by Simon Callow
His (more or less) innocent racism is revealed in every phrase. ‘Jack Carter is a fine figure of a negro in tight-fitting trousers that do justice to his anatomy.’ Then Atkinson turned to Carter’s performance. ‘He has no command of poetry or character … Edna Thomas has stage presence and a way with costumes, and also a considerable awareness of the character she is playing. Although she speaks the lines conscientiously, she has left the poetry out of them.’ This is an assertion which is constantly made about Welles, his productions, other people’s performances in his productions, and his own performances: that they lack poetry. There seems to be some truth in it. He had a passion for verse, but he wanted to eliminate Poetry from the classical theatre, considering it an obstacle to the life in the plays, a veneer that needed to be stripped away. And yet he was no realist. He wanted the majesty without the poetry, the tone without the music. What he offered instead was Orchestration; colour and sound, largely devoid either of meaning or of melody. ‘Since the programme announces Macbeth by William Shakespeare, it is fair to point out that the tragedy is written in verse and that it reveals the disintegration of a superior man who is infected by ambition. There is very little of that in the current Harlem revival,’ wrote Atkinson. But, he concluded enticingly enough, ‘as an experiment in Afro-American showmanship the Macbeth merited the excitement that rocked the Lafayette last night. If it is witches you want, Harlem knows how to overwhelm you with their fury and phantom splendour.’
Burns Mantle in the Sunday News had much the same message, less attractively expressed: ‘This is not the speech of negroes, nor within their grasp … with the spoken lines, though they are modestly and sensibly spoken, the coloured Macbeth becomes a good deal like a charade.’34 The costumes, generally admired, were also held to be somewhat fantasticated. ‘Extremely vivid, though a bit bizarre,’35 wrote Richard Lockridge in The New York Sun. ‘They are prodigious, running wild-eyed through the rainbow and being of such strange shapes that one can only guess that Nat Karson, who did them, was one time frightened by a costume ball … Macbeth’s costume is like a football player’s outfit, with great padded epaulets; Duncan’s crown madly sprouts feathers.’ Percy Hammond, in a notice which was less a review of the production than an expression of personal affront at being unable to file his copy on time, took the anti-Federal Theatre Project line. ‘The production is only as interesting as could be expected – one of your benevolent Uncle Sam’s experimental philanthropies … an exhibition of deluxe boondoggling … the actors sounded the notes with a muffled timidity that was often unintelligible … the personnel of the Negro Theatre is magnificent in its titles and numbers. It contains, one learns from the playbill, a managing producer, a casting director, a stage manager with four assistants etc, some experts in voodoo chants, and a superintendent of the chorus to say nothing of the ticket takers, the ushers, the press representatives, and as pathetic an orchestra as ever misunderstood the wood-winds, cat-guts and brasses. Despite the competence of this large army of Federal officials Macbeth could not get its curtain up until 9.30 p.m. – so I, as a punctual reporter, had to desert the performance before Miss Thomas, as Lady Macbeth, walked and talked in her sleep. The Macbeth of the Negro Theatre and the WPA is as interesting as can be expected, a unique example of the New Deal’s friendly processes.’36 This dyspeptic irrelevance cost the critic dear; according to legend, either Welles or Asodata Horton were particularly incensed by its tone, and conveyed their displeasure (crying, perhaps ‘who will rid me of this meddlesome hack?’) to Abdul, the show’s witchdoctor, who then stayed up all night cursing Percy Hammond with a particularly virulent chant. His notice appeared on the Tuesday, he took ill on the Thursday, and was dead by Sunday. Gratifying though this story is, its veracity may be doubted. As Sam Leiter points out, there were far worse notices than Hammond’s – though critics should note that nothing is more calculated to render homicidal the person criticised than a refusal to engage with the work done, instead of some external factor; liked or loathed, it should be the work that is reviewed, nothing else. Perhaps Percy’s notice and his sad, if apocryphal fate, should be conveyed to all critics at the outset of their careers.
The few black critics were enthusiastic, without gushing. They saw the event in a different light, of course. The militant journalist Roi Ottley wrote in the Amsterdam News: ‘In Macbeth the negro has been given an opportunity to discard the bandana and burnt-cork casting to play a universal character … we attended the Macbeth showing, happy in the thought that we wouldn’t again be reminded, with all its vicious implications, that we were niggers.’37 More simply, Errol Aubrey Jones in the New York Age wrote: ‘Hallie Flanagan and Phillip Barber must have felt proud for their protégé after it all was over. We were. The theatre lives again! Hurrah!’38 – an important vote of confidence from the community.
