Comedy of Errors

Revenge, a dish best served theatrically

Jul 24, 2023

Once again, I turned to my friend

for short story inspiration. He previously offered me ‘The Love Letter’ by Johannes Vermeer as an artistic prompt for a tale of intrigue and surprise. I asked for another picture to nudge my pen hand into action. ‘In the Loge’ by Mary Cassatt is the suggestion and it is perfect.

The story, on the other hand, well, you decide.

This first-night performance would be her last involvement with the theatre that had been her life for over four years.

One short conversation earlier in the week had dissolved the association.

Bertrand Frobisher knew that she knew this was his vanity project but he was far too vain to acknowledge it. His over-inflated opinion of himself and his imagined prowess as an impresario meant he could never admit how central Hortense was to the smooth running of the place. Frobisher’s contribution was limited to shaking hands (limply, if the truth be known) with wealthy benefactors. Coincident with these ineffectual greetings he would engage his most obsequious implorings for even greater patronage. It made no difference to the efficient running of the place. She knew this. He knew that she knew this. But her loyalty to the theatre encouraged her to turn a blind eye to his shortcomings. Silent devotion made her wrap a cloak of secrecy around his financial incompetence, his reluctance to reward his staff correctly, and his tendency to spend the takings on indiscreet dalliances with aging actresses of questionable morals.

When he had called her in, she foolishly assumed he would be settling the outstanding matter of six months’ salary. Hortense’s talent for squeezing value out of modest ticket office receipts extended to stretching her modest savings to cover regular shortfalls. She had quietly asked for a meeting to resolve the situation. If she was surprised that he agreed so readily, she tried not to show it. His temper was legendary and his red-faced bluster was both unpleasant and most likely to end with your best gown covered in spittle. The last thing she wanted to do was to provoke him.

Well, that was then, of course. Now the situation felt altogether different and the thing she most wanted to do was to inflate his pomposity all the better to prick it.

Three days earlier, he had not only further delayed settlement of her outstanding wages but he had explained, bluntly, that his daughter would be “running the ticket office from now on”. Running the ticket office? As if that was all Hortense did. He didn’t understand half of it. She quietly argued her point until the flush of drunken indignation threatened to spill over into a port-flecked veil of saliva. She turned on her heel and, mustering as much dignity as she could, swept down the corridor to the small cloakroom where she allowed the tears to flow and her resolve to harden.

Three days later she sat in the upper circle seat he had begrudgingly offered her clutching the opera glasses gifted to her by a number of aging actresses who preferred that their indiscretions would not be magnified.

While she could feel Mr Benjamin’s lascivious stare from the box to her right, she had rebuffed his ‘intentions’ several times over the past four years and there was no time to waste on him this evening.

Her attention was on the ‘Royal Box’. The raised voices inside the gilded balcony also began to draw the stares of an increasing number of curious theatregoers craning their necks from the stalls. Her opera glasses picked out the exaggerated whiskers of Mr Holstein whose white knuckles gripped the backs of the two luxuriously upholstered chairs in the centre of the Box. His simpering wife in a fashionable pale blue gown was fluttering a fan and pressing an embroidered handkerchief to her lips. Her eyes flicked between her over-excited husband and the well-padded ‘upholstery’ of Franklin Chamberlain, a noted philistine who, nonetheless, nurtured a salacious taste for the young actresses who wouldn’t offer the impecunious Mr Frobisher the time of day.

As the orchestra began to warm up, a game of musical chairs ensued, the two entitled patrons both insisting that they had tickets for this box and this performance. As the sound of disrespectful laughter swept through the ‘cheap seats’, Hortense smiled to herself. Half bowing, face glowing crimson, Mr Frobisher presented himself to the two protagonists fawningly, wringing his hands as he pleaded for calm. The chubby finger that Holstein jabbed into the theatre owner’s chest beat a dramatic rhythm, matched by Chamberlain’s fist slapping repeatedly into his palm.

She saw the Theatre Critic from the Evening Standard leaning forward, notebook in hand, straining to catch words that would illuminate the unfolding story for his readers. Holstein’s monocle dropped from his scrunched-up left eye at the very moment Chamberlain’s waistcoat buttons lost their brave fight with the enormous belly they were required to hold back. Two buttons fell to the floor. The third, however, flew unerringly into Mrs Holstein’s right eye causing a squeal of surprise and pain.

Even Hortense - for whom the contretemps had been entirely expected - gasped and raised a hand to her mouth in shock. As she slipped from her seat, suddenly conscious that the overnight coach to Bristol would be leaving within the hour, she glanced one last time at the unseemly happenings in Royal Box she had double-booked two days earlier. Had he not been so insufferable, she might have felt a twinge of sympathy for Mr Frobisher. But with the takings from a full house secured tightly in her portmanteau and a one-way ticket to New York sewn into the lining of her cloak, she wasn’t going to be losing her resolve now.