Vox Meditantis

6th October 1988

The silence of an empty auditorium is unlike any other silence in this world. I stood upon the stage this afternoon – alone, as I have been standing alone for longer than I care to admit – and listened to it. Not the absence of sound, mind you, but rather its presence: the peculiar hush that lingers where voices once rang out, where applause once thundered. It is a living thing, this silence, and it remembers.

They’ve asked me to clear out my dressing room by month’s end. Forty-three years I’ve kept the same corner space, Stage Left, Number Seven. The young director – can’t be more than thirty-five – explained it ever so gently, as one might explain death to a child. “Budget constraints,” he said. “Rationalisation.” Words that mean nothing and everything simultaneously.

I found myself thinking of the Olympics closing ceremony last weekend. All those athletes in Seoul, their moment of glory captured and broadcast round the world, then gone. Ben Johnson’s medals stripped away – what must that do to a man’s sense of self? One moment you are the fastest man alive; the next, you are nothing at all. Or worse, you are revealed to be someone you hoped you were not. Identity, it seems, is a fragile construction, easily demolished by truth or time.

What is my favourite hobby or pastime? The question appeared in a letter from my niece this morning, part of some family survey she’s compiling. I sat with my pen poised above the paper for twenty minutes before I could answer. Once, I would have written “the theatre” without hesitation. But is it a hobby if it has been one’s entire life? Can the stage be called a pastime when one has spent every waking hour either upon it or preparing to return to it?

I wrote, finally, “Listening.” She will think me daft, no doubt, but it is the truth. I have become a collector of sounds, of the echoes that populate empty spaces. The creak of stage boards beneath my feet – I know each one by heart, could map them in darkness. The rustle of the velvet curtains, heavy as ceremonial robes. The particular acoustics of this old building, built in 1923, which swallows certain frequencies and amplifies others in ways that modern architects, with all their computers and calculations, could never replicate.

Who am I when there is no audience to witness me? This is the question that haunts my waking hours and disturbs my sleep. For decades, I have been other people – Hamlet, Lear, Willy Loman, Jimmy Porter. I have spoken their words, worn their faces, lived their lives with more conviction than I have lived my own. Now, approaching my sixty-ninth year, I find I cannot quite locate myself beneath the accumulated layers of performed identity.

Margaret keeps the country running with her iron will, they say. I wonder if she, too, questions who she might be without the role she plays. We are all performing, are we not? The only difference is that some of us admit it.

This afternoon, I attempted Prospero’s epilogue, there in the empty theatre. My voice – still strong, thank God, though the breath control is not what it was – filled the space, and for a moment I felt myself again. “Now my charms are all o’erthrown, And what strength I have’s mine own.” But when I finished, the silence rushed back in, and I was merely an old man talking to himself in an empty room.

The sound of my own footsteps as I left the building seemed unbearably loud against the quiet streets. October always brings this melancholy, this sense of things ending. The leaves falling, the light failing earlier each day. I am in the October of my life, I suppose, though I still cling to the delusion that there might be Indian summer ahead.

I wonder if anyone truly knows themselves, or if we are all simply playing roles we’ve rehearsed so thoroughly that we’ve forgotten they were ever performances at all.

The diary will be silent now. As am I.

The diary is set in late 1988, a period marked by lingering Cold War tensions and transitional change in global politics. Just days earlier, the Seoul Summer Olympics had concluded, noted for their symbolic role in easing relations between East and West and overshadowed by the scandal surrounding Canadian sprinter Ben Johnson’s disqualification for doping. In Britain, Margaret Thatcher’s government was in its ninth year, pursuing economic liberalisation amid growing public debates over inequality and job security. The months that followed saw the gradual thaw of the Cold War, leading to major geopolitical shifts by the decade’s end, including the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989.

Bob Lynn | © 2025 Vox Meditantis. All rights reserved. | 🌐 Translate