Orson Welles, Vol I

by Simon Callow

  This was a formidable array of technical facilities. But Feder was never simply a mechanic of light; he saw himself as an artist. Initially inspired to go into the theatre by the magic act of The Great Thurston (a bond between him and Welles, you would have thought, but no) he was always interested in the overall expression of the play. His alphabetical Steps in Lighting20 (A. READ THE PLAY) reveals a degree of interest in the process of rehearsal unusual in a lighting designer of the period. E. is ATTEND REHEARSALS: ‘Soak up the show. Watch it for mood, and visualise the effects you will want to create.’ G. (FIRST REHEARSALS) warns: ‘the director will start arguing about effects. Keep him happy, and make the necessary changes.’ For Macbeth he considered his approach particularly carefully. ‘Nat Karson set the play in a castle laid in a jungle actually using only one set for the entire play. The limitations of a one-set play and the small size of our stage made it difficult to create the illusion of distance and perspective. And this production offered other difficulties; the physical structure of the castle was real enough, but the background was a stylised design of huge tropical leaves.’ So much for the practical challenges. In this case, too, there were special demands, made by an unusually exigent collaborator. ‘The director required that at times this setting should take on all the mysticism and fantasy of Negro spiritualism.’

  And of course, there was the question of the actors’ skins, difficult to light because of the light-absorbing properties of darker pigmentation. In collaboration with Nat Karson, Feder devised light-friendly make-ups and a series of gels specially suited to the actors’ pigmentation; the rule of thumb hitherto had been ‘Amber for negroes’. Thus the light too, was politicised, helping to break down the dehumanising visual stereotypes. ‘It will be seen then, that because the director and the designer deviated from the original script, it was necessary to light this classic in a manner that would create a balance of fantasy and realism in light.’ This is the reality of the work that underpins a directorial inspiration. As always, too, the theatre’s overwhelmingly practical nature means that there is a constant negotiation between the vision and the possibility, so that pretty nearly everything that appears before the public has evolved into something quite different from what was originally envisaged; sometimes it is better, and sometimes worse.

  As far as can be told, Karson had an amicable relationship with Welles. This was not the case with Feder; perhaps Welles decided that the best way to get good work out of him was to enrage him. Either way, he took delight in publicly goading and abusing him; this, Houseman felt, was good for the troupe: seeing a white man abused by another, which is taking work psychology to machiavellian lengths. Feder was, in Houseman’s words, ‘a garrulous masochist’, though there was no doubt of his brilliance as a lighting designer. His assistant, Jean Rosenthal, later a famous light designer herself, called him ‘gadget-happy and opinionated’. This was calculated not to appeal to Welles. He had strong ideas about light – as about everything else – and was not interested in any sort of competitive one-upmanship in technical matters. He knew what he wanted, and he expected his collaborators to give it to him. As it happens, Feder had a great deal to give him – and gave it, despite the persecution; his contribution to Welles’s success as a director was crucial. Fifty years later, he was not in a forgiving mood: ‘Orson Welles? It was just like the Wizard of Oz, with Houseman cranking up the loudspeaker. He was just a kid of 21, part of the flim flam of the thirties. He had an enormous voice, but his ideas were all pedestrian. He knew nothing of the nuts and bolts of the theatre.’21

  Sensing something strange about the unrelenting nature of the goading that he received from Welles, Feder came to a curious conclusion: ‘Welles was a glandular case – he had a glandular malfunction, which had a lot to do with the madness he was perpetrating from 35–38.’ There is no medical evidence whatever for this, nor any likelihood of it; but it says something about the impression made by Welles’s terrifying dynamism, sweeping all before it. (Feder had little time for Houseman, either: ‘Houseman was a grain merchant when he was young and when he died he was still a grain merchant.’) Embittered he may have been, but his contribution to the lighting of these early productions of Welles was unarguable. He knew as much about light as anyone in the American theatre, and took the art some large strides further forward, partly thanks to the demands that Welles made of him; a man deeply curious and exploratory by nature, he was set challenges and given demands by Welles that no one else would have even thought of. Welles was the catalyst.

