The show must go on

Flute Performance Number 9 is unfolding nicely, albeit with an understudy replacing an indisposed Queen of The Night. I’m sitting in my usual spot by the refrigerator in the understage corridor, outside the men’s chorus and the Puppeteers’ dressing rooms. An assortment of wigs technicians and makeup artists sprawl in adjacent chairs alongside me, scrolling on their phones while they wait for cues and changes. I’m watching a monitor fixed to the wall, that shows what’s happening on the stage. Occasionally, someone will try to sneak the channel over to football or Love Island, but we need to see where the show is at. Dresser Adeline fishes a whistle pop out from her bag, and reduces us all to tears of laughter as she tries to work out Beethoven’s 5th on it. We’re suggesting that she ask the conductor if he’ll let her join the orchestra when it begins to melt in her mouth, so she crunches it up and retires to the table in the costume store to do some drawing in her sketchbook.  

I check my timer. It’s 40 minutes into the show, and coming up for one of the puppeteers’ side-of-stage quick-changes. I stand up, and am just checking that I have my head-torch with me, when the lights overhead flicker, pop, and then cut out. Suddenly, everything is plunged into the semi-darkness of emergency lighting. The intercom is dead, and the opera has ground to halt. The monitor screen is black. I hear a thunderous rumbling coming from the stage as the safety iron hurtles down, and then the fire alarms begin to wail. I turn to catch eyes with my colleagues, and no one is smiling. This is not a drill.

Right, I think. Just follow the motions. I go back to my chair and as I reach for my bag that’s tucked beneath it, I am trying to remember where the emergency meeting point for dressers is in the gardens — it gets changed every year. Chorus singers and a couple of the puppeteers spill out from their dressing rooms — ‘what do we do? Do we leave the building? What’s happening?’ 

By now, the fire alarm is stopping and starting, meaning we are all caught up in a frozen limbo of confusion. ‘Wait,’ says wardrobe assistant Leah, ‘let’s just hold on for a sec.’

We can hear footsteps running down the corridor, and Tristan from stage management screeches around the corner. ‘Stay here,’ he instructs, ‘just stay in your dressing rooms.’ In lieu of a working intercom, he is literally having to physically sprint around the building in person. ‘Don’t go anywhere,’ he says, ‘I need to know where you all are and where I can find you.’ 

‘What’s happening?’ Leah asks him. 

‘I don’t know,’ he says with a panicked shrug, and then he shoots off again. 

I sit back down, and notice that my knees are shaking. 

‘Oi,’ Leah calls after a couple of chorus men who are beginning to make their way down the corridor. ‘Where are you going?’ 

‘To make a cup of tea.’ They hold up their mugs. 

‘And how are you going to manage that without a working kettle?’

They look at each other. ‘Oh yeah…’

It occurs to us that the power-cut might be wider spread than just Glyndebourne, and I reach for my phone to see if Twitter might be able to offer any answers, but just as I discover that there’s no internet, I hear an anguished cry from inside the men’s chorus dressing room — ‘No internet? What are we going to doooo?!’ 

Adeline quietly continues with her drawing in the costume store, working by the light of her head-torch. 

Boss Lucy appears. She’s making her way around the building to check on all the dressers, and she hands Leah a battery powered walkie-talkie so that all of the Running Wardrobe assistants can keep in contact with each other. 

Nobody’s quite sure why the Glyndebourne generator hasn’t kicked in, but a few performers who have trickled back from the stage have some snippets of information for us. All the bigwigs of the company have gathered at the side of the stage in the Prompt-side wing, which is apparently is the protocol for situations such as this. And the upshot? Nobody knows what has happened, and nobody knows what to do. This news sets everyone off into gales of adrenaline-spiked laughter. Then we hear that the auditorium is in pitch blackness and the worker lights are not working, which means the audience have had to stay put. We wonder what they are all thinking, sitting there in the darkness. As the minutes tick by, the next piece of news filters through — the management are trying to decide if the show should be abandoned and the audience reimbursed, or if they should wait and hope for a return of power and pay everyone overtime, and in which case, how long they should wait for.

The lights come back on. Then they go out again. And then they come back on again once more.

Leah’s walkie-talkie crackles — ‘Lights are on in the pit.’ We hear that the building management department are turning the power back on in different parts of building one section at a time, to ward off the risk of a power overload. Next to come back are the auditorium lights, and the audience are finally released into the gardens. 

Stage management Claire’s voice comes over the intercom — ‘This is a test call.’ She then informs the company that we will restart the show, picking up from where we left off, but that it will take about half an hour to get everything back on track. 

‘Alright then!’ says Leah, throwing up her hands with an overwhelmed laugh. ‘I guess that means go take a tea break!’ 

I make my way to the Courtyard canteen, and find it packed with orchestra. They’ve probably been in here the whole time. By now the internet is back on, and we learn that the power-cut was not just us, but has affected a large part of the country. 

Calls are going out for principal singer Bjorn, who has gone awol, but once he has been rounded up and returned to his dressing room, we are ready to restart the show. I pass the Front of House manager Jules as I make way back to the under-stage corridor. She’s speaking into a walkie-talkie — ‘…if you could start to encourage them back in…’ 

I head back to my spot by the men’s chorus, and see that the monitor has come back to life. Jules is making her way across the stage in front of the safety iron, illuminated in a pool of light. She stops to make an announcement, and Leah stabs at the volume button on the remote control so that we can hear what she is saying. She’s thanking the audience for their patience, and informing them that we will be finishing an hour later than scheduled, but that the Glyndebourne transport will get them back to Lewes in time to catch later trains to London, and that Box Office staff can help with ordering taxis. 

Then the safety iron rattles up again, revealing that the stage behind it is all lit and ready to go. The conductor returns to the pit, and Sofia Fomina reappears on the stage as Pamina. She curtseys cutely for the audience, who roar with applause and cheers, before she reenacts the faint she had performed just before the power had cut out. The music swells up again, and we are off once more, almost an hour behind schedule. 

The show will indeed, go on.