“What the hell are you doing?!” screamed Athelan Wynnslett over the braying of the crowd. “That is not in the script!”
Tarquin Rickman momentarily stopped pounding his fist into the face of the elf lying prone on the field. “But the audience loves it,” he explained. “I believe it’s called ‘improv’.”
Athelan shrugged. “Works for me,” she supposed, sticking out a leg and tripping one of the rival troupe as he tried to dart past her.
She had no idea what was going on. In fact, none of them did. In all her years on the am-dram circuit, she had never seen a theatrical performance go so disastrously awry. Even when the infamous halfling troupe, The Bacon Butty Players put on their “Tale of Tyrion and Teclis: An Homage to Their Magnificence” in the Naggaroth Sacrificial Theatre, at least they managed to stumble through the Prologue before their entrails wound up decorating the town square.
Athelan gazed around the carnage, looking for Hoffman. It was Hare-Foot Hoffman who was supposed to be delivering the opening narration, “Ye gads and forsooth! Verily the bear did have a sore head!” Tripe, she knew, but it was the kind of rubbish that the audience expected. If it made any sense, they would complain that it wasn’t ‘clever’ enough. She eventually found Hoffman rolling around, centre-stage, his limbs tangled together with those of another elf as they tried to wrestle one of the props from each other.
“Hare-Foot! We can’t start until you say your line!” She had to scream now to be heard. The audience were growing ever more restless and had begun to throw rocks.
“Well, the audience seems to like it when someone is holding this.” The two elves were fighting over a boar’s bladder which had been filled with air. “They seem to get all excited when somebody runs off-stage with it.”
“Well, that’s just stupid,” she protested, indignantly.
“No,” he grunted, scrambling to keep hold of the bladder, “it’s all terribly clever, don’t you see? This bladder represents the Bear’s rage, or the Princess’s maidenhood, or... something – but we’re symbolically defeating whatever it portrays by removing it from the stage. A bit odd, I’ll admit, but thoroughly modern!”
The rival elf troupe did seem rather intent upon running away with the inflated bit of leather and Athelan was loath to let these Branches of Aruth (as she’d heard the audience call them) interlopers steal the show. A swift boot in the groin was enough to set the Aruth player howling – much to the crowd’s delight – and allow Hare-Foot Hoffman to snatch the bladder from his suddenly-preoccupied hands.
He’d been right, she noted, as she watched him tear down the pitch. The audience’s adulation soared as he charged off the stage, narrowly avoiding being leapt upon by the rival Branches.
Shortly before the Intermission, the Branches themselves managed to mirror his performance on the other side of the huge stage, but by this point the Green Glade Travelling Theatrical Players had made up their minds to ditch the script just this once and give the audience what they seemed to want.
Girth Gielgud, the Treeman whose role had simply been to provide set decoration for the woodland scenes, was busy delighting the audience with a heartfelt physical portrayal of the rage of the forest against swelling orc incursions and the endangerment of natural habitats. Simply put, he spent the entire performance pounding the living daylights out of any rival players who came with reach.
Glorfindel of the East Wood was less than enthusiastic about the whole turn of events. Every time the bag of air came anywhere near him, in the face of the half dozen rival players descending upon him, he would squeal like a maiden and throw it as far away from him as he could manage. The audience found this to be particularly thrilling when, toward the end of the performance, Peregrine Pine-Cone managed to pluck it out of the air with extraordinary deftness and run the distance with it, barely remembering to stop once he’d reached the edge of the stage.
Athelan wasn’t sure what happened next, but as far as she could tell, they looked to have won the audience over. A goblin on the wings was seen handing over a large bag of what could have been gold coins to the ogre in stripes who seemed to be directing the whole debacle. The ogre had blown a whistle and everyone from the rival troupe had shuffled off-stage, their heads bowed to jeers and heckles from the audience. The Green Glade Travelling Theatrical Players had, however, received rapturous applause when they all linked hands and took the deepest of bows together at the end.
“What the hell was all that about?” Athelan asked Tarquin Rickman through gritted teeth, taking another bow.
“I have no idea. Just keep smiling,” he grinned back.
“Do you think they want an encore?” she asked.
“Bugger that! Let’s get out of here...”
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