  In the case of the music, Welles more than met his match as far as temperament was concerned. Welles’s seductive charms had no effect on Virgil Thomson, so it seems he decided instead to bluster. ‘My other close director friend, Jo Losey, could not bear him,’22 wrote Thomson, ‘but Houseman scenting brains and temperament, brought him to our flat. That Welles could be so overbearing at eighteen was in his favour; that he had directed plays in Dublin we did not believe.’ They had to work together, however, as they were both officers of the Negro Unit. ‘Orson and I never quarrelled; but we never really agreed. He was extremely professional and he knew exactly what he wanted. He knew it so well and thoroughly that I, as an older musician with a certain amount of pride, would not write him original music. I would not humiliate myself to write precisely on his demand. On the other hand, I respected his demands dramatically. So, as Houseman’s employee, I gave him sound effects and ready-made music – trumpet call, battle scenes and percussive scenes when he wanted them – and of course, the waltzes for the party scene.’ In Welles’s conception, music and an organised sound score were crucial. His aim was to render the play as a sort of symphonic poem.

  ‘Macbeth was staged as a romantic tragedy,’23 Thomson says. He describes the musical approach: ‘There was a sizeable pit orchestra … also there was a percussion group backstage made up of bass drums, kettledrums, a thunder drum, a thunder sheet, a wind machine – also these not only for stimulating storms, but also, played by musicians and conducted for accompanying some of the grander speeches. In this way, on a pretext of rough weather, I could support an actor’s voice and even build it to twice life size … the music consisted altogether (outside its voodoo realisms, its offstage storms and battles) of familiar suspense-conventions, of pathos passages almost Hearts and Flowers, and, in the ball scene, of Lanner waltzes … the whole production was melodramatic to the utmost.’ Thomson of course uses the word melodrama in its specific, technical connotation: speech underpinned by music. It is, as he implies, a heightening device, which can also very effectively conceal weakness in a performer; almost anyone sounds better with music under them. But it amounts, in Welles’s treatment, in conjunction with the other elements, to a new art form, somewhere between dance and play.

  With his curious mixture of Kansas City bluntness and Parisian sophistication, his hatred of pretentiousness and his nose for talent, Thomson didn’t like Welles, but he respected his work. ‘Orson Welles knew nothing about musical ideas. He was virtually without musical interests; but he was very quick to know what he didn’t want. Orson knew about matching sounds to the voice … He knew his business. God knows where he learned it.’24 Leonard de Paur, the distinguished black conductor who was Thomson’s assistant, said that ‘instead of telling you in musical terms he’d say: this is what I want to accomplish. Ninety-nine per cent of the time he was right.’25 The most sensational element of the score was provided by the drummers under Asodata Dafora. Their first demand after being given the job was to request black goats, which were then ritually slaughtered in order, they said, to make skins for their drums. Their leader, Abdul, was a genuine witchdoctor, (Welles, unwisely, one cannot help feeling, insisted on addressing him as ‘Jazbo’) and their chants consisted of real African spells. Somehow, they didn’t sound sufficiently menacing; eventually they admitted that the spell they were chanting was medical: a safeguard against beri-beri (Shamkoko, Shanwable, O beri-beri). They agreed to darken their imprecations s
omewhat; next time he overheard them rehearsing, Houseman was sure he heard them chanting ‘Mr Houseman, Mr Welles’. He refrained from reporting this to Welles because ‘he was ridiculously superstitious’ and haunted by Macbeth’s evil reputation, which Welles later confessed to Peter Bogdanovich. ‘When you do that play, it has a really oppressive effect on everybody. Really, it’s terrifying – stays with you all day. The atmosphere it generates is so horrendous and awful that it’s easy to see how the old superstition lives on.’26 This sense of oppression can only have contributed to the driven feeling that Welles emanated throughout the rehearsals. In fact, said Houseman, this was the only show they ever did together in which Welles didn’t sprain an ankle or sustain some physical damage to his person. He did none the less have, almost literally, a close shave very near to the first performance: walking through the foyer, he was attacked by a black man with a razor taped to his wrist, allegedly put up to it by the black communist faction. Fortunately he was with his Banquo, the ex-boxer Canada Lee, who overpowered and disarmed the man.

