and
the lost _Hamlet_? And if they knew enough to spot that, wouldn't they
be bound to realize the whole Elizabeth-Macbeth tie-up was
anachronistic? But when Sid gets an inspiration he can be very
bull-headed.

Just then, while Bruce-Banquo was speaking his broody low soliloquy on
stage, Miss Nefer cut in again loudly with, "Aye, Eyes, a good bloody
play. Yet somehow, methinks--I know not how--I've heard it before."
Whereupon Sid grabbed Martin by the wrist and hissed, "Did'st hear?
Oh, I like not that," and I thought, _Oh-ho, so now she's beginning to
ad-lib._

Well, right away they all went on stage with a flourish, Sid and
Martin crowned and hand in hand. The play got going strong again. But
there were still those edge-of-control undercurrents and I began to be
more uneasy than caught up, and I had to stare consciously at the
actors to keep off a wavery-fit.

* * * * *

Other things began to bother me too, such as all the doubling.

_Macbeth_'s a great play for doubling. For instance, anyone except
Macbeth or Banquo can double one of the Three Witches--or one of the
Three Murderers for that matter. Normally we double at least one or two
of the Witches and Murderers, but this performance there'd been more
multiple-parting than I'd ever seen. Doc had whipped off his Duncan
beard and thrown on a brown smock and hood to play the Porter with his
normal bottle-roughened accents. Well, a drunk impersonating a drunk,
pretty appropriate. But Bruce was doing the next-door-to-impossible
double of Banquo and Macduff, using a ringing tenor voice for the
latter and wearing in the murder scene a helmet with dropped visor to
hide his Banquo beard. He'd be able to tear it off, of course, after
the Murderers got Banquo and he'd made his brief appearance as a
bloodied-up ghost in the Banquet Scene. I asked myself, _My God, has
Siddy got all the other actors out in front playing courtiers to
Elizabeth-Nefer? Wasting them that way? The whoreson rogue's gone
nuts!_

But really it was plain frightening, all that frantic doubling and
tripling with its suggestion that the play (and the company too, Freya
forfend) was becoming a ricketty patchwork illusion with everybody
racing around faster and faster to hide the holes. And the
scenery-wavery stuff and the warped Park-sounds were scary too. I was
actually shivering by the time Sid got to: "Light thickens; and the
crow Makes wing to the rooky wood: Good