MAT OSMAN The Ghost Theatre. Reviewed by Ann Skea

Mat Osman’s second novel swoops through a fantastical rendering of Elizabethan London.

Magic, drama, theatre – and the birds:

Everywhere birds. The sound hit you first: vast waterfalls of birdsong, overspilling like a treasure hoard. On first hearing it was a thick braid of noise but as your ears grew accustomed you picked out individual songs. The padded ruffles of wood pigeons and the stream of wren song. Sparrows bickering across the music-box tunes of the great tit. Blackbirds moaned and there was something human to their tone …

This is Birdland, the place where Shay was born, ‘her home … her family’, downriver from the City of London in a place of marshes and marsh-gas, where Aviscultans have erected their netted ‘temple’ and watch the Murmuration of starlings for signs.

Shay is an Aviscultan – a ‘flapper’ – with a tattoo of sparrows on her wrist and under the tufts of her closely cropped hair. Today, she would be an expert at parkour, but the year is 1601 and Shay is not leaping from rooftop to rooftop across the City of London for fun. She uses the City rooftops as the fastest way to get around to deliver messages, but three times now she has released birds from Gilmore’s bird shop, and he is closing in on her with his men and his pack of wolves.

She leapt from the board houses onto a sturdier roof. She came down with a crash, sending a flock of pigeons skywards in a soft explosion of feathers. They spread like a fountain and she repeated the catechism under her breath: The gods are birds and the birds are gods. She let its cadence guide her feet. The gods – step – are birds – leap – and the birds – step – are gods – leap.

Suddenly a boy appears: ‘Friend or foe? No way to know,’ but he guides her to safety.

Two teenagers, both familiar with the City rooftops. The boy, it turns out, is an actor with the Blackfriars Boys, one of the companies of boys who perform popular plays in Shakespeare’s London. He introduces himself as Lord Nonesuch, and hides Shay in the theatre where he is performing. And Shay sees, from the people who wait for him outside the theatre, that he is well-known: ‘Nonesuch, Nonesuch, what are you playing tonight? Any spares? Any backstage?’

So begins Shay’s association with the Blackfriars Boys, all of whom have been ‘press ganged, bribed or plain kidnapped’ by Evans, the theatre owner.

Nonesuch is a consummate actor and storyteller, ‘master of disguises’, thief and trickster, charming, mercurial and hard to pin down. Shay, by default, becomes an emergency prompter for the first performance she sees and she is enthralled. When Evans discovers her and offers her tuppence a performance to continue as prompter, she knows this will be a valuable supplement to the money she makes as a messenger ‘boy’, and that she can take more money to her ailing father in Birdland.

Others working for the theatre are Trussell, who ‘can’t get through a single act without making a mistake’ but is a natural artist; a Moorish trumpeter and skilled costume-maker, Blank, who has made his home in the crow’s nest of an abandoned ship; and Alouette, a Flemish woman who handles the stage effects, has ‘explosions and powders and lightning at her fingertips’ and boasts that she can create wonders.

Shay asked, ‘What wonders?’

Alouette didn’t miss a beat. ‘A bonfire that doesn’t char, a sea that stretches for leagues. Forests of crystal. Atlantis rising from the waves.’

Each phrase set images coursing though Shay’s mind and she let them play as Alouette finished.

Alouette visits Dr John Dee, Queen Elizabeth’s famous astrologer, to obtain explosives and other alchemical products for her work. They share interests and Dee pays Alouette for any strange phenomenon she discovers. When Alouette takes Shay with her to his house at Mortlake, Shay sees glass walls and ceilings mottled with algae, exotic butterflies hatching from racks of pupae, unrecognisable herbs, glowing fungi and fireflies. She also sees horrors: dead peacocks pinned to the wall, because, Dee tells her, ‘Pliny the Elder says that in India the peacock eats lead and shits gold’. Dee looks cadaverous, haunted, ‘channels of disappointment’ round his mouth, but he has a grip ‘as sure as a hawk’s’ and he recognises Shay as an Aviscultan. He asks if she is ‘skilled at divination via a flock of birds?’ and if she examines their entrails and knows the secrets of birdsong.

Shay shook her head. They were the same breathless rumours that Shay had heard all her life. Flappers could talk to eagles and bend them to their bidding. Flappers could persuade magpies to share their loot … She sighed. ‘No, of course not. Even children know that’s not true.’

Nonesuch and Shay become lovers in a casual and easy-going way, and he delights in disguising her and taking her into parts of the City where he gives impromptu ad-libbed performances. ‘What am I supposed to be?’, she asks the first time. ‘I’ve no idea. Yet,’ he replies. These performances earn them money and, after an argument with Evans, Nonesuch broaches the idea of the Ghost Theatre. He, Trussell, Alouette, Blank and Shay will perform in taverns, streets – anywhere they can attract attention – telling stories, ‘real stories, stories without gods and demons and sorcerers, where people “just like you and me” lived, laughed and died’, and drawing the audience in with their magic so that they willingly pay for their entertainment.

