Orson Welles, Vol I

by Simon Callow

  It was. Abandoning the arch smiles appropriate both to melodrama and the efforts of the boy wonder of acting, the critics approached the masterpiece of masterpieces on bended knee. They were scarcely less respectful of Mac Liammóir. The Tribune gave advance notice that he was ‘said to be one of the few first-rate Hamlets of this generation’,24 adding that ‘a conservative historian of Irish drama’ believes it will be recognised as the greatest of our day. Hamletolatory, rife in England, was even more strongly established in America. The number of Shakespeare’s plays actually performed was small: when Maurice Evans played Richard II in New York it was the first time the play had been given professionally since Edwin Booth’s 1878 performance. The same few plays recurred over and over, Hamlet more than any; there was frantic competition to say who was now the best exponent of the leading role. John Barrymore in 1923 had set the benchmark, which was not to be seriously challenged until John Gielgud in 1936. Meanwhile, the ‘young Irishman’ (he was thirty-five) was keenly anticipated. As Hilton Edwards’s production note indicated, the production was ‘a replica of that directed by myself at the Gate Theatre in Dublin in 1932 and 1934. After 300 years of almost continuous performance,’ he continued, ‘it seems not only difficult but inadvisable to attempt anything new in the performance of Hamlet. Rather we have deemed it necessary to discard much that this play has accumulated through the ages … [we have chosen] a method that allows the scene to change and the action to proceed with the swiftness of speech and light … we have put our faith in color, movement, and above all in a faithful and vital interpretation of Shakespeare’s words.’

  These were the words of a member of the modern tendency of Shakespearean production. Micheál’s designs were evocative but minimal, a far cry from Woodman Thompson’s solid, monumental settings for the Romeo and Juliet in which Orson had just been appearing, but equally seeming to owe little to Craig’s epic linearity, on view in Robert Edmond Jones’s famous designs for Barrymore. It was a chamber approach, as befitted both the intimate dimensions of the Gate Theatre and Mac Liammóir’s own susurrated performance, which the audience seemed not so much to hear as to overhear. ‘I fancied at times … to have penetrated to strange moods, strange perfumes, strange shadows in the depths of his mind, as when the soul, shuddering before that welter of mortal sorrow, sought release in temporary expansion of the spirit, and wandered alone and undismayed in a freedom the body could never know. Like a disembodied being indeed one could imagine him pacing amid the wintry cloisters on that pale interminable afternoon in which the first part of the play is steeped before the dreadful night of action begins.’25 His performance was perhaps like his prose: dreamy, diffuse, richly and sombrely coloured.

  It was received with respect, but not excitement. Immense stress was laid on his youthfulness, which reminds us that it wasn’t until John Gielgud’s sensational performances of the thirties that the tradition of elderly Hamlets was swept away. HE KNOWS A HAWK FROM A HANDSAW, said the caption over a strikingly posed photograph of Micheál, arms upraised, palms flat. ‘A Hamlet of metropolitan stature and a distinguished addition to the meagre Shakespearean annals of the contemporary stage,’26 said Charles Collins. ‘Mac Liammóir has youth and the romantic qualifications for the great role – a sensitive and poetic face which wears the mask of tragedy nobly … slowness of pace is Mac Liammóir’s handicap.’ And it is true: celerity was not Micheál’s strongest suit; a measured relish was responsible for some of his finest effects, but the mercurial aspect of Hamlet, in which Gielgud was supreme, was not attempted by Mac Liammóir.

  Welles’s performance as Claudius was so much clearer and easier to respond to. ‘Into this version of the world’s most interesting drama, Orson Welles, the bright morning star of Woodstock drama, fits himself with zest. He views the fratricidal king as decadent and monstrous enough to make the situation between uncle and nephew as melodramatically simple as that between Oliver Twist and Fagin. With the courage of his 19 summers and the impact of his own vigorous imagination, Mr Welles plays the king much as Charles Laughton played Nero, lasciviously, swinishly. With no beard to hide a sensuously made-up face, and with bangs half-obscuring his sidelong eyes, this king is frankly degenerate. So much of an eye-catcher is this king that he at times hampers the play … [during the play within the play] he allows the audience to be conscious of nothing but the king, for during the major part of the scene he is busy making love to his queen. Sitting with Miss Louise Prussing, who obligingly bared one shoulder to make the most seductive Gertrude in my experience, Mr Welles exchanged caresses, ripe plums, California grapes and lawless looks with her, interjecting so much amorous business as to fairly hog the scene. It is brilliant technical character work, but it flattens the drama, which, as Hamlet remarks, is the thing.’

