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Behind the Scenes 8: The Property Room

(The Daily Mail [London, UK] - 14th December, 1905)
CUPID AND THE TARANTULA
The Witches' Kitchen at Drury Lane, where the Jabberwocks Come From.

Outside there was fog; fog of an impenetrable, bilious yellow. Even the staring posters round Drury Lane Theatre had grown slightly green. Fog had crept inside, too; through the three glass doors; through every backway and cranny that gives entry to fairyland. The green-room was choked with it. It invaded that vast, dim passage where the worn-out bogey's lie, and made it gloomier still.

There was a huge grinning flower-pot on the shelf leering malevolently through the murky yellow, and from it sprouted an orchid. I could have sworn Mr. Chamberlain's head popped out of the shadow and winked and nodded. Massive pewters seemed to roll their eyes and jeer, and fog belched from the pipes they grimly chewed. But it was a cold and dreary passage, this hall of the dead bogeys, and we hurried on.

Throuth the gloomy back of fairyland, vast and dusty and dim, we climbed, till we came to an iron door. It opened, creaking, and slammed behind us with a hollow clang. This was the inner hall, the lowest ring of the Inferno, the very bogey-land itself. Here in the dim light bogeys are created and made terrible, before they leap out to fret their glaring lives upon the stage. My guide was perfectly possessed, and I took courage from his reckless bravado; but the place was fearsome.

Mailed knights lined the walls, grim guardians of the cavern. Green, tailless lizards wagged their gaping jaws and rolled their eyes and leered. A horse began to dance with stiff, uncanny movement, and rolled towards us with glaring eyes. Hares and ferrets were heaped in the corners with weak, but wicked grins. Suddenly my hat slipped from my head, and I looked up unconsciously. A huge, glittering wasp held it in two savage claws. Then I saw a brown tarantula with extended nippers. Slowly it crept down a thread with its wicked, glittering eyes fixed on my guide. I stood intent. It seized his hat with a snap, and vanished up again. Then a monstrous pie burst, and shot up leeks and rabbits like stars, from a Roman candle.

At the far end was a gleaming fire with blue coke-flames flickering evilly. It was huge - the size of a sack of coal - and round it were grouped bogeys, half-bogeys, bits of bogeys, warming themselves. Here a lizard gaped sleepily with a dreamy eye on the fire; on the other side his tail wriggled viciously. Cupid was hanging overhead, in two halves, drying from a fire-proof bath, but still under the witch's spell. In the middle crouched a strange, incongruous beast, which seemed to enjoy the blaze, and smiled into it sleepily.

Suddenly there came a whirring noise. Something was wrong with the ballroom clock. The face raced round at a terrible speed, and every time XII came to the front Cupid popped over the globe from the back and stabbed it viciously. But it would not, could not, stop. Then a strange tinkling music began under the floor, accompanied by a reassured, savage thump - and I turned to fly.

"It is only the ballet rehearsal," said my guide, phlegmatically. "The ballet-room is just underneath, it ain't no use to start at any of these things either; they are nothing but paper, wet paper, dried in a mould, and painted." Which was the truth. The wasp has a paper body, and when his wings go up his claws grip. Cupid is paper, cast in a mould of clay, and gilded afterwards. The lizards are paper on a bamboo frame; the very woods and mounds are paper on an outline of wood and wire. The cow is paper - all but its skin, and that is flannelette.

But paper is expensive - in this form. It would cost ten pounds to make Mr. Chamberlain in a demon flower-pot with a spring. His head, you see, must be carefully modelled in plaster from a photograph, and by the time he is moulded in clay and painted in papier-mache he is, worth gold.

The one deep grief of the property manager to-day is that people no longer delight in the hideous. The demon is dead. Seven years ago he was the rage, and every exit and byway, of the stage was held by him. The good old days, of course. If ever the demon of old returns, let the reader beware of that property-room on a foggy day. It is fearsome enough as it is.


Primary Sources: As indicated.

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