Reginald Cooke has been cutting meat on Marchmont Street for thirty-eight years. His father cut meat there before him, and his grandfather before that. The shop — Cooke & Sons, three doors down from the Bellvue Theatre and across from the tobacconist — has survived two recessions, a fire in the storeroom (1994), and the opening of a larger butcher’s in Midtown that everyone said would finish them.
On Tuesday morning, Mr Cooke walked into the Bellvue box office, placed a cheque for 500 florins on the counter, and set a cured ham next to it.
“The cheque is for the roof,” he said. “The ham is for the cast. They look thin.”
Norah Fell, who is nineteen and has been processing donations at the box office with a calm efficiency that belies her age, recorded the cheque in the ledger she has maintained since the benefit night. It was the sixty-third individual donation since Saturday.
The total now stands at approximately 175,000 of the 180,000 florins required for the fly tower repairs. The gap — which was 62,000 a fortnight ago, 9,000 on Saturday morning, 6,600 on Sunday, and is now roughly 5,000 — has narrowed with a momentum that suggests the city has decided, collectively and without formal coordination, that the Bellvue Theatre is not going to close.
“It isn’t one thing,” said Augustin Fell, the theatre’s owner and director, standing in the auditorium on Tuesday afternoon while Thomas Ashworth rehearsed his Act II monologue on stage. “It isn’t the benefit night, or Glass, or the children with the biscuit tin. It is all of it. It is the city saying something.”
The donations since Saturday have been small, persistent, and various. A retired teacher from Thornhill sent 25 florins and a note reading: “I saw my first play here in 1961. It was dreadful. I have been coming back ever since.” A solicitor’s office on Guildhall Terrace sent 150 florins from a staff collection. The Tuesday morning post brought four envelopes, the largest containing 40 florins, the smallest 5.
The Marchmont Street Traders’ Association, which raised 4,200 florins in a door-to-door collection earlier this month, has written to the Municipal Heritage Committee asking that the Bellvue be added to the formal register of protected cultural sites. The committee is expected to consider the request at its next meeting.
Rehearsals for The Lamplighter’s Oath continue. The play opens on 10 April — twenty-four days from now — and Fell, who wrote it and is directing it, has moved into what he calls “the panic stage, which is actually the productive stage.”
Ashworth, who teaches history at Thornhill Secondary during the day and arrives at the theatre each afternoon at four, has settled into Edmund Vale’s skin with the authority of a man who has been performing on this stage for fifteen years. His council-address scene — the one that silenced 378 people on benefit night — has, Fell says, only grown since.
Nessa Holloway, at twenty-three the youngest member of the cast and in her first professional engagement, continues to deepen her portrayal of Clara. She was seen on Monday afternoon sitting alone in the empty auditorium, reading a book of Bobington history from the 1840s that Fell had lent her.
“She is not playing Clara,” Fell said. “She is becoming Clara. I did not expect that.”
The fly tower repair contract has been provisionally awarded to Thurston Brothers, a theatrical engineering firm from Caldwell, pending the completion of fundraising. Thurston’s have quoted 178,500 florins — slightly below the 180,000 target — with work to begin on 2 May, one day after the fundraising deadline.
Five thousand florins. Three and a half weeks. A ham from the butcher.
The clock on the Municipal Chamber, which restarted this morning after seven days of silence, could be heard faintly through the open stage door during Tuesday’s rehearsal. Ashworth paused in his speech, listened, and smiled.
“That,” he said, “is the city reminding us it’s still here.”