Mainstream critics felt impelled to return to the subject. More or less reversing his original judgement, Brooks Atkinson in his weekly round-up declared that the production was not Macbeth: ‘it turns out to be a colorful and rousing voodoo show … an amusing show shop lark.’39 This word keeps cropping up: ‘amusing’. Unexpected in a review of Macbeth; rather refreshing, though it is scarcely intended as a compliment. Many of these notices represent, in fact, the reverse side of American anxiety about Shakespeare. Now they’re worried that they’re enjoying it too much. John Mason Brown in the New York Post offered A FURTHER CONSIDERATION OF THE WAY IN WHICH ORSON WELLES FAILED TO DEVELOP AN INTERESTING IDEA.40 The piece makes some interesting points about the production, and about Welles: ‘In a moment of inspiration, Mr Welles apparently saw the three weird sisters of Shakespeare’s text not as fantastical hags lurking in the shadows of a Scotch heath, but as mumbo-jumbo agents of a fearful witch doctor in the jungles of Haiti. The next step in his thinking … was to imagine a Macbeth who would be appropriate for these witches; who would be subject to the spell of black instead of white magic; in other words, a sort of Brutus Jones Macbeth, whose heart would quicken to the beat of voodoo drums.’ This is exactly what most critics claim to have seen. Not according to Mason Brown.
‘Unfortunately,’ he continued, ‘Mr Welles seems to have lost his nerve just when he needed it most … he has introduced a few fairly tame voodoo scenes into a wretchedly cut and stupidly altered version of Macbeth that, in spite of being acted by an all-Negro cast, is still laid in Scotland … it is merely a conventional production with unconventional features which is less well acted than are most indifferent Shakespearean revivals of the same traditional sort.’ The concept, Mason Brown is saying, is merely a gimmick. ‘One wonders why Mr Welles lacked imagination enough to adapt the language of the play to the locale he had selected for it and the actors who were to speak it. It is not the absence of orthodoxy but its presence that one objects to in this Macbeth.’
This was the sticking point for the hostile critics: they would, they imply, have liked it better if it hadn’t been called Macbeth, and if the actors hadn’t used Shakespeare’s text. Equally, they would have been happy if Welles had held classes in the iambic pentameter and produced a troupe of medal-winning verse speakers. The point is that the Negro Unit (that is to say Houseman, and, behind him, Hallie Flanagan) wanted to make a bold statement of intent: black actors, they were saying, will be confined neither to folkloristic tweeness nor to Broadway slickness (both offering stereotypical views of black performers) but will create something thrilling and bold which will rival anything that the white theatre can offer. The works of Shakespeare, part of the store of common culture, provided a useful starting point.
Whatever the critics’ cavills, the beau monde took up the show in a big way, as did theatre people (John Barrymore, Welles claimed, saw the show every night of its ten-week run). But its fame went beyond the theatre. ‘No event in the art galleries this week,’41 wrote the New York Times Art Critic, ‘could hope to rival in barbaric splendour the transmogrification of Macbeth by members of the Negro Theatre … the stage pictures at
any rate constituted a sumptuous pageant of colour, form, pattern and movement, keyed to the pulsebeat of voodoo drums.’ Whatever the original intention, Orson Welles had staged a highly original and exciting event, an integration of light, sound, movement and decor which had an overwhelming sensuous and visceral impact, a barbaric cabaret. The effect on its audiences must have been something like that of the Ballets Russes in Paris, 1911. Feder’s lights, in conjunction with Karson’s Douanier Rousseau backcloths, revealed ‘a tragedy of black ambition in a Green Jungle shot with such lights from both heaven and hell as no other stage has seen’,42 in the fevered words of a contemporary critic; the lights were co-ordinated with the sound score and the stage action to a degree never before experienced by an American (or any other) audience.
