Material Girl by Louise Kean Page B

the press pack.
    ‘That’s right. Well done. Gold star. Initially it was a far from controversial or even noteworthy opening. Lacking the public pulling power of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof , or Streetcar , the critics called it a “ strange little play for the strangest little theatre in the West End, and surely only being staged as a vanity project for Joanna Till .”’
    ‘Joanna Till had been one of the first studio stars in her youth, an international beauty with platinum curls that framed a pale complexion and a perfect cupid’s bow permanently painted on her delicate lips throughout the 1920s. By the time she came to play Mrs Goforth, the dying monster at the heart of the play – who has seen off numerous husbands and is now a recluse in an Italian villa dictating her memoirs to her young and beleaguered assistant – Joanna was an alcoholic who ate barely one meal a day, and whom few saw out of make-up. But an old beauty still sang in her eyes, reminding those close enough that she was once the greatest prize to be won, the cup on the table, the lady in the booth at the front of the mile-long “dime for a kiss” queue. The memory of what she had been haunted all of her movements. Her fingers danced and flickered nervously about her face, trying to cover every line simultaneously, attempting todistract any audience from the age that had set in and which now clung to her once-beautiful features like an evil moss to smooth pebbles in a lake.
    ‘One of the only members of the company that she allowed close was her young co-star Edward “Teddy” Hampden, who played the impertinent but handsome visitor Chris, and who, at thirty-five, was twenty-eight years Joanna’s junior.’
    ‘Good for her!’ I mutter, but Tristan ignores me.
    ‘Joanna could be heard giggling from behind her dressing-room door in the afternoons, after matinee and before evening. She rarely spent any time alone, aside from “the half” – the half an hour before each performance when she would shoo away her young admirer and compose herself. But even then, occasionally, he was allowed back in. The controversy murmured in every nook of The Bridesmaid. Teddy shot Joanna through the heart, six hours after she finished their affair over a cajun salmon lunch at the Savoy.’
    I gasp. Tristan nods his head seriously.
    ‘Although they had been involved for barely three months they were being too indiscreet, and news had reached her husband, the world-famous director Sir Terence Till. Sir Terence placed an outraged and irate long-distance call from a set in Egypt telling Joanna to behave. Teddy at least had the decency to turn the gun on himself afterwards, aiming straight through his heart as well. So the strange little play’s curtain failed to rise the following night, as both the leads’ hearts were streaked across a dressing-room wall.’
    I look around urgently – ‘Not this room, Tristan? Not these walls?’ – feeling a cold chill run down my spine, the kind you get when you are a kid and somebody pokes out the game ‘Does-this-make-your-blood-run-cold?’, finishing with a grab on the back of your neck. I shudder.
    ‘It’s possible,’ he says, seriously, ‘it’s very possible. Anyway, controversy courted The Majestic again six years later, inNovember 1974, when a performance of Hair so shocked a four-hundred-pound Presbyterian Texan banker that he suffered a massive heart attack in the second row. The banker died, and so did the show, after two months and below-average ticket sales, even for The Bridesmaid.’
    ‘We should move to another venue,’ I say earnestly, nodding my head, ready to pack up my things and dust off the bad luck I can feel settling in on me and Tristan as we sit for too long in one place in this cursed theatre.
    ‘Too late, the tickets have been sold, Make-up. Then, in 1981, as a protest against the Falklands war, some of the younger members of the cast of The Iceman Cometh – the ones blessed with better