The Understudy

Owen Pryce had been understudying the role of King Lear for three years, and in that time he had never once set foot on the stage during a performance.

This was not unusual. The role belonged to Sir Malcolm Hale, who was seventy-four, famously indestructible, and regarded by many critics as the finest classical actor of his generation. Sir Malcolm did not miss performances. He had performed through flu, through a broken toe, and on one legendary occasion through the night his house was burgled. Understudying him, one of the stage managers had told Owen on his first day, was “like being the reserve goalkeeper for a team that never concedes”.

So Owen did what understudies do. He attended every rehearsal, sitting in the corner with a pencil. He learned every line, every movement, every pause. Once a week, on Thursday afternoons, the understudies ran the play together in an empty rehearsal room, under the supervision of an assistant director who was usually checking her phone. He learned to perform Lear’s madness and grief to an audience of folding chairs.

And every night, he sat in the dressing room he shared with three other understudies, listening to the performance through a crackling speaker on the wall, mouthing the words along with Sir Malcolm.

It is a peculiar psychological condition, being an understudy. Owen was forty-one. He had once been considered promising, then talented, then reliable, which in the theatre is something close to an insult. He had spent two decades playing servants, messengers and second murderers. The understudy role paid reasonably well, and it gave him, he told himself, an opportunity to study greatness at close range. But he would have been lying if he claimed that he had never, late at night, imagined Sir Malcolm tripping on the stairs.

He was not proud of this. He liked Sir Malcolm, who was courteous and generous, and who always remembered the names of everyone’s children. Owen’s feelings about him were ambivalent in the most precise sense: admiration and resentment, existing side by side, neither cancelling out the other.

The call came at six forty on a wet Tuesday evening in February. Sir Malcolm had collapsed in his dressing room, apparently from exhaustion. He was conscious and talking, but the company doctor had forbidden him to perform. Curtain-up was at seven thirty.

Owen was in the costume within twenty minutes. The crown was slightly too large for him and kept slipping over one eyebrow; someone stuffed tissue paper inside it. The stage manager made the announcement to the audience: “At this evening’s performance, the role of King Lear will be played by Owen Pryce.” Through the speaker in the wings, Owen heard what he had always dreaded: a long, audible groan of disappointment, followed by the sound of seats tipping up as a handful of people walked out.

Then the lights went down, and there was no more time to think.

He would never remember much of the performance with any clarity. He remembered fragments: the heat of the lights, which he had forgotten could be so intense; a moment in the storm scene when he realised the audience had gone completely silent; the face of the young actress playing Cordelia, who looked at him with genuine tenderness and terror in the final scene, as if she, too, had forgotten that he was not the real king. He remembered that his voice cracked on the last line, and that he did not plan it.

And he remembered the ovation. It began hesitantly, a polite scattering of applause, and then it grew, and grew, until people were rising to their feet. He stood at the front of the stage, the crown still slipping over his eyebrow, and found that he was crying.

The reviews, when they appeared, were extraordinary. A critic who happened to be in the audience wrote a piece headlined “A Lear Out of Nowhere”, praising Owen’s “raw, unvarnished humanity” and suggesting, provocatively, that his performance had in some respects surpassed Sir Malcolm’s. The article was widely shared. His agent, who had not called him in eighteen months, called him four times in one morning.

Sir Malcolm was signed off for two weeks. Owen played Lear for all fourteen performances. Each night the audience was larger and more enthusiastic.

And yet, to his considerable surprise, Owen found that he was not happy.

It took him most of those two weeks to understand why. For three years, the fantasy of this moment had sustained him: the sense that he was secretly as good as anyone, that he had simply never been given the chance to prove it. Now he had proved it, and the proof had cost him something he had not realised he valued. As long as he was merely the understudy, he could believe that the only thing standing between him and greatness was luck. Now he had been given his luck, and he could see, with uncomfortable clarity, everything his performance lacked: the precision, the stamina, the hundred tiny choices that Sir Malcolm made every night without apparent effort. He had not been mediocre. But he had not been Malcolm, either.

On the night Sir Malcolm returned, Owen went to his dressing room to welcome him back. He was not sure what he expected. Coolness, perhaps; the critic’s article had been pointedly unflattering to the older man.

Instead, Sir Malcolm got up, embraced him, and held him at arm’s length.

“I read the review,” he said. “It was nonsense, of course. But you were very good. My dresser told me she wept twice.” He smiled. “I’m told you were afraid you would eclipse me.”

“I wasn’t,” Owen said, and then, because the old man’s gaze was unusually sharp, “Well. Perhaps a little.”

“Everyone who stands in the wings is afraid of that. Or hopes for it.” Sir Malcolm sat back down at his mirror. “I understudied Olivier in 1971, you know. I went on twice. I spent the next ten years trying to prove I was better than him. It took me another ten to realise I’d been wasting my time. The only person worth competing with is the actor you were last night.”

It was, Owen thought afterwards, either the most magnanimous thing anyone had ever said to him or the most elegant way of putting him back in his place. Possibly both.

He went back to the dressing room with the crackling speaker. He listened to the performance, mouthing the words along with Sir Malcolm as he always had, and found, to his relief, that the old resentment had gone. In its place was something quieter and more useful: the composure of a man who no longer needed to wonder what he might have been.

Six months later, he was cast as Lear in a small regional production. The reviews were good, though not extraordinary. He was, he found, entirely content with that.