There is a room beneath the National's main stage that the public never enters, where a complete second cast performs an entire play to an audience of work lights and stacked chairs. They do this every week, in full, without applause. It is called the shadow run, and it is the oldest continuous tradition in the building — older than the revolving stage, older than the royal box, older than the theatre's own name.
The current revival of The Glass Diplomat has made the shadow run briefly, unexpectedly famous. When the production's celebrated lead withdrew an hour before curtain on opening night, her understudy — a 26-year-old performer whose programme biography ran to two lines — gave what three national critics independently called the performance of the season. The story has been retold as an overnight sensation. The people in the room beneath the stage know better: the overnight sensation had performed the role in full forty-one times.
An economy of readiness
Theatre keeps a standing army it hopes never to deploy, and the economics of that readiness are stranger than any box office. An understudy is paid to remain a few seconds behind someone else's life: same lines, same blocking, same emotional weather, held in permanent suspension.
“People imagine we are waiting for the lead to fail,” says one veteran of eleven productions. “We are not waiting for anything. We are doing the play. We simply do it where you cannot see it.”
What has changed this century is that the waiting has become visible. The National now sells tickets to four shadow runs a season — they sell out in minutes — and other houses are following. Audiences report that the performances are unlike anything on the main stage: rawer, faster, stripped of the varnish that settles on a long run.
The revival's director puts it more plainly. “The first cast gives you the play as we rehearsed it. The second cast gives you the play as it might have been. I have stopped being sure which one is the work of art.”
The Glass Diplomat runs at the National until 30 September. Two shadow runs will be open to the public in August.
