The ‘half’ is called over the backstage tannoy.  ‘Half an hour, please, ladies and gentlemen’—allowed, much too soon it seems, by the ‘quarter.’  Wigs, newly dressed, are fitted by the wigmaster, Robert Gardner.  Hamlet has grown his own hair, beard and moustache.  A wig would be impossibly hot and sweaty in such an active part.  Invitations are issued to a wine-and-cheese cast party afterwards.  The trumpeter can be heard warming up.  People, as usual, are borrowing make-up from one another.  (It is not all Leichner—a lot of young actors save money by going to the Boots make-up counter.)      ‘Five minutes, please,’ says the sepulchral voice over the dressing-room loudspeakers and behind it can now be heard the subdued, bubbling sound of an assembling audience, like the breaking of a distant sea.  Each actor feels at this moment nakedly exposed and vulnerable.  They have their own ways of exorcising their fears.  Superstition runs deep, as it does in any risky profession—motor racing, bull fighting, gambling. Actors put charms on their dressing tables.
      Timothy West sets out a collection of glass animals.  ‘One day I found I’d forgotten them and then I realized how much they meant to me.’  Barbara Jefford keeps a special stone, the colour of a conker.  ‘My husband (John Turner) gave it to me and I would feel very odd without it.’  On Derek Jacobi’s table the pots and sticks and liners are marshalled fastidiously like troops on a parade ground.  The telegrams and good luck cards are lined up on the wall with impeccable dressing.
      By such rituals actors try to contain their fear of the many-headed beast waiting out there for them in the dark.  They are as superstitious of bad luck omens as sailors. Hence the taboos against whistling in the dressing room, or naming that unluckiest of plays, Macbeth—often referred to, for safety, as ‘the Scottish play.’
      ‘Beginners, please,’ murmur the loudspeakers.  Most of the beginners (it means those on first, not those who are inexperienced) are already pacing the wings in a state either of friendliness or withdrawal.  Distantly one can hear the front of house announcement:  ‘Ladies and gentlemen, will you  kindly take your seats?  The curtain will rise in one minute.’  The phrase lingers although there is no curtain down, as is increasingly the custom with Shakespeare productions.
      There is much throat clearing in the passages and the occasional ‘Good luck’ and ‘Merde.’  Why the French word?  It is like spitting for luck—but why in French no one is sure.  ‘Stand by, please,’ murmurs Marje in a super-cool voice into her microphone in the prompt corner, with a finder poised to take down the house lights.
      As they fade to darkness, a spotlight hits the front of the stage; the first eerie chord is struck by the musicians and the heads of the audience come into view, like rows of cobblestones lit by moonlight.  Smoke billows from a smoke canister; the waiting guards grasp their pikes and thrust forward into the smoky space to turn it into the battlements of Elsinore, and suddenly the play is on.
      ‘Stand by all those concerned in the first court scene . . .’ The guards come off in a swish of greatcoats and wait behind the side drapes for their next entrance.  Soon Polonius can be heard through the tinny loudspeaker in Claudius’s dressing room, giving Laertes that endless good advice, while Claudius sits studying his next scene.  Soon Hamlet is off doing a quick change in the adjoining dressing room.  ‘Did that sound all right to you?’ ‘Sounded fine but I jumped a cue.’
      The musicians in their dark backstage corner are screwing up their eyes over their paperbacks.  The trumpeter hastily puts down a Michael Innes detective story just in time to sound the King’s rouse.  The stage rocks as a maroon explodes in its tank.
      At last the interval.  Polonius gratefully lights the pipe he has been concealing in his chamberlain’s robes, saying between puffs to Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, ‘I brought you on a bit early.  I cut a great chunk of the fishmonger scene, my apologies!’  The director’s voice can be heard going from dressing room to dressing room, ‘Angel . . . wonderful . . . absolutely right . . .’  It may sound gushing, but amid the tension it is badly needed reassurance.
      Up many flights of stairs, round many corners, in the walk-ons’ shared dressing room, people do not call with reassuring remarks.  ‘Last night it was all jokes in here—tonight it feels chilly by comparison, like a second night.’  ‘What do I do to make myself look very old, which I can take off again immediately afterwards?’ ‘Try white or ivory on the bridge of your nose.’  There is no loudspeaker up here and the first vibrating chord of the second half takes them by surprise.  ‘Oh God . . .’ a strolling player goes careering down the stairs to Elsinore, clutching his red wig.
      So it goes by—‘To be or not to be’, the nunnery scene, the play scene, the closet scene.  Polonius is killed without a squeak, thanks to the foam rubber.  Hamlet comes off panting after the chase and arrest, pulling off his coat and boots, mopping at the sweat, chucking the fifth soaking sweatshirt of the evening on to the pile on the dressing room radiator.  He has 15 minutes, the only break of the night, in which to get his breath back for the final assault leading up to the duel.  Shakespeare knew what he was doing when he arranged this rest for his leading actor.  Without it, no one could play Hamlet.  Derek Jacobi lights a cigarette—but there isn’t time to finish it.
      In the wings, Laertes is flexing his knees and his sword arm, loosening up for the duel.  When it comes, they give it real venom, overturning chairs, leaping tables like the freshest of musketeers.  As the four captains bear Hamlet from the stage, the maroons boom out again—only two out of the three because the first explosions blew the detonator off the next. Finally, the curtain calls.
      As they come off from the first call, the actors surreptitiously kick or fling off-stage the foils, the poisoned cup, bits of overturned furniture which are in the way.  The noise of the audience is like the sea—a roaring, but not a menacing, breaking of waves, with ‘Bravos’ sounding in the foam as Hamlet steps forward for his own call.
      At 10:40 the stage lights go down fo r the last time and the house lights come up. The director can be heard booming his ‘Well dones’. The musicians are already in the pub next door where there were eight pints waiting on the bar at 10:45 precisely.  Musicians have these matters well organized.
      To an onlooker who has watched the fraught moments, the last-minute changes, the eleventh-hour licks of paint, the wonder is that everything is somehow, just ready.  ‘It will be all right on the night’ is a dangerous optimistic saying but the knowledge that there is no more time left does concentrate the mind, sharpen the reactions and bring forth wonders of improvisation.
      At the cast party, Marje Williams, whose performance in the prompt center is as vital as that of any leading actor, was able to relax for the first time since stage rehearsals began.  ‘I admit I get a bang from the actual performance and the concentration it demands.  I put up with the misery of the rest of it for that.’
      On this particular night, the most testing moment came when the light on the prompt corner telephone started flashing in the middle of a complicated sequence of music and lighting cues.  It could have meant an emergency—a fire backstage, an actor struck down or missing, an electrical breakdown . . . When Marje picked it up a strange voice said: ‘Is that you, Reg?  Oh, wrong number.’
      Afterwards such stories are passed from mouth to mouth as part of the unwinding process.  In the late-night restaurant towards midnight, Hamlet, Claudius and others are sitting around, relieved by the reception but still wondering how it really went—perhaps a little afraid to ask the director when he joins them.  Besides, everyone is too tired to go into it.
      ‘It’s lovely when it stops,’ says Derek Jacobi, staring without interest at his plate.  He can still scarcely eat.  He leaves early to see if at last he can sleep.  ‘Good night, sweet prince,’ says someone inevitably.