After half an hour, or probably an hour’s wait, the keen young man reaches the stage door, and finally gets into the passage. In his eagerness he fancies he sees space in that passage to slip past a number of people who are waiting round the door-keeper’s room, and congratulates himself on his smartness in circumventing them. Somehow he contrives to get through, and finally runs gaily down a flight of stairs, to find himself—not on the stage, as he had hoped, but underneath it. A piano and voice are heard overhead. Quickly retracing his steps he mounts higher and higher in his anxiety to be an early performer, tries passage after passage, to find nothing but dressing-rooms, until he arrives breathless at the top of the building opposite two large apartments relegated later to the chorus. Utterly bewildered by the intricacies of the theatre, and a sound of music which he cannot locate, the poor novice is almost in despair of reaching the stage at all. One more effort, and a man who looks like a carpenter remarks:
“These ’ere is the flies, sir: there’s the stage,” and he points down below over some strange scaffolding.
The singer looks. Lo, there are fifty or sixty people on the stage.
“All trying for a job, sir; but, bless yer ’eart, not one in twenty will get anything.”
This sounds cheerless to the stage beginner, whose only recommendation is a good, well-trained voice.
With directions from the carpenter he wends his way down again, not with the same elastic step with which he bounded up the stairs. “Bless yer ’eart, not one in twenty will get anything” was not a pleasant piece of news.
Ah, here is a glass door, through which—oh joy! he sees the stage at last. He is about to enter gaily when he is stopped by a theatre official who demands his “form.”
“Go back to the stage door, sign your name and address there, and fill in the printed form you will get there,” says this gentleman in stentorian tones that cause the poor youth to tremble while he inquires:
“Up those stairs, first to the right, and second to the left.”
Back he goes, and after another wait, during which he notes many others filling in forms one by one and asking endless questions, he gets the book, signs his name, and receives a form in which he enters _name_, _voice_, _previous experience_, _height_, and _age_. There is also a column headed “_Remarks_,” which the would-be actor feels inclined to fill with superlative adjectives, but is informed that “the stage manager fills in this column himself.”