question. The Head of Acting reached into his pocket and withdrew a playing card. It was a card from an ordinary deck, thinly striped on the reverse side, pinkish and round edged. He held it up for them all to see and turned it over in his fingers to show the King of Diamonds, bearded and thin lipped and pensive, holding his axe behind his head with a thick hammy hand. The Head of Acting tossed the card on the ground, inclined his head politely, and left the room.
    The gymnasium door closed softly in his wake and sent the