The Casting Office

My room is on the third floor, has no window facing the street and appears on no plan that gets handed to visitors. I am the head of the casting office. I do not sing, I do not conduct, I decide nothing. I am simply the first to know what will not work.

I wrote down the stories in this volume because I was present at all of them. I will not appear in them all the same. This has nothing to do with modesty. Anyone doing my job never stands at the centre of a proceeding but always beside it, with a calendar on their knees, and that position is too precise to give up for the sake of a better story. Wherever my office turns up, it is therefore simply called the casting office. Nobody in the house says that I said something anyway. They say the scheduling office said something, as though a piece of furniture had spoken. I have got used to it.

The people who speak in this volume are the others. Each chapter opens with a line stating who is standing beside the matter this time and how they come to be there – a cast slip, no longer than the one in the foyer. That person then speaks up over the course of the chapter, and their interjections are set apart from the rest of the text. They explain nothing. They contradict, they defend themselves, they occasionally concede that they could have known. That is precisely why they are there: arguments about resources are rarely conducted calmly, because at the end of every one of them stands a person who will hear about the decision.

Once it is the Intendant, the artistic director of the house, who has drawn up a season. Once the chorus director, hearing nine applicants in one afternoon. Once the general music director, deciding in seconds what elsewhere takes half a year. And at the end a singer, disposed of by everyone before her, this office included.

Nobody is given a name here, as in the earlier volumes. There is the chairman of the board, in the same armchair as ever. There is the head of the scenic workshop, the technical director, the lighting supervisor. Roles outlast names, in the theatre as anywhere else – and in a volume about casting that is not a quirk but the subject itself.

Two Lines in the Minutes

The Intendant speaks. Two seasons into the post, she drew up this season within the sequence laid down by the board, and stands by it to this day.

“I drew up this season the way I drew it up, and I would do it again. You do not build a season by asking first what will not work.”

The programme for the coming season took its final shape on a Tuesday in March, in a room with too little air and too many chairs. Twelve titles hung on the wall, each on its own sheet, and every one of them had been well considered. There was a through-line. There was a baroque evening. There was a work not staged for eighteen years that the chairman of the board has been mentioning for just as long. The order in which the great works return to the repertoire was fixed in any case; what was negotiated was which month each of them would fall in.

At the end of the table sat the casting office with a calendar. It was not asked.

Since the beginning of February that calendar had said two of these twelve evenings would not happen as planned. Not because of the money. Because a single singer was to carry both, and in November she is in Milan, which has been settled for two years. It had been said three times, twice in the corridor and once in an email that received a friendly reply. On that Tuesday it was said a fourth time, in two sentences, with a request that they go into the minutes. They did go in. In small print.

“Two sentences at the end of a four-hour meeting. I do not remember them. That is not an excuse, that is the point.”

The order of things

This is not carelessness, it is an order of operations, and almost everywhere it runs backwards. Selection first, casting afterwards. A group meets, a list emerges, each title is given a month, and then the list goes to the people who are supposed to work out who will do all of it.

It is about as clever as printing the season and then finding out who is in the ensemble. It happens all the same, and not out of stupidity, but because selection is the more agreeable part of the work. Twelve titles can be argued over, enthused about, voted on. A calendar allows nothing but the observation of what is written in it.

A selection made without a casting picture is not a decision, though. It is a wish list in ranked order. Agreed is not cast, and between the two lies the whole difference between a season and an intention. Money can be moved, topped up, begged for in an emergency. People cannot. A house can raise the fee; it cannot invent a second Isolde for the same evening.

„f somebody tells me in March that two of twelve evenings are shaky, they are spoiling a good mood with information that cannot be checked until November. I thought it was caution. It was knowledge.„

What is kept in that room

The calendar that lay on the table that Tuesday is not an address book. It is a picture: who is in the house, what those people can genuinely do, where they will be in November, who has already stepped in twice this season and who has been waiting a year for a bigger part. That is not administration. It is the only dependable statement of what a season can actually support.

For that picture to hold, it has to do two things. It has to know the demand – not only the productions already agreed, but those still under discussion. A casting picture consulted only after the decision can at best put a figure on the damage. And it has to be current, which sounds trivial and is in fact the whole job. A calendar assembled once a year describes a season that no longer exists. Where nobody reconciles it weekly, everyone ends up keeping their own list, because they do not trust the shared one.

No right of veto follows from this. What follows is the order: the calendar belongs on the table before the sheets go up on the wall. A season that knows its capacity rarely has to cancel; it can stagger. The new production in March rather than October, because in October half the company is tied up in the revival – that is not a cancellation, that is a date. Anyone who receives the same information in September no longer has a choice, only damage.

„Staggering I could have done. In March it costs a shift of dates, in September it costs an evening. I knew that exchange rate. I simply thought it did not apply this time.„

The same person, three questions

In a house the same human being is regarded from three sides, and each asks something different. The production asks whom it needs. The season asks whom it shares. The house asks who there is at all. The third question is the most uncomfortable, because only it forces an honest answer, and it is the one least often asked in meetings.

In November the first of the two productions lost its singer. It became an evening on which a cover sang who had never rehearsed, and she did better than she had to. In the foyer it was said afterwards that they had been unlucky. On the third floor lay a set of minutes from March with two lines in them, in small print.

„Next time I ask before the sheets go up on the wall. I imagine I shall say that once a year from now on.„

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