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Shakespearian Tragedy

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I’m away on holiday for a couple of weeks, so here’s one I prepared earlier.

And now, ladies and gentlemen, sit back in your seats, open the popcorn, stick a straw in the soda, relax and enjoy a real Shakespearian Tragedy…

I was bumped off when I was just twelve years old. That’s right – murdered, rubbed out, wasted, erased, hit, whatever you want to call it.

The foul deed was committed on the stage of the Little Theatre in Cork, and it was repeated no less than three times in a single week. Come to think of it, there was a matinee performance on Sunday, as well.

It was my first, and only, experience of treading the boards. The play was ‘Macbeth’, and as it was part of the school curriculum that year, the greater part of our audience each night consisted of final year students, most of whom were present under duress and all of whom were only too willing to delight in the inevitable mishaps that occurred on stage.

My character was Young MacDuff, a small part with just a single scene that ended in my gruesome and untimely death. And throughout the long weeks of rehearsal leading up to the first performance, I repeatedly clutched my chest, staggered across the stage and toppled to the floor in a most convincing fashion.

But for the life of me, (or, to be strictly accurate, for the death of me), I could not summon up a final shriek of sufficiently blood-curdling quality to satisfy the artistic needs of our director. In the end, she was reduced to expressing the hope that it would be “all right on the night”. And how right she turned out to be.

Perhaps it was the effect of performing in front of a live audience. Or maybe the flailing arm of the assassin, rising and falling with murderous intent, reminded me that I faced a cantankerous schoolmaster the following morning with my homework incomplete.

Whatever the reason, on the opening night of the play I produced a dying scream of such sheer, unadulterated terror that Alfred Hitchcock, had he been present, would have raised his hat in admiration.

Even our youthful audience was impressed. The moment of shocked silence that followed my ear-splitting demise was testament to that.

Unfortunately, the dramatic effect was promptly ruined when the curtain at the end of the scene was accidentally delayed, and my bloodied corpse was seen to rise, Lazarus-like, and scurry from the stage, provoking both consternation in the wings and laughter from the front of the house.

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