Orson Welles, Vol I

by Simon Callow

  As a sort of end-of-term romp, Welles and assorted Woodstockites hired a camera and made a little film, a wild parody of avant-garde film styles to which they had recently been exposed at a local film society. Hearts of Age, they called it: Welles claimed in later life that it was his satire on Bunuel and Cocteau, but the real influence is The Cabinet of Dr Caligari. Jerky, grotesque, melodramatic and full of the imagery of death, it is, for all its technical limitations, a highly distinctive piece of work. Welles is of course the central character, made-up like something out of E.T.A. Hoffmann, high-domed and wild-eyed, with a steeple-top hat, cane and prancing gait. Virginia is a mournful old lady, little Egerton Paul appears in blackface as a servant, Keystone cops come hurtling through, as Welles is coming down the stairs three times in a row, leaping onto the roof, moodily playing the piano with bent fingers. Bells toll, candelabras gutter, Virginia dies. The final sequence shows a selection of tombstones, the last one of which, of course, is inscribed THE END. The images stick in the mind. Even with a cumbersome old 16 mill camera, Welles was able to frame interesting shots, and the action he unleashed for the camera to record is nightmarish and alarming. The angles of shooting are Dutch and distorted, from low down and high up, odd, glancing shots. The entire film (which would gain him immediate admission to a film school today) is full of life and imagination, highly theatrical, but keen to exploit the freedom and the tricks of the cinema; in these regards it bears an uncanny resemblance to Eisenstein’s first film, Even a Wise Man Stumbles, shot for insertion into a stage production of Ostrovsky’s play. The influence of Caligari is equally strong there; considering that that famous film is more or less lifted straight from current German expressionist theatre practice, the appeal to both stage-struck young men, Welles in Woodstock, Eisenstein in Moscow, is understandable. It was to surface again in both men’s mature work.

  The students (including Virginia, with whom Orson was now intensely involved) went back to their homes; the socialites and the critics departed. Woodstock breathed a sigh of relief, and Todd went back to being a school. For Welles (though presumably no offers of film-tests had been forthcoming) the season had been an enormous personal triumph, as actor – less so as director – as organiser, as front-man and not least as publicist. Skipper was reasonably content and not financially disadvantaged. They scarcely had time to think about it, because, in the midst of the season, their earlier joint venture, Everybody’s Shakespeare, was rolling off the school press. It is typical of the density of Welles’s life, now and always, that two of his most ambitious enterprises should have occurred simultaneously. And Everybody’s Shakespeare is an extraordinary achievement by any standard.

  Extracting illustrations from Welles had been like pulling teeth; Roger was still nagging him while Romeo and Juliet was lugging itself round the country: ‘plug at that book. Work will be impossible later … finish first – and soon – the Malvolio lock-up scene. We must get forms for the introduction and first two plays to the press to send to prospective foreword writers. Then we must finish the book and circulate literature before the closing of the schools – a better time to introduce a text than the fall.’35 Skipper was as ever trying to make practical, financially feasible sense of the venture. Without him, it wouldn’t have existed at all. But he was content to function as Welles’s handmaiden. He beavered away in research libraries to provide the academic apparatus for the edition, but claimed no creative contribution whatever: ‘it is a mystery to me and will be a blank to you how I could spend the immense amount of time on a mere detail to make a dummy from your work.’ Orson was eighteen; Roger Hill was forty-one, his teacher and surrogate father. Yet there is no mistaking where the power in the relationship lies.