  Agitation and expectation gripped Harlem as the first night approached. The New York Times sent their man, Bosley Crowther, to the spot to interview the director: ‘Why had they mustered the audacity to take the bard for a ride?’27 his readers wanted to know. After a few minutes with Welles, he was convinced that ‘this was no striving to accomplish a freak production just for the sake of sensation. They had good, sound reasons for it.’ Giving a quick tour d’horizon of Welles (including the new claims that he had directed Othello and The Tempest at the Royalty Theatre in London; every interview advanced the legend a notch or two), he quickly allowed his subject to take over the interview. ‘You’ve heard that the locale we’ve chosen is Haiti? Well, it isn’t Haiti at all. It’s like the island The Tempest was put on – just a mythical place which, because our company is composed of negroes, may be anywhere in the West Indies.’ That was, of course, the party line: ‘without reference to race or colour’. Orson doesn’t try to square that one (he couldn’t; there’s a real and significant conceptual inconsistency there) so he tells a lie. Then he makes a joke: ‘The only point in shifting the scene from Scotland was because the kilt is naturally not a particularly adaptable costume for negro actors.’ Finally he comes clean: ‘The witch element in the play falls beautifully into the supernatural atmosphere of Haitian voodoo. We’ve taken full advantage of that. Instead of using just three witches, as most productions of Macbeth conventionally do, we have an entire chorus of singers and dancers. And Hecate, who is seldom presented, is the leading spirit in their midst – a sort of sinister Father Divine – a man witch who leads the others.’

  Crowther asks about the quality of the acting. Welles, happily mounting his hobby-horse, replies ‘You see, the negro actors have never had the misfortune of hearing Elizabethan verse spouted by actors strongly flavoring of well-cured Smithfield. They read their lines just as they would any others. On the whole, they’re no better and no worse than the average white actor before he discovered the red plush style.’ Crowther reports that ‘Mr Welles said that he found the present acting company a whole lot more comprehending than any troupe of professional whites that he had ever seen.’ One in the eye for Katharine Cornell, or for that matter Hilton Edwards and Micheál Mac Liammóir. The Times’s man was impressed, though, and came down firmly on the side of the project and the Negro Unit, and against the suspicious chorus of doubters, who could see nothing in this venture but free-loading loafers. ‘Every one of the actors seemed as alert and enthusiastic as they must have been the day – or night – they started. The New Deal, not only in the theatre but in Shakespeare, was meat and drink for them. And any actor who will rehearse from midnight to dawn, the rosy-fingered, every night for eleven weeks must be interested in something more than a pay check.’

  The anticipation and controversy among the smart audience were expertly maintained by both Houseman and Welles; in Harlem, things were in the hands of Houseman’s assistant, Carlton Moss, who had forged good relations with the community, building the local audience with patient propaganda, then, nearer the opening night, capping it with stunts like the luminous stencilled logos of MACBETH that appeared all over the neighbourhood, while garlands and balloons festooned the Tree of Hope. A free preview drew 3,000 more spectators than the theatre could hold; police had to disperse the crowd. When the first night itself arrived – on 14 April – all northbound automobile traffic was stopped for more than an hour while from trucks in the street, floodlights flared a circle of light into the lobby, and cameramen took photographs of the arrival of celebrities. The massed forces of the brass bands of the Monarch Lodge of Benevolent and Protective Order of Elks played, marching over the painted footsteps on the pavement – another of Moss’s stunts. Hallie Flanagan, proud and exhilarated at having instigated an event that was as brilliant as any Broadway opening and at the same time a genuinely popular occasion, wrote a sharp impression of that night: ‘Flash of ten thousand people clogging the streets, following the scarlet and gold bands of the Negro Elks, marching with flying banners, bearing the strange device: MACBETH by Wm Shakespeare – flash of police holding back the crowds, of newsreel men grinding their cameras on soundtrucks – flash of jewels, silk hats and ermine.’28 The result of all this extra-theatrical activity was that the curtain went up an hour late, at half past nine; the mood inside the theatre was unlike that for any Shakespeare anyone had ever known. Perhaps it was a little like an audience at the Globe Theatre, one afternoon in 16oo: rampant with expectation, oblivious of theatrical etiquette, keenly following the story.