Virgil Thomson invited Jean Cocteau, in 1936 making his trip around the world in eighty days, to the production. ‘Cocteau did not understand the constant lighting changes. His classical theatre mind found them distracting till he had seized their function in the spectacle as contributing to the climate of violence … he perceived a Wagnerian aspect to the proceedings.’43 This is a precise perception: the totality of expression, the gesamtkunstwerk, of Wagner’s aesthetic, is exactly what Welles was after. It is hardly surprising, given his immersion in grand opera from his earliest years (it was the first form of theatre to which he had been exposed) that his work should aspire to its condition. The integration of motifs – the aspiration towards the organic – is entirely Wagnerian. Reinhardt’s designer, Ernst Stern, who was in town to design (of all things) The White Horse Inn, left a vivid account of one instance of this: ‘When Macbeth and Lady Macbeth planned the murder, their plottings were accompanied by the background throbbing of the drums. It merged naturally into the knocking on the door: “Wake Duncan with thy knocking! I would thou could’st.” Sometimes the throbbing was subdued, like the insistent throbbing of a guilty conscience, like a steady pulse-beat; sometimes louder and more insistent, according to whether it conveyed the memory of past horrors or the suggestion of new horrible deeds to come.’44
The influence of The Emperor Jones was felt by many spectators, especially perhaps in this insistent use of drums. Welles, like many an artist, a Stravinsky or a Picasso, stole anything that was germane to his purpose. He was not, in fact, a great innovator at all; he was a great fulfiller. Pragmatic rather than visionary, he was supreme as a doer. Houseman felt that Welles had been initiated into the mysteries of the theatre. If we say, rather, that he seemed innately to have an absolute mastery of the skills of the theatre – of its hokum, so to say – and all the whorish skills involved, a shameless, unabashed determination to give immediate gratification, it may be closer to the truth. It is an astonishing, an uncanny endowment, not liable to produce the greatest art, but still formidable. Not yet twenty-one years old, Welles had it in him to be the greatest manufacturer of theatrical fireworks ever known. Mary McCarthy, unrelentingly pursuing him, wrote, two years later: ‘The Harlem Macbeth is now far enough in the past so that even those who enjoyed it can see that it was at best a pleasant bit of legerdemain.’45 Contemporary accounts suggest a different adjective; a staggering piece of legerdemain.
Cocteau, plagued with doubts and reservations, finally abandoned his objections and allowed himself to submit to the spell wrought by Welles. ‘I like Macbeth and I like negroes. Where then is the gap? The voodoo violence of the witches’46 scenes stifles the plot of the tragedy. Macbeth and Lady Macbeth become an American household in which Macbeth trembles and his wife wears the breeches. The terror of the king haunted by Banquo’s ghost turns into negro panic in a cemetery, and I deplore the omission of the physician hearing the sleep-walking Queen’s confessions and also that the ghost does not occupy the throne at the ball that replaces the banquet scene. But what does it matter! The play’s the thing! The Lafayette puts on the sublime tragedy that no other theatre is playing, and negro enthusiasm transforms the end, which is always somewhat confused, into a superb ballet of ruin and death.’ Mary McCarthy noting that ‘it is significant that our white culture has had to draw so heavily on the negro for the revivification of its classics’47 somewhat fancifully suggests that ‘as in the days of the Empire in Rome, it is the son of the freedman who believes most in the national past, and the elite must depend on the feelings and energies of its ex-slaves to experience its own artistic inheritance.’ Certainly there was an explosive energy that came from the actors finally being allowed access to this supremely stimulating work; a process comparable to the explosion of Jewish artistic activity once Jewish artists had been admitted to bourgeois society. This liberated energy was what Welles and Houseman had begun to tap.
For the critics the question was whether this Macbeth should be assessed as Shakespeare, or as a show. To expect inexperienced black actors to be able successfully to perform a play which has defeated (as several reviews pointed out) highly trained and experienced white companies was unreasonable; to judge the production purely as a diversion not only seems patronising, but also misses the main point, which is that something big and splendid had been brought off in a section of the community which had been made marginal. It may not have been good Shakespeare, but it was very good Negro Unit, though even here there is a question of whether in the long term it had a beneficent effect. It proved impossible to top The Voodoo Macbeth; nor was it a fruitful vein of work to pursue. For the Negro Unit, it was a one-off maroon, a great big noise to say ‘we’re here!’ Welles had an interesting suggestion to follow it up, a Romeo and Juliet with black Montagues and white Capulets – a really explosive notion for a New York stage that had just survived its first inter-racial kiss. But by then, he and Houseman had moved on. Welles’s artistic Don Juanism starts here.
