Ruben Glass is coming home.

The actor — who left the Bellvue Theatre for the Caldwell stage fifteen years ago but has never, by his own account, stopped missing the creak of the Marchmont Street floorboards — will arrive in Bobington on Thursday. He will attend Friday’s dress rehearsal, Saturday evening’s benefit performance, and a private reception afterwards. He has, it is understood, declined all fees and offered to cover his own travel.

“I got my start in this building,” Glass said in a letter to Augustin Fell, framed in the Bellvue lobby since February. “If it needs me, I will be there.”

The benefit night — Saturday 15 March, curtain at 7:30 PM — is the centrepiece of Fell’s campaign to raise the 180,000 florins needed for fly tower repairs before the 1 May deadline set by the Municipal Building Inspector. As of Monday, fundraising stood at approximately 115,000 florins: the 35,000-florin Arts Council emergency heritage grant, 4,200 from the Marchmont Street Traders’ Association door-to-door campaign, and the balance from private donations that have arrived steadily since the campaign began.

The gap is 65,000 florins. Six days remain before the benefit night, and fifty-three before the deadline.

Over 300 of the 380 seats for Saturday’s performance have been sold — a remarkable figure for a theatre that has not filled its house on a non-opening night in recent memory. Fell attributes the demand partly to Glass’s presence and partly to what he called “the city paying attention to something that matters.”

The Third Act

Rehearsals for The Lamplighter’s Oath — Fell’s first play, opening 10 April — have reached the third act, and by all available accounts, they are going well.

Thomas Ashworth, the schoolteacher-actor who plays Edmund Vale, continues to arrive at the theatre from Bramblegate Grammar School at 4 PM each afternoon and rehearse until 9. Fell, who both wrote the play and is directing it, said Monday that Ashworth was “finding depths in Vale that I did not write, which is exactly what a playwright wants and fears in equal measure.”

Nessa Holloway, in her first professional role as Vale’s daughter Clara, has grown visibly more confident through rehearsals. The third act — which centres on Vale’s confrontation with the Municipal Gas Board over extending lighting to the Docklands — demands sustained emotional range. Holloway, Fell said, “has a kind of stubbornness that reads as conviction. She is going to be very good.”

The production’s technical demands are, somewhat ironically, limited by the very infrastructure the fundraising is meant to repair. The fly tower — the mechanism above the stage that raises and lowers scenery — operates at reduced capacity, restricting the complexity of set changes. Fell has adapted, designing a production that relies on lighting and a single rotating set piece rather than elaborate backdrops.

“The constraints have made a better play,” Fell said, though one suspects he would prefer to say this from a position of having had the choice.

Glass, when he arrives on Thursday, will see a theatre that has not changed much since he last stood on its stage. The gilt is a little more faded. The crimson is a little less vivid. The floorboards still creak.

Whether they will creak for another season depends, in no small part, on what happens on Saturday night.