  It sounds as if it might have led to an outbreak of justifiable thespicide from either of the distinguished professional players whose production Orson had thus invaded, but no: ‘his King was outrageously exciting,’ wrote Mac Liammóir. ‘Had he kept control and given the performance he promised in rehearsal’ – before he invented the make-up, perhaps? – ‘it would have been the finest Claudius I have seen, but Orson in those days was a victim of stage intoxication: the presence of an audience caused him to lose his head; his horses panicked, and one was left with the impression of a man in the acute stages of delirium tremens.’ Even the amiable, ice-cream licking, fan-waving, buffet-supper chomping Woodstock audience was in two minds about it. ‘Some of the Woodstock patrons have been proclaiming that they didn’t like him, which merely means that they didn’t like the character. That was young Mr Welles’ intention … the speech that contains the lines “there’s such divinity doth hedge a king” was fat meat for the elder Thespians. They made a play to the gallery with it. Welles takes that speech and shrewdly molds it into his treatment of the king as a wheedling, cajoling scoundrel. Trembling inwardly, he pours out his oily rhetoric and bluffs Laertes into submission. This is a new idea, cleverly carried out; and it deserves a cheer.’ Mrs Henry Field confessed her doubts to the readers of the Herald Examiner: ‘Orson Welles departed from the orthodox king and we have not yet decided exactly what we think of his new departure.’27 Claudia Cassidy well describes the knife-edge on which the performance existed: ‘he thumbed a flat nose at convention, achieving a make-up somewhere between an obscene old woman and the mask of lechery that visits Dr Faustus. Decadence is here in a thicket of curls hung from a bald pate, with voluptuous mouth confirming the evil glimpsed in heavy-lidded eyes. Almost a caricature, this face, but rescued from absurdity by the command of the voice that is the Welles passport to stardom.’

  It is clear from this description that his performance was a melodramatic one, again: he created an ogre, a nightmare figure. It is hard to imagine what else, at his age, he could do – other than play safe and dull. He could hardly create a credible middle-aged, adulterous, guilt-haunted, manipulative politician-king. Instead he did something in broad strokes which made a strong impact, sustained, always sustained, by that mighty organ, his voice. The voice is the focus of so much comment on Welles’s performances, early and late, that it is worth observing that any huge natural endowment is a double-edged sword for a performer. The temptation to rely on it to get you out of trouble is overwhelming, and can prevent proper development. The greatest artists – Olivier and Margot Fonteyn spring to mind – are those of modest natural endowments who have worked and worked to extend them, thus developing in themselves disciplines and hard-won strength which open up worlds of expression and imagination unknown to those who had it all for nothing. In his performance, Welles was going for broke – throwing in everything that he knew, exhausting his make-up box and rolling the verse on his tongue like vintage wine. These are the excesses of young actors with courage, appetite and ambition. What is odd is that the performance should have been given opposite actors – Louise Prussing, Hilton, Micheál – of great experience and consummate technique. It also odd for the perfor
mance to have been reviewed by critics of major newspapers. That, however, is what Welles had engineered for himself. His desire to shortcut the usual processes, had the usual consequences: forcing growth is a risky business.

  Welles repeated his Ghost from the original Dublin production. ‘An unhorrific old ghost, gentle and grandfatherly, and almost a crooner,’28 said Lloyd Lewis. It is interesting to compare this comment with the notices he received in Ireland two years before: ‘he made the speech of the Ghost almost human as well as awesome.’ Perhaps his father’s death was now more distant, and the sense of urgency that he had found in Dublin had gone from the performance. The production in general was liked; Hilton mildly praised for his Polonius, greatly admired for daring to include so much of the text, and for his directing and lighting. It was another opportunity for Welles to examine at close hand Edwards’s immense skill in these departments. He learned his grammar of stagecraft directly from Hilton: what he had to say was different, as was his way of saying it, but the swiftness of transition, the economy of action and precision of focus that characterised Hilton’s work were all to inform Welles’s work as a director. Less influential, perhaps, were Hilton’s manners. ‘Would it be reasonable,’ Hascy Tarbox reports him as saying to a student actor, ‘do you think it might help, if you moved HERE?’ Orson’s way was to be a little more direct.