  They had chosen to publish three plays: Twelfth Night and Julius Caesar, both of which, in truncated form, Welles had directed, and The Merchant of Venice, which he had not. Skipper’s original notion was ‘to make the Elizabethan popular in the classroom as well as the stage’.36 The whole venture must be seen in terms of an American theatre where Shakespeare was relatively rarely seen – where neither actors nor audiences had much experience of his work, and where there was consequent terror of it. ‘I found,’ wrote Margaret Webster as late as 1942, ‘that actors were plainly frightened of Shakespeare, particularly of the verse, and were initially disinclined to regard his characters as real people. Audiences were frightened, too.’37 There must be, it was felt, some mystery about Shakespeare that was beyond them. It was this cultural and intellectual inferiority complex that Welles and Hill wanted to challenge. They believed that it started in the classroom, and that if you could alert school-kids to the excitement of Shakespeare’s plays, you would have them hooked for life. The texts attempted to evoke live performance as much as possible, since there was a serious shortage of it on the contemporary stage.

  Their first modest volume, green with a soberly calligraphed gold label saying

  SHAKESPEARE

  TWELFTH NIGHT

  HILL – WELLES

  is prefaced with a quotation from the distinguished scholar, Brander Matthews, averring the indispensability of actors to an understanding of the plays: ‘No commentary on Hamlet … would be a more useful aid to a larger understanding of his character than a detailed record of the readings, the gestures, the business employed in the successive performances of the part by Burbage, by Betterton, by Garrick, by Kemble, by Macready, by Forrest, by Booth and by Irving. They have been compelled by their professional training to acquire an insight into this character – an insight to be obtained only in the theatre itself and hopelessly unattainable in the library even by the most scholarly.’ This is partly what Welles and Hill set out to provide, by means of illustrations and stage directions. The non-academic bias is stressed again in Roger Hill’s lively introduction:

  ON STUDYING SHAKESPEARE’S PLAYS

  Don’t!

  Read them. Enjoy them. Act them.

  … he wrote plays to amuse audiences in the theatre and he never bothered to have them printed. But luckily they were and the wide world has been joyfully reading them ever since. Internally or externally, however taken, the plays of Shakespeare are among the wide world’s major joys; in the theatre, in the library, even in the schoolroom.

  After you have read and re-read his plays; after you have come to loving terms with them; after their music sings in your heart and their characters are part of your intimate acquaintanceship, then is time enough for the literary dissecting table.

  This is pure Todd, pure Roger Hill, the inspired natural pedagogue, full of love and passion, loathing academic procedures. He takes the students’ side. At the top of this page, Welles has drawn a cartoon of an angry book, frisking its devil’s tail, in full pursuit of some academics. At the bottom of the page, a smiling book, with a halo, holds the actors’ hands as they take their curtain calls. The next page brings a Biography of William Shakespeare (No 1,000,999), a chatty sympathetic account, followed by a short essay on the quartos and folios, THREE WEIGHTY CHAPTERS REDUCED TO SUBHEADS: THE PLOTS, THE CHRONOLOGY, THE LITTLE MATTER OF GRAMMAR and finally SOME COMEDY RELIEF: BACON IS SHAKESPEARE. All of this in the unmistakably breezy and genial style of Skipper Hill.

  Orson’s contribution, too, is unmistakable, ON STAGING SHAKESPEARE AND ON SHAKESPEARE’STAGE: ORSON WELLES.

  Shakespeare said everything. Brain to belly; every mood and minute of a man’s season. His language is starlight and fireflies and the sun and the moon. He wrote it with tears and blood and beer, and his words march like heartbeats. He speaks to everyone and we all claim him but it’s wise to remember, if we would really appreciate him, that he doesn’t properly belong to us but to another world that smelled assertively of columbine and gun powder and printer’s ink and was vigorously dominated by Elizabeth.

  This is the first fully fledged example of the characteristic Orsonian manner: sweeping, rhetorical, perfectly adapted to his own cadences, knowing, lofty, echoing with other men’s phrases, infectiousl
y exhilarating. It is, in fact, actorly – but like a fifty-year-old actor. Eloquent, certainly, but perhaps a little too instantly eloquent: verbal monosodium glutamate. It is interesting to note that this platform – the essentially Elizabethan nature of the plays’ world – is diametrically opposed to the productions he made his name with. The important thing is its assertion of the stageworthiness and irrepressible vitality of the plays. (An example of how foolishly Welles was overpraised is Thornton Wilder’s remark, reported by Skipper, that the above paragraph was ‘the greatest thumbnail summation of Shakespeare’s genius ever written’. If he believed even half of what was said about him, he was in serious trouble.) ON STAGING SHAKESPEARE continues:

  The curtain, which ‘discovers’ an act and ‘descends’ at the end of it, leaving everything in the middle of the stage and in the middle of a situation, came in with scenery and scene-shifting a number of years after Shakespeare when people had forgotten how to write plays. If you think the Elizabethans had a pretty primitive way of putting on a play I don’t blame you. The show-business has been certain of it for two hundred years but lately it is beginning to wonder.

  Good, provocative stuff, punchy but seductive, flattering the reader. The omnipresent first person singular is striking in its confidence, and its ease. The voice of the school magazine is still present, occasionally modulating into that of an after-dinner speaker. ‘Femininity makes for other forms,’ he writes, talking of the introduction of actresses to the English stage. ‘The Drama in England, hitherto strictly a man’s business, was now for a while scarcely a manly one. And to this very minute the ladies have maintained on us, as in all matters in which they’re importantly interested, an emphatic edge.’ Somewhat ironically, in view of his later innovations in the field both of light and settings, he inveighs against developments in scenic arts. ‘Poetry has since then been neither necessary nor possible because when you can make the dawn over Elsinore with a lantern and a pot of paint there’s no call for having a character stop in the middle of the action and say a line like, “But look the morn, in russet mantle clad, walks o’er the dew of yon high eastern hill,” even supposing you could write a line like it. You can’t see and hear beauty, fully, at the same time.’ He redeems this dubious apophthegm with a witty drawing in the margin: ‘How to make the morn in russet mantle clad without resorting to poetry.’ ‘I feel,’ he continues, ‘that one of the very wisest ways to play Shakespeare is the way he wrote it … I believe he wrote it that way not because he didn’t know better but because he knew best. So I entreat you who are going to use this book for producing these plays to try at least one of them utterly without impediment. Fix up a platform in a class-room, a gymnasium, a dance-hall or a back-yard and give Shakespeare a chance. I think you’ll find him more literal than anybody’s paint brush. For those of you who are students, if I may be permitted another personal opinion, I do think that in studying these plays you ought to act them out, if only in the theatre of your own mind. Mr Hill, who is a scholar and a teacher and ought to know, agrees with me.’

  Noting that there are a thousand different Shylocks – his sketch shows a line of Shylocks stretching back to the crack of doom, arms outstretched to heaven, heads bowed in despair – he hopes that the reader will ‘jump in and fill the holes with ideas of your own. This is a book of ideas and whenever it inspires other ideas it will have value. Your idea is as worth trying as anyone’s. Remember that every single way of playing Shakespeare – as long as the way is effective – is right.’ Except, presumably, with realistic scenery, a curtain etc. The tone he finally settles on is of an enlightened high school senior addressing high school juniors. It’s a very attractive and unthreatening approach. His final injunction (as ‘the actor-half of this editorship’) is to urge ‘the study of these plays by acting them. This is because I think the theatre the pleasantest, speediest and safest way to that zealous and jealous love which most intelligent people, once exposed to him, must inevitably feel for Shakespeare.’ There never was the slightest doubt of the jealousy or zeal of Welles’s love for him.

