On the Stage-And Off by Jerome K. Jerome — Read

WAS most miserable with the company I had now joined. What it was like may be gathered from the following:

"Dear Jim: If I stop long with this company I shall go mad (not very far to go, perhaps you'll say! ). I must get out of it soon. It's the most wretched affair you could possibly imagine. Crummies's show was a _Comédie Francaise_ in its arrangements compared with this. We have neither stage-manager nor acting-manager. If this were all, I shouldn't grumble; but we have to do our own bill posting, help work the scenes, and take the money at the doors -- not an arduous task this last. There are no 'lines. ' We are all 'responsibles,' and the parts are distributed among us with the utmost impartiality. In the matter of salary, too, there is the same charming equality; we all get a guinea. In theory, that is: in reality, our salaries vary according to our powers of nagging; the maximum ever attained by any one having been fifteen shillings. I wonder we got any, though, considering the audiences we play to. The mere sight of the house gives one the horrors every night. It is so dimly lighted (for, to save expense, the gas is only turned a quarter on) that you can hardly see your way about, and so empty, that every sound echoes and re-echoes through the place, till it seems as though a dozen people are talking in a scene where there are only two. You walk on the stage, and there in front of you are, say, twenty people dotted about the pit, a few more are lolling listlessly over the gallery rails, and there are two or three little groups in the boxes, while, as a background to these patches of unhappy humanity, there stares out the bare boards and the dingy upholstery. It is impossible to act among such surroundings as these.