The first performance is thrilling and dangerous. Shay, who is no actress, fears she has lost the audience’s attention, but when she is ‘stabbed through the chest’ she starts to sing, as she has been instructed, and suddenly she is entranced. Later she can remember nothing about the song, but Trussell tells her ‘It was almost birdsong, and then almost prophecy. Then you sang that we were all birds,’ and the people were ‘reeled’ in, crying, ‘Tough old men weeping’. Evans learns of this performance and begins to exploit her in a room in his theatre where she is dressed as a fortune-telling bird and housed in a gilded cage.

For a time, the Ghost Theatre and the Blackfriars Boys both thrive. Shay’s fame spreads. She becomes ‘The Sparrow’ and people believe she has occult powers, but she is also dangerously exposed, not just to Gilmore, who is now hunting her after a disastrous ‘performance’ in which she and Nonesuch disrupted a cock-fight and freed his prize birds, but to others who wish to exploit her powers.

Then, Queen Elizabeth, hearing about her through John Dee, demands an audience.

Shay, who does not believe in her own ability to tell fortunes, begins hesitantly, but when Elizabeth tells her to sing, she again falls into a trance and knows nothing of what she says. The result, however, as Elizabeth interprets Shay’s words in her own way, sets off a reign of terror as the queen’s soldiers sweep through the country ‘picking off Catholics’ and recusants. The soldiers have chalked an emblem of a swift on their shoulders; people go into hiding; gossip links Shay with these horrors and Shay fears for the safety of Birdland, but the demand for her fortune-telling increases.

When plague breaks out in London, ‘it and the Ghost Theatre were the only shows in town’. Theatres are closed, the streets become deserted, houses shuttered, and parts of the city are empty. Evans proposes to take the theatre on tour to areas of the country not affected by plague, which lessens the danger Shay is in but eventually exposes her to worse. She is captured by Commoners – a group that claims to be helping country people reverse the enclosure of common land by greedy landlords. They tear down fences and burn and uproot the landlords’ hawthorn hedges, but this particular group are also entertainers and they want Shay to be part of their entertainment.

Shay is imprisoned, separated from her Ghost Theatre friends, and drugged into reluctant submission. Only the falcon, Devana, who has known her since birth, stays near her, haunting the sky.

Again, there are thrilling events, huntings and marvels. Eventually, Shay does read the Murmuration of starlings for Queen Elizabeth, and she prophesies a forest of fire, a stopped river and deaths. Her eventual fate is full of drama, duplicities, revelations and deaths.

All the time, Mat Osman’s prose weaves its own magic into this story, which he presents as a three-act drama. He recreates Elizabethan England, and especially the underbelly of London, with the vivid imaginative skill of a dramatist. His history may not be accurate, but his characters live and the thrills of his theatre, unbelievable as they may be, are full of power.

Shay cuddles Sackerson, the ursine veteran of the Bear Pit; she scales impossible walls; sleeps on rooftops; frees Devana from the mews where she is kept by a wealthy landowner; and finds empty mansions where she and Nonesuch can make love in private. Finally, she confronts Nonesuch and he confesses his jealousy of her and his love:

‘That first day I saw you on the rooftops, oh my word. With each leap, I thought to myself, that it, she’s going to fly … I truly thought it would happen. I could see it. The men and the dogs all looking up into the heavens and you gone into the light.’ He stopped. ‘But down you came every time. We can’t escape our roles, Shay. We can only play them with some style.’

Shay stopped the dance. ‘Did you love me?’ The question was automatic, an out-breath.

‘Yes.’ He didn’t stop to think. ‘Yes. A hundred times over …’

‘That isn’t me. Those are just things I did. It wasn’t me that you loved, it was just my role.’

His eyes were black discs but he smiled for the first time that day. ‘Maybe so. But oh Shay, what a role’.

Mat Osman The Ghost Theatre Bloomsbury 2023 PB 320 pp $32.99

Dr Ann Skea is a freelance reviewer, writer and an independent scholar of the work of Ted Hughes. She is author of Ted Hughes: The Poetic Quest (UNE 1994, and currently available for free download here). Her work is internationally published and her Ted Hughes webpages (ann.skea.com) are archived by the British Library.

You can buy The Ghost Theatre from Abbey’s at a 10% discount by quoting the promotion code NEWTOWNREVIEW.

You can also check if it is available from Newtown Library.

If you’d like to help keep the Newtown Review of Books a free and independent site for book reviews, please consider making a donation. Your support is greatly appreciated.

Tags: Aviscultans, Elizabeth I, Elizabethan London, Elizabethan theatre, John Dee, Mat | Osman, Murmurations