  The bulk of the book is, of course, taken up by the text, judiciously pruned by Roger Hill. The cuts are fairly standard; obscurity is eschewed, all but the most obvious quibbles are out, including some fairly ripe stuff. Welles writes: ‘Elizabethan plays are not played in their entirety any more. This is partly because the language has changed and certain passages have become meaningless, and partly because modern theatre audiences are unaccustomed to sit through more than two hours of actual performance.’ In later editions the following is added: ‘although thousands of pilgrims to the Todd Theatre Festival last summer sat enthralled before Dublin’s Micheál Mac Liammóir in the ole Opera House at Woodstock and looked at their watches in amazement after the final ovation to realise they had been under the spell for four hours’. Even pruned, their edition was fuller than most that contemporary audiences would have seen. Understanding and enjoyment of the plays is immeasurably enhanced by Welles’s stage directions, even more by his illustrations, obviously the work of someone who has been personally and closely involved with the plays himself. Sometimes they are cartoons, sometimes straightforward line-drawings with vividly animated matchstick people, often very skilful realistic illustrations of a particular actor in a role – Hampden as Shylock, for example – or a set – Emil Orlick’s and Ernst Stern’s design for Reinhardt’s production of Merchant of Venice (which Welles might just possibly have seen), or Belasco’s ‘costly failure’, starring David Warfield.

  What he provides is in effect a story-board narrating the action, a performing history, and a textual commentary, all rolled into one. It anticipates by some fifty years the highly successful cartoon Shakespeare books of the recent past. He creates delicious fantasias in the margins, and is especially good at conveying the dynamics of group stagings. Allowing himself great freedom in conveying a character, he doesn’t limit himself to one version of it. Sir Toby Belch, for example, is fat in several different ways – sometimes he seems massively fat, avoirdupois incarnate; another time, he’s helium-filled. Welles uses different styles to convey this: pure cartoon, imitation print manner (a very successful impression of James Lewis in the role, for example), complex crayon sketch (a striking representation of the floored knight, caterwauling), brush strokes with no outline. The stage directions – supplemented by illustrations, suggestive, vivid, like designers’ preliminary sketches – don’t describe the concrete world referred to by the author in the play: they discuss possible stagings, and describe past ones.

  An example from Twelfth Night: Act I, scene ii, shows a transfigured ship’s mast: ‘Characters and cut-outs of sky and ship silhouetted against drop – suggestions of clearing storm – lit from behind.’ Alongside the sketch, Welles has written: ‘entrance from below, exit to side’. It is as if he were taking the reader into his confidence, saying: ‘this is the effect we want, and this is the way we go about it.’ There is no pretence of three-dimensional realism, no suggestion that it is anything but a stage. He continues:

  The wreck of a ship may be in evidence. Some thunder and lightning, representing the last of a violent storm, often opens the scene. Viola is sometimes carried on in the sea captain’s arms, just awakening from semi-consciousness. The seamen who enter with her, bedraggled and dripping and obviously exhausted, establish the mood of ship-wreck. But Viola is the first lady of the play and more often she is given a ‘good entrance’ which is perhaps just as well. That means that she enters first, walking to the Centre, where she stands making a picture in the attractive tatters of her dress and the sweep of her improvised sail-cloth cloak. Viola herself is attractive; often dark and always of the same physical type as her brother … she waits silently as two or more sailors, staggering under a great sea-chest and such gear as might have been salvaged from the wreck, come up with the captain. Sometimes she enters last, after a pause, and after the men, lowering their loads to rest, have turned in her direction.

  T
he stage sense of the nineteen-year-old Welles is revealed here: quite old-fashioned, thoroughly aware of hierarchies of character (‘Viola is the first lady of the play’) and of effects (‘she stands making a picture in the attractive tatters of her dress’). The production suggested in these words is a very straightforward traditional one: that is partly his purpose, to show how these plays are normally staged. His character descriptions, too, are detailed and conventional: ‘Sir Toby is the Countess Olivia’s uncle, and, we may assume, a cousin of some sorts to Sir John Falstaff. He is a fun- and liquor-loving old gentleman, very fat and very hearty. He swaggers in valorously-hatted and gauntleted, carrying a whip. He is in high spirits, which is natural for Sir Toby, but he seems to be sober. Maria is Olivia’s first maid, a little plump perhaps, or a little vixenish, but certainly a pretty little mischief, a bit wicked-looking and marvellously gay even in the household’s mourning. Malvolio is the steward … a stork-like, wry, dry, complacent and sallow-faced personage; monumentally dignified, excruciatingly refined, and fanatically infatuated with himself.’