Dale sat in the security office of the Elysian Theatre, bemused. The screen displayed the images from twelve cameras and he had opened up number twelve -full screen. It showed the stage itself – there in case of any ‘health and safety incident’ they said, and ‘actors have been known to pass away on stage’. Dale thought that must be an odd experience, to be in a make believe world one moment and another totally new world the next.

He didn’t understand this play. Some Shakespeare fantasy about people running around in a wood falling in love and being watched by overweight fairies. ‘What a thing to pay money for,’ he mused, ‘A Midsummer Nights Time-wasting.’

The play was now in the last scene, where the ‘mechanicals’ enter lead by Peter Quince, who perform a play within the main play. The audience were laughing uncontrollably at the antics of the strange looking men – one dressed as a woman called Thisbe. The character Bottom was whispering sweet nothings to Thisbe through a chink in a makeshift wall. The director had a couple of fairies holding up the wall, and they laughed along with the audiences. Two audiences – because the royal household were also being entertained, three if you include Dale.

Dale didn’t know much about Shakespeare but he did remember the line, All the world is a stage and we are all the actors on it – something like that. Tonight he understood what this meant.

‘Everything we do is a sort of ‘performance’. I sit in a glass box every night next to the stage door, checking in the actors as they make their entrances and exits‘ -another part of that quotation that just came back to him. His uniform might as well have been supplied by Wardrobe. Looking at the quality it probably was! This is his world from where he can look down into the multiple worlds contained inside the theatre – dressing rooms, corridors, front of house, offices – they are all set with the correct props every night and the staff perform their roles as diligently as the actors.

This play explains all this. There is a the fairie kingdom, totally invisible but performing a function and influencing the behaviour of the human characters – even though they didn’t realise it. Just as Dale watches everything and makes sure everything is safe and sometimes he changes the behaviour of the actors without them realising. How? Well he has been know to move around the names on the doors to the dressing rooms just for fun as well as useful stuff like keeping out autograph hunters who huddle at the stage door and try to slip in.

And next to the fairie kingdom, separated by a thin wall with only a chink in it for occasional discourse, is the world of humans. They inhabit many worlds. There are the ‘mechanicals’ (who are now called the working class) with their trades and get it done know how. And at the other extreme the ruling classes like the King and Queen in this play, watching the mechanicals behaviour and having a good laugh at their expense. And then there is the audience of the Elysian Theatre who have made their entrances tonight from their ordinary lives, for an escape into another world.

We are all constantly slipping down rabbit holes or worm holes into other universes. There, stories are unravelling with different actors who happen to believe they are enacting a real life situation but they are not.

Dale had the boxed set of The Matrix. He had watched it many times. He knew that the architect was the one in charge, with his white hair and beard – he was like the medieval images of God – except he wears a business suit. And he loved that moment when the machines break through a hole in the ceiling and face a fire-storm of bullets from the human world – like love words whispered through a chink in a wall.

Down the pub he sometimes quoted Morpheus in a deep voice;

What is real? How do you define ‘real’? If you’re talking about what you can feel, what you can smell, what you can taste and see, then ‘real’ is simply electrical signals interpreted by your brain.

After the curtain fell he watch actors scuttle home. Titania and Oberon, both obese, left hand in hand.

‘Now that hasn’t happened before,’ he wondered, ‘I wonder what is going on there?’

The exit door spun open in a strong wind. It was raining outside, hard. Car lights flew passed as if propelled by the wind and the Fairy King and Queen, disappeared.