The biscuit tin was the detail that undid Norah Fell.

Miss Fell, who is nineteen and who staffed the Bellvue Theatre box office alone on Saturday night during the benefit performance that raised forty-seven thousand florins, is not easily moved. She processed thirty-one separate donations that evening without, by her own account, so much as a tremor.

But when twenty-three children from Marchmont Street Primary School arrived at 10:15 on Saturday morning — before the benefit, before the crowds, before Ruben Glass — carrying a biscuit tin they had decorated with painted stars and the words “FOR THE BELLVUE,” she needed a moment.

“It was 14 florins and 60 centimes,” Miss Fell said. “They had been collecting for a fortnight. Their teacher, Mrs Alleyn, had told them the theatre needed help, and they decided to help. One of them — a boy of about eight — asked me very seriously whether it was enough.”

It was not, strictly speaking, enough. But it was the start of a weekend that has brought the Bellvue’s total to approximately 173,400 florins — narrowing the gap from nine thousand to six thousand six hundred.

The benefit night on Saturday accounted for the bulk: Glass’s extraordinary twenty-thousand-florin personal donation, audience pledges of twelve thousand four hundred, and ticket revenue of approximately fifteen thousand. But the smaller donations that have continued to arrive since — by post, by hand, and in at least one case by biscuit tin — have added a further twenty-four hundred.

Among them: a cheque for 200 florins from the Ashwater Sculling Club (“We know about keeping old things afloat,” wrote Commodore Gareth Toll in the accompanying note); an anonymous envelope containing 50 florins and a programme from a 1983 Bellvue production of The Glass Harmonica; and a collection of 340 florins organised by the landlord of The Greystone Arms on Harbourfront Parade, who placed a jar on the bar on Friday evening and found it full by closing.

Augustin Fell, the theatre’s owner-director, has spent the weekend in the building. He was there when the children arrived, though he did not come downstairs. He was there on Saturday evening when Glass spoke for twelve minutes from the stage to an audience of 378. He was there on Sunday morning, alone in the auditorium, when this reporter visited.

“Six thousand six hundred,” he said, without being asked. “I know the number. I have known every number since October.”

Mr Fell, who inherited the Bellvue from his aunt Constance in 2007 and has staged more than a hundred productions in nineteen years, has staked everything on closing the gap before the first of May. The fly tower — the soaring void above the stage through which scenery is raised and lowered — requires structural repairs that cannot be deferred without risking closure by the building inspector.

“The play opens on the tenth of April,” he said. “We will be ready. The question is whether the building will be.”

The Lamplighter’s Oath, Mr Fell’s first original play, is in its third week of rehearsal. Thomas Ashworth, who plays Edmund Vale, has been arriving from his teaching post at four o’clock each afternoon and rehearsing until nine. Nessa Holloway, whose Clara drew audible gasps at Saturday’s benefit reading, is being spoken of in terms that would be remarkable for an actress with twenty years’ experience, let alone one making her professional debut.

Mrs Prudence Alleyn, the Marchmont Street Primary teacher who organised the children’s collection, said she had been bringing her classes to the Bellvue for Christmas pantomimes since 2019. “They know the building,” she said. “They know the red seats and the gold ceiling and the way the curtain goes up. When I told them it might close, they wanted to do something. So we did.”

The gap is 6,600 florins. The deadline is the first of May. The biscuit tin is on the box office counter, where Miss Fell has placed it next to the donations ledger. She has not emptied it.

“I thought about it,” she said. “But it looks better full.”