desireearmfeldt

Darren surveys the layers of detritus covering the walls and shelves and desk and floor of Oliver’s—Geoffrey’s—his office.  The past twenty years and more of New Burbage History, piled higgledy-piggledy, gathering dust as they lose meaning.  There are already actors in the company to whom Oliver Welles is just a name; next year, there will be actors to whom Geoffrey Tennant and Ellen Fanshaw and the rest of the fugitive Old Guard are no more than names.

Those names will persist, he knows.  Stories have a long life, whispered in green rooms from older cast members to the neophytes.  The story of Geoffrey’s Hamlet, of Geoffrey and Ellen’s tragic love and Geoffrey’s blazing fall, was fated to be a legend from the moment he jumped off that damned stage.  Darren wasn’t here to hear it told over the years, but he knows in his bones that it is woven into the collective hallucination that is this theatre company.  Knows just as surely that Geoffrey’s brief tenure as Artistic Director and his spectacular exit is already being codified into legend.  A decade from now, when the world has forgotten Geoffrey Tennant’s name, his ghost will live on in the nooks and crannies of New Burbage, sustained by the imaginations of every starry-eyed young idiot of an actor who comes in search of magic and clings onto that threadbare, unoriginal hope far past the point of reason.

Even those old enough and wise enough to remember the truth, he concedes, will, in time, rewrite their memories into whatever shape most suits them.  He is realistic to know that he is already doing so.  And human enough—by God—to be unsure whether he thinks that’s a good thing or a bad one.

He knows, too, that for as long as he remains here, he will be measured against the yardstick of those legends: Oliver Welles, Who Built New Burbage; Geoffrey Tennant, The Mad, Incandescent Hero.  People will sneer, people will whisper behind his back: poor Darren, he tries his best, of course, but surely he can’t really expect to measure up. . .  And of course, he won’t measure up: no one measures up to the legends during their lifetime.  That’s the point of being legendary: to be freed from the shackles of mundane reality.  To exist on a rarified plane of. . .

Darren rubs his hand over his eyes, suddenly weary of his own rhetoric.  His own performance, played to an audience of exactly no one.

“The point is,” he says, and although there’s no one to hear him, it’s most likely Geoffrey he’s talking to.  “The point is, they’ll talk about me when I’m gone.  It hardly matters what they say.  Stories have a life of their own anyway.  Don’t they?”

No one answers, of course.  Darren sighs, takes one more look around at the warehouse of decay, and goes to find Anna and get her to bring him some cardboard boxes.  It’s well past time to clean house.