It was the next morning, and this time they were prepared for a trip
to the Victorian era. They had checked the clothes hamper, and Ruth and
Agnes found dresses that at least seemed wearable, despite the hated
bustles.
“We’re sure we want to go to the first night?” Patrick said. “I
looked it up and apparently the first night wasn’t very good.”
“It’s still the first night, though,” Tom replied. “The first night
of any Gilbert & Sullivan production ever. It’s worth seeing just
for that.”
“We could always go again later in the run,” Agnes said. “What’s the date?”
“26th December 1871, for the first night,” Ruth said. Tom entered the date on the machine. “Ready?” he asked.
Thespis was not quite what they had been expecting it to be. Ruth
couldn’t put her finger on anything wrong with it, as such, but it
wasn’t the G&S they were used to. She could see how it was related
to the later shows, but it was obvious that the duo were yet to reach
their greatest heights.
She had forgotten that several of the leading male parts were
actually played by women. She wondered how some of the musical
directors she’d had would have reacted to that. But Thespis seemed to
owe quite a bit to the pantomime tradition. And it certainly helped
with her long-standing grumble that the men got all the best parts.
“Well, I’m glad I’ve seen it,” she said as they made their way back to the TTC.
“I wish we could have got a score,” Tom said. “Just imagine! A Thespis score being found after all those years...”
“Look!” said Patrick. Opposite the door to the TTC was a rubbish
bin, and poking out was a wad of paper, of which the title line was just
visible- Thesp...
Agnes pulled it out. “It’s the score,” she said excitedly. “Look!
‘Throughout the night, ‘Oh I’m a celestial drudge,’ ‘Oh incident
unprecedented’...all the way through to ‘We can’t stand this!’ It’s the
whole thing!”
“It’s been shoved in a bin, no one’ll miss it,” Patrick said.
For some reason, although Ruth wanted more than anything to take the
score, something warned her against it. Perhaps it was just that it
seemed rather convenient to find a copy of the score right outside their
time machine, especially a copy that no one would miss. She took the
score from Agnes and looked at it. She was no musical expert.
“Is it really a Thespis score?” she asked. “Does the music look like
it’s what we heard?” She held out the score to Adam, who was the best
at actually reading music. He looked closely a few pages.
“It looks like it,” he said. “Anyway, why would it say Thespis if it’s not?”
“They often changed stuff between printing and production,” Patrick
said. “This is probably just a rehearsal score, it doesn’t look like it
was intended for publication- I don’t think Thespis ever was. So
there’ll probably be a few changes, but still- it’s the best we’ll ever
get.”
Ruth went with her wish, and offered no opposition as they took the
score into the TTC and carefully tucked it into a drawer so that it
didn’t get knocked about during their rough flight home. She half
expected it to have crumbled to dust when they opened it, back in the
twenty-first century, but it was still there, just a bit crumpled from
being in the bin but still legible.
Adam had worked out how to switch the keyboard from controlling the
TTC to being just an ordinary musical instrument, and they played a few
of the songs. That was when Tom had the idea.
“Wouldn’t it be great if we could perform this?” he said. The others thought.
“Everyone’s too busy with the Festival Ruddigore,” Adam replied
doubtfully. “Anyway, how would we explain how we got the score?”
“Would we need to?” Patrick said. “People have written their own Thespis scores before now.”
“But ours is the original,” Ruth said.
“It might be quite funny,” Patrick said, “to find out what people
really thought. Then, later on when we’ve worked out how to deal with
this time travel thing, we can tell them it’s the original and watch
everyone’s faces as they try to explain why they thought Sir Arthur
Sullivan’s work was inferior!”
“But we’ll have to tell the others something,” Ruth said. “We can’t say we wrote it, and they’d never believe us anyway.”
“We could say we found it online?” Tom suggested.
“But how can we persuade them to perform it? Like Adam said,
everyone’s busy and, well, we five aren’t the most influential people on
the society.”
“Let’s just learn as much as we can ourselves,” Agnes said. “If we
perform it, maybe they’ll like it and want to get involved, once
Ruddigore’s over. Maybe we can show it at the Festival ourselves.”
“It’s worth a try,” Adam said.
Far away in the past, a black cloak swished in a corridor and heels
clip-clopped over the bare wooden floor. The figure reached the rubbish
bin, and saw that it was empty. She gave a thin-lipped smile, whether
from annoyance or satisfaction it would have been hard for an onlooker to
say.
So, they had it then. The stage was set, and soon it would be time
for the curtain to rise. Time. She turned with a swoosh of skirt and
cloak, and soon the echoes were the only remembrance of her presence.
The story continues...
