ACT ONE
Once there was a Queen who had three daughters. As they come of age, her husband the King persuades her to throw a party, inviting all the suitors in the land. But, unbeknownst to the rulers, a mischievous Crow has cast a spell on the princesses; they are each to marry their own true loves, as long as they can traverse lands of dreams to find their princes.
In a flash, the castle tumbles into ruins as if it has been standing for a thousand years, the three princesses are in rags, and the Queen and King dance mournfully among the wreckage of their lands as their daughters set off on their quest.
ACT TWO
Princess Sapphire arrives on the seashore, searching for her mate. She dances with the waves, dives for pearls and finds her suitor at the bottom of the ocean. Princess Opal searches the skies for her prince and finds him in a maze of clouds.
ACT THREE
Princess Ruby searches in an orchard filled with exotic fruits and finds her prince among the boughs. A group of hunters escorts the princess and her mate back to the castle, which is restored to its former glory. The three princesses wed their suitors and the Queen and King celebrate all being well in the land.
The honoured Lords, Ladies and gentlefolk of our audiences are respectfully reminded that the auditorium opens after the sounding of the Angelus bells, at 18.55 GMT each evening.
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Payments are gratefully received. Please leave your tokens on your seat as you leave us at the end of the performance.
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We kindly request that our honoured guests refrain from touching, tasting, or otherwise interacting with our performers and musicians.
Just before midnight the cast and crew ofThe Apple and the Pearlare aboard their train, not a one among them left by the boulder-strewn river where last night’s performance took place. The shriek of a whistle – the very last warning call to stragglers – and the train starts to heave itself along the track, a groaning moaning sound of carriages awakening, spitting and spluttering as they gather speed. Thechug chug hisssssssof the curved steel on the track. The sigh of cool air on the nose of the locomotive as it hurries through the darkness, its lurching the loudest thing in the night. A hunting owl’s wings brush the air; tiny icicles dangle from the fir trees growing a hair’s width every hour as the snow waterdrip drip drips; a fox cub snuffles as he digs at a hedgehog nest.
Now the bell rings, tolling in the new day and bidding farewell to the old. It rings loud outside the train, echoing solemnly in the valley.
A clang for the King, a clang for the Queen,
three clangs for the sisters never to be seen.
In the first carriage, behind the set and costumes and paraphernalia a touring ballet takes on the road, a woman named Belinda sits with a heavy hidebound ledger open onher lap. She scrawls down the columns quickly, dropping coins and earrings and watches and tiny gleaming jewels into the iron-bound chest at her feet. As the fifth bell tolls she puts the ledger in the chest, locks it and puts the key on a chain around her neck.
A clang for the orchard, a clang for the sea,
three clangs for the suitors who lie in a dream.
In the dining carriage in the middle of the train, the cellist, the percussionist and the bassoonist are drinking, sipping from shot glasses and slamming on the tables in syncopated rhythms. They hum Verdi and Puccini as they get drunker and drunker, and when the tenth bell comes they weave its note into their wobbly melodies and toast the coming of the new day.
A clang for the curse, a clang for the quest,
The sleeping cabins in the back half of the train are filling up with those who hear the curfew of the midnight bells with relief rather than as a challenge. Yawning, the assorted dancers and stage managers and woodwind and strings spit out toothpaste, pull pyjamas out from under duvets and slip on eye masks, rolling out their shoulders and necks from another day of leaping and turning and humping and hauling and blowing and plucking to sink into the soft lull of the train gently rocking their tired bones.
And one last for the crow who sings in its nest.
At the very back of the train in the caboose, a woman sits with her legs dangling off the deck, a broom across her lap. She wears a voluminous dress of black serge and hums a little tune as she points her toes and swings her legs. Beside her is a tray bearing a half-finished plate of garlic risotto, a few crumbs of a shortbread biscuit and two empty shot glasses. She watches the dark hills of the day dissolve as the train staggers into a new landscape, and with the toll of the thirteenth bell she opens her beak and caws out into the night.
***
Nine o’clock in the morning is the first reveille on the Grub. For most, it sounds like a light burble of running water; it’s cheerful piano scales for those who do not consider themselves morning people; and for Zach, the lighting director, it’s a foghorn that sounds over and over like a ferry in a storm until he gets up out of his bunk, opens his cabin door and presses the button above the door two cabins over. By that time, standing barefoot in the corridor with his hair rumpled, a pillow crease on his cheek and last night’s garlic risotto wafting out from between his molars, he is fully, furiously awake and swearing at the cacophony that yanks him this way from the sweet oblivion of his dreams every single morning.
‘Fuck you, Grub,’ he mutters, as behind him Alina the wardrobe mistress leaves the bathroom and the pungent, lavender-scented steam of her shower seeps out into the corridor.
‘Morning Zach!’ she calls brightly as she squeezes past him. ‘It’s a beautiful day to put on a show.’
He pulls up the closest blind to see that it isn’t a beautiful day at all. He drags a finger through the condensation on the window to see fine, drizzly mist. He lets his forehead fall onto the cold glass and watches as Belinda marches past, with one gloved hand gripping a tray bearing an empty plate and two shot glasses, and the other clamped around the Pearl. Already he can hear the doors of the cargo carriages creaking open; Danny shouting to Charlie as they unload the first of the crates containing the set; the hiss of the hydraulic lifts and thethump thump thumpof the broken wheels of the stage left props crate. The musicians are still in bed, the bastards. Maybe he should learn to play an instrument, the drums or something: that can’t be too hard. Then he’d get a blasted lie-in for once in his life.
He needs a shower. A coffee. A double helping of whatever Gino’s doing for breakfast today, more coffee and an extra jumper because it’s bound to be cold in the Grit today with that creeping fog out there.
