EN GARDE

Sword fighting isn’t just an adventure for Ella Shane. It’s her job.
As a woman who plays heroic male roles in opera, she has to be able to duel with the best of them. If it happens to come in handy when trying to catch a killer, or discourage an overly enthusiastic admirer, well, that’s just a fringe benefit.
While Ella, as a woman who sings roles originally written for men with artificially high voices (another story for another #ThrowbackThursday!) is a relatively new thing, she’s part of a very long tradition of stage combat. Actors have been simulating battles onstage pretty much since we’ve had stages, and they’ve been training to fight convincingly and safely almost as long.
By Shakespeare’s time, when sword fights were pretty much a requirement for a good show, they’d mastered the convincing part, as audiences could attest. They were still working on the safety, though – several actors were seriously hurt in stage or rehearsal mishaps in the period, and at least one lost an eye.
That, obviously, wasn’t good for anyone, and as the acting profession evolved, so did the training for the stage, with the understanding that what works in a real duel might not work in a show. After all, a real duelist is trying to kill their opponent, not please an audience.
So stage fighters focus on what looks and sounds good, while still keeping the performers and audience safe. The look and style evolved over time, and by the late-19th century there were even widely-known set fights called “standard combats.”A director could call for the “Round Eights” in a scene and the company would know exactly what was desired.
While it was usually male actors who did the actual fighting in front of an audience, women were often trained in the art. Stage fencing was part of the curriculum in some top theatre academies into the 20th century; so it’s entirely possible that many Juliets not only knew the choreography of Romeo’s duel…they could have done it better!
When the young Ella started her training as an opera singer, her mentor Madame Lentini quickly steered her into lessons in fencing and stage combat as well as French and Italian. Later, when it became clear that trouser roles were her gift, she was already on the path.
Ella has another advantage that a lot of women performers don’t; she was a street fighter. During their tenement childhood, Ella and her cousin Tommy had to take care of themselves in a rough neighborhood, and she sometimes threw in on his side. Madame Lentini put a stop to that pretty quickly, but Ella can still land a punch.
By the time of A FATAL FIRST NIGHT, Ella is both the star and the co-owner of her opera company, so she has both a good show and a safe one in her mind when she approaches the climactic duel. In the fictional opera, “The Princes in the Tower,” Ella as Henry Tudor will vanquish the evil King Richard III – every night of the run, to the great pleasure of the paying customers. Of course she wants to send her Richard home with applause…and without a scratch!
So Ella and her partner have practiced the duel dozens of times, and when the curtain rises, they’re polished and ready to put on quite a show. And it may turn out to be more of a show than anyone’s expecting, even Ella…

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