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A raked stage is a very gentle hill that runs down toward the audience from the back wall of the theatre to the front edge of the stage. Here, an orchestra separates the actor from his audience and provides those tunes necessary to enhance the drama of the drama such that we may term it melodrama. ‘A scene of bucolic tenderness with haystacks.’ ‘A raucous tavern scene and a fight.’ ‘At the docks, Jed sets out his position.’ The concept of a rake is to improve the view for the audience in the stalls of the actors positioned toward the back of the stage, who on a flat floor might appear to be missing the lower part of their legs, roughly from the knee down. It’s true that actors placed at the rear of the stage are likely to be those gifted with roles of little significance, but a rake also gives the stage artist a better platform upon which to construct a trout stream, a snowscape, or the remains of battle fought and lost, and for every rut made by a farm cart, smoking cannonball fired by an army, or finely wrought display of edelweiss arranged by Heidi’s sister to be fully visible. This tussle between visibility and practicality is played out at every melodrama performance every night in theatres across London, where raked stages are de rigueur, with the athletic actor (one who likes to offer choreographed physical enhancements to the flow of words necessitated by the script, such that something resembling a dance emerges) unwittingly playing the part of ‘crash dummy.’
Depending on the degree of rake (there is no set specification), the effect on the actors’ balance can be negligible or dramatic. Furniture can be built to compensate for the rake by shaving some legs a little shorter than others – not an option for the actor. Also this modification assumes that the furniture will be set to the same axis on the rake throughout the drama; otherwise, the modification could make the issue worse, potentially amplifying the slope, so that the actor is presented with a seat similar to those at a bus shelter designed to discourage a long stay after a night on the tiles.
Such it was for George when he met the raked stage for the first time ever. For, you see, George had one leg longer than the other, a malady that had never been properly fixed, it being determined that it was too late and that any fix would be ineffective due to his advanced age. George was a cripple, and being a cripple was part of his act, and any engineering to render him less crippled would also render him unemployable. His disadvantage was made worse by the ubiquity of the raked stage in London in 2043, when the only theatres left standing were those with raked stages, all the rest succumbing to the ban on flat floors, particularly in theatres. The ban had come about suddenly, when the phenomena of the pit was discovered: how the pit would gather up the detritus of the melodrama during the course of the performance, swallowing up all the discarded handkerchiefs, swords, tavern crockery and bottles, and buttons and bows from the garters and corsets of the courtly men and ladies necessary to furnish the trend for medievalism with verisimilitude to the real thing. The real thing, namely:
• the projected image,
• the 3D image,
• the virtual reality,
• the augmented reality,
• the green screen,
• the artificial actor,
• the avatar
had also been replaced by people, props, words, and music which, by consequence of their weight and awkwardness, would fall and roll down the rake into the pit which caused the Union of Players of Music to cry ‘insurance’, not for themselves but for their instruments, which were irreplaceable as a consequence of the law forbidding the replacement of sound-generating devices that might clash with the silence so much preferred by all audiences.
So George’s career was on the rocks. He should have been able to earn a few pennies by entering upstage with aplomb, plenty of bravado, and an unfathomably virtuosic Top C, seeming to encounter the rake for the first time, and out of fear following the note with a windmill of rotating arms while sliding toward the front edge of the stage and eventually toppling onto the drums beneath with requisite battery of percussive chaos. Unfortunately, this was too much for the audiences so enraptured by the predominance of silence in 2043, who wanted less noise, not more, an effect, when he prototyped it, that rendered George’s act nonsensical. After all, who could fall into the pit onto some drums noiselessly? So, no pennies for George, just insurance claims.
George’s only solution was to hire a partner for his act to distract the audience while the ear-splitting percussive anarchy played out, and then to pick up at the point that he climbed out of the pit to receive a bouquet from a plant in the first row of the stalls. Provided nobody laughed or clapped this moment could progress in soulful silence.
And so ‘George the Cripple and Alison the Old Lady’ was born. An act that circumvented the issue of ‘an acrobatic actor falling into a pit with legs of different lengths on a raked stage performing melodrama to an audience who preferred silence’ so neatly that it became a model for all similar acts, of which, funnily enough, there were none.
How did they do it? Well Alison, though elderly, was comely and appealing. Her plentiful flesh could be piped like icing into layers and shapes that held her audience in their seats as effectively as the flesh-icing held its shape. By adding small amount of food dye to her diet, Alison could present whole limbs or muscles in diverse colours, and while the audience were prevented from trying to eat Alison, the shift to concentrating on Alison’s rainbow of flesh-icing caused them to ignore the kerfuffle taking place in the pit.
By now, you will have determined that this writing, like Alison, is merely a distraction. That, in this case, the writer is seeking distraction, and one way of so doing is to begin to inhabit the lives of those whose lives are more absurd than his.
The absurdity takes the form of
• A family he loves more than himself
• An illness that won’t go away
• Books that he would like to read
• Films he would like to see
• Places he would like to go (not true, this one)
• Cats he would like to pet
• Dogs he would like to pet
• Languages he would like to learn
• Music he would like to play
• Thus instruments he would like to learn to play
• Poems he would like to write
• Photos he would like to take
• Music he would like to hear
• Things he would like to own
• Thus stuff he would like to buy
• People he would like to impress
• Prizes he would like to win
• Clothes he would like to wear
• Really?
• Projects he would like to complete And more…
that require more lives than he or most people probably have left – so best to solve George and Alison’s current predicament: how can you fall from a raked stage into a pit onto a battery of drums silently?
April 14, 2025