Always the Cover

Here is a fact about me that I have made my entire personality, and I am completely fine about it: I am very good at being second. Six years at the Lyric Northgate. Six years, eleven productions, and in every single one of them my name sits in the programme under the heading UNDERSTUDIES, in the smaller font, the font for people the audience is sincerely hoping not to see. Cover for the lead. The cover. I know every lead role in the company repertoire the way other people know their own phone number, and I have gone on — actually gone on, lights and all — exactly four times, always at short notice, always to a house that was disappointed before I opened my mouth and grudgingly less disappointed by the interval. I am fine about this. I want that on the record before we go any further. I have a whole speech about it. The speech involves the words "craft" and "consistency" and "the work is the work whether or not the lights are on me," and I deliver the speech to anyone who looks at me with sympathy, because sympathy is the actual enemy here, sympathy is the thing I cannot afford. So when the new director — Margot Vance, in from London, all sharp blazer and sharper opinions — calls me into the rehearsal room on a Monday and says, "Frankie, sit down, I have an idea and I need you to not say no for at least thirty seconds," I sit down, and I cross my arms, and I begin, internally, to count. "You're playing Beatrice," Margot says. I get to four. "That's a lead," I say. "Beatrice is a lead. I'm the cover. I'm always the —" "You're playing Beatrice, the actual role, opening night and every night, and before you do the thing your face is currently doing —" Margot points at my face, which is, admittedly, doing a thing — "I cast you because you're the best Beatrice in this building, I watched the tape of you covering it last spring and you were funnier and quicker and braver than the woman whose name was on the poster, and I am not in the business of putting the second-best person on my stage to spare anyone's feelings. So. Congratulations. Stop crossing your arms." I do not stop crossing my arms. But something behind my ribs is doing something complicated and loud, and I have to look at the floor for a second, because six years is a long time to be very good at being second and Margot Vance has just casually set fire to the entire personality I built out of it. "Okay," I say. My voice comes out smaller than I'd like. "Okay. Who's Benedick?" And Margot — and I want you to understand that she does this on purpose, she is watching my face when she does it, she is a woman who enjoys her work — Margot says: "Theo Hardiman." Theo Hardiman. Theo Hardiman is the Lyric Northgate's golden boy. He has been the lead in nine of the eleven shows my name has sat under in the small font. He has a jaw you could use to open letters and a way of being effortlessly, infuriatingly excellent that has made him, over six years, the single most successful argument against me that the universe keeps producing. The audience is never disappointed to see Theo Hardiman. The audience would, frankly, see Theo Hardiman read a parking notice. "No," I say. "There it is," says Margot. "We made it nearly forty seconds, I'm genuinely impressed. Yes. There's more, sit back down." I sit back down. "The Northgate is, financially, having a difficult year," Margot says, and her voice goes flat and honest in a way I wasn't expecting, "and *Much Ado* has to sell, and the marketing department — who I report to, unfortunately, on the matter of bums in seats — the marketing department has had an idea. The idea is a story. A leading lady and a leading man, sparkling chemistry, will-they-won't-they, the whole press doing the whole press thing. The idea is that you and Theo are —" she makes a small graceful gesture that somehow contains an entire scandal — "*together.* For the run. For the cameras. A romance. Off the page and into the foyer." I stare at her. "You want me," I say slowly, "to fake-date Theo Hardiman." "I want you to play Beatrice opposite Theo's Benedick," Margot says, "and I want the two of you to let the marketing department imply, gently, in interviews and at the gala and in a few photographs, that the chemistry on the stage might possibly be the chemistry off it. That's all. Implication. Nobody's asking you to mean it." Here is the thing I do not say to Margot Vance, the thing I am only telling you, because you and I are going to be honest with each other for the next twenty-three chapters or this isn't going to work: I am a wonderful actor. Genuinely. Six years of being second has made me technically magnificent. But I do not fake well. Not the real things. I can play grief I've never felt and joy I've never earned and I can die convincingly eight times a week — but I cannot, have never been able to, stand close to someone and pretend at a feeling that the actual situation is busy generating for real. The line between performing a thing and feeling it has always been, for me, embarrassingly, dangerously thin. And I have spent six years standing in the wings watching Theo Hardiman be excellent, and I have a personality I built specifically so that nobody would ever ask me how I feel about that. "Thirty seconds is up," Margot says. "What do you say, Beatrice?" I uncross my arms.