For him, of course, Macbeth was an unequivocal triumph – even though at the time there was some uncertainty about the extent to which it was his sole work. Even Hallie Flanagan, writing five years later, wrote ‘it was difficult to tell who was responsible for what’. The programme even contains the phrase ‘the production supervised by John Houseman’. To Welles’s fury, The New York Times had coupled his name with Houseman’s in the review, which led to their first row – ‘a brief, violent, personal row on the sidewalk’ – a taste of things to come. Welles was quite right to claim entire responsibility for the production – it was his, from beginning to end; Houseman had not even been allowed into rehearsals until the very end (another cause of friction: mild now, later to become severe). But it was Houseman who had given him the opportunity, and Houseman who ensured that he was able to make the best of it. Phillip Barber, the head of the New York division of the Federal Theatre Project, said in an interview: ‘Welles has all the gall that you can possibly conceive of any human being ever having in all of time, and he always had it. And Jack Houseman is one of the most astute and clever managers that ever lived on shore. And he used Orson and in a sense protected him. He had to fight him to the point of separation practically … to prevent him from doing things. But he kept that force contained and moving in a direction, and there was nothing like that.’48
The deep underlying knowledge that this was the case – that he needed Houseman, and that somehow this detracted from his glory – grew from this tiny spat on a Harlem pavement into an obsession. It was not unilateral. In an interesting passage from the early part of his memoirs, Houseman describes a relationship that he had with a school-fellow, Eric, the son of the headmaster. The seven-year-old Houseman shared a room with him. ‘It was here that my first male relationship was formed – an intimacy based on inequality and fear … (it was) HIS house … HIS room … through HIM the hope of acceptance and the menace of rejection were kept in constant suspense. This created a pattern of insecurity that has persisted through most of my life and … left me incapable of parity – a prey to competitiveness in its most virulent form. More than once, at some critical point in a working relationship, I have had the uncomfortable feeling that I was following the emotional curve of th
at first ambivalent children’s intimacy of long ago.’49 The sense of inequality and aspiration, his desire to be liked and affirmed, simultaneously fearing both rejection and domination, that lurked beneath his surface calm and confidence, was a fertile soil for Welles to sow his seeds of, alternately, affection and resentment. Their relationship was, in fact, a classic instance of what has come to be called co-dependency: an addiction to the power struggle at the heart of the relationship.
This was to come. For the time being, they were the toast of Harlem (‘I was really the King of Harlem! I really was,’50 Welles told Barbara Leaming) and the wonder of Broadway. The show sold out for all of its sixty-four performances; on the opening night it was announced that on Monday evenings, two-thirds of the seats would be set aside for ‘persons on home relief who would receive tickets on presentation of relief identification cards’. At 9 o’clock on the first Monday, the box office manager announced that all seats had been filled. The queue, stretching back a whole block, continued to push forward, however, and a pane of glass was broken at the theatre entrance. A year ago, the same crowd had been burning cars and smashing shop windows; now the peace was broken in the name of theatre tickets. Progress of a sort.
At the end of its run at the Lafayette, the show transferred to the Adelphi on West 54th Street, where it played for eleven performances. Jack Carter’s self-restraint broke down; he started to drink heavily during a show. When Edna Thomas burst into tears on stage, he simply walked offstage to his dressing room, then out of the theatre, and was seen no more. The Macduff, Maurice Ellis, took over, and it was he that led the subsequent triumphant nationwide tour: Bridgeport, Hartford, Chicago, Indianapolis, Detroit, Cleveland, Dallas; something of a feat. ‘You have to take into account that this was 110 black people,’51 wrote John Silvera, the company manager. ‘And travel for black people at that time … was not the most pleasant or easiest thing in the world. We were living in a strictly Jim Crow situation where hotel accommodations for blacks were non-existent in many cases. But there were no incidents.’ In another way, then, the Negro Unit had blazed a trail. A hundred thousand people of all races saw the show. In Indianapolis, an event occurred that might have set back the cause of black theatre by many years. Maurice Ellis fell ill; his understudy too, was sick, nor did the new stage manager know the role. As if it was what he had been waiting for all along, Welles jumped onto the next plane and took over the role, playing it in blackface. This well-attested event is best contemplated in awed silence.
