But that was over now. That was the past.
Next to him in the box Ginny cried out, “We did it! David! We bloody well did it!” as she doubtless realised that—all charges of nepotism be damned when he'd chosen his wife to direct the production—she'd just risen to the sort of heights occupied by artists like Hands, Nunn, and Hall.
David's son Matthew—as his father's manager, knowing only too well how much they had at stake in the production—grabbed David's hand hard and said gruffly, “Damn. Well done, Dad.” And David wanted to warm to those words and to what they implied, a firm withdrawal of the initial doubts that Matthew had expressed when told of his father's intention to turn Shakespeare's greatest tragedy into his own musical triumph. “You're sure you want to do this?” he'd asked, and the rest of his remarks had remained unspoken: Aren't you setting yourself up for a final deadly fall?
He was indeed, David had confirmed at the time, if only to himself. But what other option did he really have than to try to restore his name as an artist?
He'd managed to do just that: Not only were the audience on their feet, not only were the cast members ecstatically applauding him from the stage, but the critics—whose seat numbers he had memorised, “the better to blow them up,” Matthew had noted sardonically—were also standing, making no move to depart, and joining in the sort of approbation that David had come to fear was as lost to him as was Michael Chandler.
That approbation only grew in the ensuing hours. At the opening night party at the Dorchester, in a ballroom creatively converted into Elsinore Castle, David stood at his wife's side, at the end of a receiving line comprising the production's leading actors. Along that line stepped London's foremost glitterati: Stars of stage and screen gushed over their colleagues and privately gnashed their teeth to conceal their envy; celebrities from all walks of life pronounced King-Ryder Productions’ Hamlet everything from “top notch” and “just fab, darling” to “kept me on the absolute edge of my seat;” It girls and Sloanes—slinkily attired, displaying an astonishing degree of cleavage, and famous either for being famous or for having famous parents—declared that “someone finally made Shakespeare fun”; representatives from that notable drain on the nation's imagination and economy—the Royal Family—offered their best wishes for success. And while everyone was pleased to press the flesh of Hamlet and his thespian cohorts, and while everyone was happy to congratulate Virginia Elliott for her masterful direction of her husband's pop opera, everyone was particularly eager to talk to the man who'd been vilified and pilloried for more than a decade.
So there was triumph to be felt in spades, and David King-Ryder wanted to feel it. He was starved for a sensation that would tell him life was opening before him instead of closing. But that was the feeling that he couldn't escape. It's over boomed in his ears like the cannon.
If he had been able to talk to her about what he had been going through since the curtain call, David knew that Ginny would tell him his feelings of depression, anxiety, and despair were normal. “It's the natural letdown after opening night,” she would have said. She would have pointed out that she had far more reason to be let down than he had anyway. As director, her job was over now. True, there were various components of the production to be tweaked—”It would be satisfying if the lighting designer would cooperate and get the last scene right, wouldn't it?”—but by and large, she had to let go, to begin the process all over again on another production of another play. In his case, the morning would bring a flood of congratulatory phone calls, requests for interviews, and offers to mount the pop opera all over the world. Thus, he could dig into another staging of Hamlet or go on to something else. She didn't have that option.
If he had confessed that he just didn't have it in him to go on to anything else, she would have said, “Of course, you haven't at the moment. That's normal, David. How could you right now? Give yourself some leeway to recover, won't you? You need time to refill the well.”
The well was the wellspring of creativity, and if he'd pointed out to his wife that she never seemed to need to refill her own supplies, she would have argued that directing was different from creating the product in the first place. She, at least, had raw materials to work with—not to mention a score of fellow artists with whom to knock heads as the production took shape. He had only the music room, the piano, endless solitude, and his imagination.