The song was left unsung. Brian scrutinised the faces before him in the audience, frozen as he was by their stares. Remarkably, the stage where he performed was relatively unlit while the auditorium itself blazed with criss-crossing searchlights, a theatrical effect that sometimes worked, sometimes flopped. Tonight, it was the latter...
...except Brian happened to depend on this performance of performances to launch his career, indeed move it from wooden boards to electronic screens. An important talent scout was known to be sitting among all those faces, but which icy stare, which particular slow hand-clapper...?
Singing was never Brian’s forte. He was fundamentally a stand-up comic, simply throwing in a ballad or lightsome novelty number to recall the old-fashioned days when comics did just that -- wrap their jokes amid a number of other all-round talents. But Brian was no Bruce Forsyth. Come to think of it, even Brian’s jokes were never anything to write home about. Dancing was the hardest thing of all.
He started clip-clopping on his metalled heels in an attempt to win back the audience and one member of that audience in particular. His steps grew heavy, the taps unrhythmical, the moves too easily followed, all his tricks gone wrong, as the theatre's searchlights grew angry and intense like tunnel-beacons through the otherwise dark skies of blitz and war.
Eventually, he knelt on the stage, just as the lighting turned back upon him away from the now darkening auditorium amid a last firework-fizzing display.
“I beg thee, listen,” he intoned Shakespeareanly, amid the increasingly stony silence. He looked up, blinded by the lights, eyes wet and continued: “I was made from passion and taught by masters. Those who physically conceived me created the passion that created me and the angel-muses became the masters who taught me of their own existence beyond the scope of mere physicality. Whether mind or matter, spirit or flesh, or simply a mixture of both, a smile on pork-lips is still a smile. My jokes still jokes, even if there is no laughter to accompany them. My songs still songs, given no applause. My steps still steps, given no real dance for them to become. A choreography of mis-timing is still a choreography to follow. My stories still stories, given no print to carry them...”
The lights dimmed one by one. Gradually, the applause in the dark auditorium grew from nothing until it eventually became unstoppable by deafening the rest of the soliloquy and its potential series of escapist punch-lines.
As a solitary weak beam lit magically upon Brian’s now-curtained confessional, one in the audience abruptly sat on his hands....
(written today and first published here)