  The third and final offering of the season, Tsar Paul by Dmitri Merejkovsky, was designed to show Hilton off as an actor. He had had a substantial success with the piece in Dublin; it had created a stir in London, too, when Laughton played not the title role but the part, Count Pahlen, Welles was to play in Woodstock. This was its first staging in America. ‘This comment on the life of the mad Tsar Paul I,’ said the production note, ‘should prove apropos at a time when so much attention has been focused on the life of his mother, Catherine the Great of Russia.’ Interestingly, it got the best notices of the three plays, and Welles, too, came out of his relatively unshowy role crowned with laurels. Both Mac Liammóir and Welles may have been a little miffed to read of their supporting performances in Tsar Paul that ‘Hilton Edwards, Orson Welles and Micheál Mac Liammóir all three appear to better effect than in their earlier summer’s work.’29 Edwards was praised as expert and intelligent, which may not be the ideal combination for conveying lunacy, but was clearly technically impressive. Mac Liammóir’s Tsarevich was held to be properly touching, but the reviews concentrated on Welles’s Pahlen. The make-up box had again been raided, of course: ‘he achieves the effect of vigorous and cunning old age with a make-up that suggests a death’s head,’ said Charles Collins in the Tribune. Enough already with the make-up, Orson! one is tempted to cry, but it is evident that in this role, at any rate, he didn’t lead with his false nose. ‘The surprise of the performance is Orson Welles as Pahlen. Mr Welles hides his 19-year-old face behind a make-up that is a cross between the saracen Saladin and General Pershing, a swarthy, weather-tanned face of sixty, military, stern, zealously patriotic. Restrained within the monosyllabic nature of a soldier, Mr Welles is an exceedingly good actor. The overboyish exuberance which made him caricature Svengali and the Danish king, is witheld here by Pahlen’s self-discipline. Mr Welles has, for the moment at least, quit trying to scare his audience to death, and is the artist, making Pahlen come alive by thinking and moving as Pahlen would think and move. Welles catches the chained fervour of Pahlen so perfectly.’

  Mac Liammóir, too, admired his performance. ‘His Count Pahlen kept all the essentials of the part and extended the limitations of its framework.’30 He added – an important comment – ‘in the second of the two productions which he put in Hilton’s hands, he was superb.’ The diagnosis for this young actor with a case of uncontrollable overacting would be, first, a steady diet of Pahlens; second, put yourself in the hands of a skilled director. Welles was fatally drawn to roles in which he could experience the rush of adrenalin that comes from eating up the stage. A few of these from time to time in a career is a fine thing, but regular exposure to them can only lead to diminishing returns. Secondly, although directing and acting in the same show is a feat that has been triumphantly achieved, and not merely by barnstorming actor-managers – Louis Jouvet, Stanislavsky and Harley Granville Barker to name but three great artists have all done so with success – it is not recommended at the very start of one’s career. One thing at a time. This was a lesson Welles would never learn, or, more to the point, a proposition he would never accept. But it seems clear that his best early performances were those given under the direction of someone else.

  Too often his own central performances were the last element in the production to which he turned his attention. His Pahlen is a glimpse of the different sort of actor that he might have been. Claudia Cassidy had no doubts about him whatsoever. She told her journal: ‘His variety and range are amazing and his youth has nothing to do with the matter except to hint at genius. The man is an actor and I think one of our major theatre pages will have fine things written in his name. Perhaps the Todd Festival’s chief achievement will be to permit a lot of people to say of Orson Welles, “I saw him when.”’31

  Getting the plays on had been the overwhelming priority; but with performances on only four nights a week (Thursday, Friday, Saturday and Sunday at 8.30) there was plenty of spare time, both for the students and for the faculty. The advertised curriculum never existed except in the brochure; had it done, it would have been rather marvellous: ‘Todd presents its students with a two months’ comprehensive apprenticeship on both sides of a fine working theatre … experiment, major production … every student will receive careful personal attention … acting, voice, scene and costume design, make-up, journalistic criticism … a long series of visiting lecturers …’ There was little evidence, apart from a late-night performance of The Drunkard and the après-show cabarets, of any student productions; instead, taking a cue from the conveniently flexible first line of the blurb (‘Favouring a less formal and a practical rather than a theoretical approach to dramatic education’) they put the students to work as an adaptable army of theatrical helots, either as stage hands, set builders, or bit-part players, fit to start a scene, swell a progress. There could be worse educations.