  ‘Negroes have taken Shakespeare to themselves,’29 wrote Martha Gellhorn, ‘Macbeth wore military costumes of canary yellow and emerald green … women came on and off the stage in salmon pink and purple. The impression was of a hot richness that I have almost never seen in the theatre or anywhere else. The audience sat and watched and listened as if this were a murder mystery by Edgar Wallace, only much more exciting.’ The production inspired a great deal of excited prose. This is Hallie Flanagan: ‘African drums beat, Lady Macbeth walked on the edge of a jungle throbbing with sinister life, Hecate with his bullwhip lashed out at the witches, Macbeth, pierced by a bullet, took his terrific headlong plunge from the balustrade.’30 Houseman, viewing the proceedings with an equally passionate but more calculating eye, was able to say that ‘within five minutes, amid the thunder of drums and the orgiastic howls and squeals of our voodoo celebrants, we knew that victory was ours. The next scene to stop the show’ (a slightly unexpected phrase in an account of Macbeth) ‘was the Macbeths’ royal reception, shimmering couples swirling with wild abandon … then suddenly, a wild, high, inhuman sound that froze them all in their tracks, followed by Macbeth’s terrible cry as the spirit of Banquo, in the shape of a luminous death mask, suddenly appeared on the battlements to taunt him in the hour of his triumph.’

  The final moment of the production, the arrival of the army in the form of Birnam wood, was greeted with a roar of approval: ‘the floor became a moving forest above which … Macbeth shot then … kicked the cream-faced loon, for an 18-foot drop, into the courtyard below – a moment later Macbeth’s head came sailing down from the battlements.’31 There was no doubt in the actors’ mind whose triumph it was. ‘At the conclusion of the performance, Orson Welles who adapted and staged the play, was virtually dragged out of the wings by members of the company and forced to take a bow,’32 reported The New York Times. ‘There were salvoes of applause as numerous bouquets of flowers were handed over the footlights to the leading players.’ The applause went on for a quarter of an hour. It meant more than the success of Macbeth: its real significance was that the Negro Unit, the Federal Theatre Project, John Houseman and Orson Welles were all endorsed.

  The press reaction the following day was, for Macbeth at the Lafayette, no longer crucial. The show was already the most enormous success. For Welles and Houseman, it mattered a great deal. They both had reputations to make. All the
first-string critics had attended the first night (one of them asking not to be seated next to negroes), and for the most part, they were enthusiastic. While regarding the whole event as a curiosity from a Shakespearean point of view, they could hardly fail – simply as reporters – to acknowledge the excitement engendered. Every single notice, good or bad – there were no indifferent ones – makes you long to see the show. Brooks Atkinson of the Times, a friend of the Project, was saddled by his sub-editor with a headline which bore no resemblance to his copy. It is a good indication of the degree of racism, both latent and blatant, that informed most of the notices: MACBETH OR HARLEM BOY GOES WRONG. He starts (as perhaps Welles did) with the witches’ scenes. ‘They have always worried the life out of the polite tragic stage: ship the witches into the rank and fever-stricken jungles of Haiti … raise the voices until the jungle echoes, stuff a gleaming naked witch doctor into a cauldron, hold up negro masks in the baleful light – and there you have a witches’33 scene that is logical and stunning and a triumph of the theatre art.’ He admired Nat Karson’s costumes and settings, and Feder’s light. ‘They have turned the banquet scene into a ball at a semi-barbaric court, heralded it with music and crowded it with big, rangy figures dressed in magnificent court array. Put that down in your memory-book as another scene that fills the theatre with sensuous, black-blooded vitality.’