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The Understudy
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July 18, 2015
This story is about a young woman who has drifted through life suffering from lack of confidence and drifts into the acting profession because her family have a big theatrical tradition. She turns out to be linked through her family to the original actresses who worked at a theatre at the time of a Victorian tragedy (since when the theatre has stood empty until the owner decided to renovate it in the late 70s/early 80s when the story is set.)
She is understudying one of the female leads and finds herself the focus of a lot of poltergeist type phenomena which are produced by a malevolent spirit of one of the actresses who is settling a score several generations on. I don't know how true to life the theatre background is, but the cast were singularly unsympathetic to the admittedly wimpy heroine - I think berating her for being upset that her grandmother died (to whom she was very close) and accusing her of acting that way just to attention seek is unbelievably nasty.
Anyway, you have to stretch your disbelief pretty far, even without the supernatural element, for example, two caricatured tramps manage to hide out in the theatre all the way through the book, their interminable and rather tedious conversations filling a good portion of the story. It's interesting that the past begins to become real to the heroine as in she starts becoming trapped in it, after reading the diary of one of the actresses, and there is some good period detail, but her lack of self esteem and continual breaking down in tears does become as irritating to the reader as it is to most of the other characters.
She is understudying one of the female leads and finds herself the focus of a lot of poltergeist type phenomena which are produced by a malevolent spirit of one of the actresses who is settling a score several generations on. I don't know how true to life the theatre background is, but the cast were singularly unsympathetic to the admittedly wimpy heroine - I think berating her for being upset that her grandmother died (to whom she was very close) and accusing her of acting that way just to attention seek is unbelievably nasty.
Anyway, you have to stretch your disbelief pretty far, even without the supernatural element, for example, two caricatured tramps manage to hide out in the theatre all the way through the book, their interminable and rather tedious conversations filling a good portion of the story. It's interesting that the past begins to become real to the heroine as in she starts becoming trapped in it, after reading the diary of one of the actresses, and there is some good period detail, but her lack of self esteem and continual breaking down in tears does become as irritating to the reader as it is to most of the other characters.
Displaying 1 of 1 review