  For the rest, it would appear that any remaining time was filled, in time-honoured fashion, with sex. Whether the unthinkably politically incorrect occurred, and the faculty and the students canoodled together, or whether each kept to his own, is hard at this distance to determine. Welles himself certainly crossed the divide, in his relationship with Virginia Nicolson. As for the other professional actors: the rather grand Louise Prussing is unlikely to have consorted with the student body, the Horatio, Charles ‘Blacky’ O’Neal and Ophelia, Constance Heron, were married to each other (a union that was eventually to give Ryan O’Neal to the world). As for Micheál and Hilton, Welles painted a lurid picture of their campus activities for the benefit of Mrs Leaming, some of which may be true but which reads as an act of revenge, a posthumous character assassination. ‘Oh it was wild because these fellows were at the absolute high pitch of their sexuality! They went through Woodstock like a withering flame. NOBODY was safe, you know. Down the main street of Woodstock went Micheál, with beaded eyelashes with the black running slightly down the side of his face because he could never get it right, and his toupee slipping, but still full of beauty. Hilton couldn’t keep his hands off his genitals.’32 No doubt they were knocked sideways by the summery beauty of young American manhood – always breathtaking at first sight to Europeans, particularly at a time when European youth kept itself properly covered no matter what the temperature. It is certainly true that Mac Liammóir cut a bizarrely theatrical figure wherever he went. But – as Orson acknowledges elsewhere – his taste in men was essentially for ‘vigorous, non-homosexual types’,33 in Welles’s own phrase. He was not a sexual omnivore, though he could never have too much of what he liked. It is highly unlikely that he would have found that among the students, and to claim as Mrs Leami
ng does that he chased Hascy Tarbox is laughable: Hascy as a grown man had a pixie-like quality, almost feminine, though resolutely heterosexual. As a boy nobody on earth would be a less likely object of desire for Mac Liammóir. As for Edwards, discretion was his middle name. To describe him, with his demeanour of a bank manager or a senior civil servant as a ‘roaring pansy’ is simply a piece of vulgar inaccuracy. The tendency of this entire passage is to render both men laughable and pathetic. Why did Welles feel the need to do this?

  At the time – despite his claim to Mrs Leaming that they ‘hated him’ all that summer – he spent a great deal of his spare time with them, indulging Micheál’s passion for the movies (Whom the Gods Destroy; Martyred by his Love; Little Man, What Now were the hits of the day). They were at the movies the afternoon John Dillinger was gunned down by the FBI, only a few blocks away from the cinema they were in. They visited the World’s Fair, though whether they attended the reproduction of the Globe (‘In Merrie England, world’s fair grounds, tabloid Shakespearean and classic plays, daily at 2, 3, 4, 5, 6.30, 8.30 and 9.30’) is unrecorded. There were meals, and parties, and long and passionate conversations with Thornton Wilder, who seems to have been in residence most of that summer. As far as Mac Liammóir was concerned, writing some ten years later, the whole period had become suffused in a golden glow of reminiscence: ‘Our season at Woodstock ended for us all amid whoops of youthful triumph, and for me with two offers of film-tests for Hollywood … but the thought of not returning to Dublin was unbearable: I would have a few weeks more in this marvellous, unreal country, and then I would inevitably wake up, and when I woke, I would have to continue what I had begun. To leave a house half built in a land of ruins was impossible. So it was at last over, this early venture of Orson’s, and on the last regretful night of Tsar Paul amid the lantern-lit trees in the courtyard of the school we drank his health and swore lasting friendship with them all.’34 They packed up and departed for home, pausing only to become involved in an extravagant Gaelic Pageant in Chicago, written by Mac Liammóir, staged by Hilton Edwards, which they ended up doing for nothing, the management having decamped. Then they returned to Dublin to continue what they had begun; they continued it till the day they died.