A ghost light is a bare bulb on a stand left burning on an empty stage so nobody walks off the edge in the dark. Ours is left upstage right, by the wall, out of the way. Every morning it is dead centre, on the mark, and the show relay, which pipes the stage sound to every dressing room, has recorded three hours of an empty stage, and forty minutes of it is not empty.
I am the stage door keeper at a producing theatre, which means I lock up, and the last thing I do before I lock up is look at the ghost light.
The light.
A bulb in a cage on a stand, on a long cable, wheeled onto the stage by the last technician out and left burning all night so the stage is not a black pit for the first person in. Ours lives upstage right, against the back wall, out of the way of the get-in.
Every morning it is at centre stage. On the mark. The small cross of tape that is the centre of the stage, that a director uses to set a scene, that an actor finds with their foot without looking.
The relay.
The show relay is a microphone over the stage that feeds speakers in every dressing room and the green room, so the company can hear where the show is up to. It records, on a loop, because the company manager likes to check timings.
Between one and two most nights the relay records a voice on the stage.
A man. Speaking, not loudly, at the level an actor uses on a stage when the house is empty and he is working. Lines. I have listened to a lot of them and I have had the resident director listen and he says they are from plays, several, none of them ours, and that they are done well, and that between the speeches there is the sound of somebody walking a stage, working out where to stand, and stopping, and going again.
It is a man rehearsing. In our building. In the ghost light.
What has been checked.
The stage, at one, by me. The light is upstage right where I left it. The relay in the green room, on the speaker, is playing the stage, and on the speaker the man is speaking, and on the stage in front of me there is nobody, and the light is upstage right, and then the light moves.
It rolls. On its casters, the cable paying out behind it, from the wall to the centre, slowly, as a person wheels a lamp to where it is needed, and it stops on the cross, and the man's voice on the relay says a line I did not know and have since looked up, which is about a light, and about being seen by it.
The cameras, which cover the stage for security, show the lamp rolling and nobody with it.
Who.
I asked the resident director for a list of the plays. He gave me nine. I asked the archive, which is a woman in her seventies who has been here since she was an usher, whether anybody had done all nine here, and she said one man had. An actor who had been in the company for thirty years, who had played here more than anywhere, who had, at the end, when the parts stopped coming, asked if he could use the stage at night to keep his hand in, and been told yes, and had done it, with the ghost light, for a year or so, and had died in the second year, and the archive said, at home, in bed, not here, as if that settled something.
He had used the ghost light, she said, because you cannot rehearse in the dark. He had wheeled it to centre and worked in its circle.
What is done about it.
The light is returned to upstage right by the first technician in, every morning, and the relay recording is wiped when the loop comes round, and the company manager, who has heard it, has asked me not to mention it to the company, because actors are superstitious and this is a working building.
What I do.
I keep the stage door.
I stopped leaving the light upstage right. I wheel it to centre myself, at close, and put it on the cross, and go and lock up. It seemed a small thing, a lamp where a man wanted it.
The relay changed. He does not walk any more, between the speeches. He does not have to find his light, because it is where he needs it. He does the speeches, one after another, in a voice that gets, over the year I have been listening, better, which I would not have thought possible, and at the end of the last one, every night, there is a pause, and then, from the stalls, from the empty house, the sound of one person clapping.
I have not been able to find out who that is. The archive says it will be his wife. She died first. She used to sit in the stalls when he worked at night, on her own, and clap, because a man cannot rehearse to nobody, and I have decided that is who it is, because the alternative is that it is somebody else who has been sitting in our stalls for years, and I would rather the lamp were the only thing I have to wheel.