by Simon Callow
There is no doubt, either, that he felt special kindred to the character of Faustus himself. ‘There was a deep personal identification which, across a gulf of three and a half centuries, led him to the heart of the work and to its vivid re-creation on the American stage,’ wrote Houseman. ‘The truth is that the legend of the man who sells his soul to the Devil in exchange for knowledge and power and who must finally pay … with the agonies of eternal damnation was uncomfortably close to Welles’s own personal myth.’ It might also be said that Faustus, last of the long line of Marlovian ‘over-reachers’, was, like Welles, driven to achieve ever more, unable to rest content with what he had done, and intolerant of any restriction on him. There is a chilling resonance for Welles in the lines from the Prologue which compare Faust to Icarus:
Till swoll’n with cunning, of a self-conceit,
His waxen wings did mount above his reach
And melting, heavens conspired his overthrow!
The identification goes even deeper, and darker, according to Houseman: ‘Orson really believed in the Devil … this was not a whimsey but a very real obsession. At twenty-one Orson was sure he was doomed … he was rarely free from a sense of sin and fear of retribution so intense and immediate that it drove him through long nights of panic to seek refuge in debauchery or in work.’
And long ere this I should have done the deed
Had not sweet pleasure conquered deep despair.
‘Quite literally, Orson dared not sleep. No sooner were his eyes closed than, out of the darkness, troupes of demons – the symbols of his sins – surrounded and claimed him … in retribution for crimes of which he could not remember the nature, but of which he never for a moment doubted he was guilty.’ It is interesting to note that Houseman was himself no stranger to haunted sleep; but he had dismissed his demons. ‘My nightmares grew to such an unbearable pitch of violence that I knew I had to break through them or go mad. When they finally scattered and dissolved, they drained away some of those other, deeper terrors – of rejection, poverty, death and annihilation – that haunted me for so many years of my life.’ Welles seemed unable to. Perhaps he never tried, for fear of what he would actually discover. Maybe like many another artist, he was convinced that his demons were the source of his art. They were certainly, if we are to believe Houseman, the driving force behind it; perhaps they also destroyed it, finally, by forcing him ever on and on.
Only Houseman and a very few others saw Welles in this light. To most people he was a conquering hero: Tamburlaine rather than Faustus. He laid into this production with overwhelming energy and intensity. His concept of Doctor Faustus was intimately bound up with magic, and he focused his considerable ingenuity and industry on realising that aspect. Magic was not only a theatrical diversion; it was a metaphor of both power and delusion. The magician has control over nature and the elements, but what he secures for himself is insubstantial. Faustus uses his magic for banal purposes, as much as for exalted ones; similarly Welles used theatrical magic for the crudest low comedy (the Pope’s procession, with meats flying up into the air, a pig dancing an obscene dance, hats flying off, and then the entire scene disappearing, leaving Faustus alone), and for effects of breathtaking beauty. In The Cradle Will Rock screenplay, he describes the scene of Helen’s appearance.
FAUSTUS opens his arms as though in a gesture of ritual, and out of the murk there appears HELEN OF TROY, high in the filmy air, as though riding a cloud. He looks up at her dark form and as he looks, takes wing and flies up, through the air to HELEN’s side.)
FAUSTUS
O thou art fairer than the evening air
Clad in the beauty of a thousand stars!
(Now, as Faustus rises to her, HELEN is aglow with new light … we realise that she wears a mask, FAUSTUS, embracing her, raises the mask … Her head falls back, loosening a great fall of reddish-blonde hair. It reaches almost to the ground above which she floats.)
FAUSTUS
Her lips suck forth my soul – see where it flies!
Come, Helen, come give me my soul again.
(The kiss is obviously real, and held for longer than is customary on the stage. The instant before a first titter might be heard, he drops her head – her body – There is nothing there! Nothing but her cloak – FAUSTUS himself falls down from the sky. He hits the floor hard. (It is almost like an accident.)
And now, at the sound of a tolling bell, he raises his head and we see he is no longer the young man (nor the mature scholar) – He is suddenly old … This is the last midnight, the hour when DOCTOR FAUSTUS must keep his dreadful bargain …)
A bravura description of bravura effects, thrillingly reported from the front line. The first element in the creation of these effects was light: Feder’s department. Grumpily observing that ‘the performance was run continuously with no intermission, putting the whole burden of changes in tempo and space into the realm of the worker in light’,35 he continues: ‘A very curious phenomenon appeared in this production. In the past, light had been the tool to illuminate what was to be seen; now light itself was to take the place of the object that was to be illuminated. The stage took on a new freedom, because by means of its very darkness one could light up a scene at the back of the stage, and with nothing intervening, the entire foreground space disappeared.’ So many lights were hung from the grid that it broke under the weight, according to Richard France; the cast had to abandon the theatre for a week. There was, or appeared to be, no set; the light was the set. In order for this principle to work, the stage was made into a black shell; the floor was painted black, too. Bill Baird, now doing the job for which he was trained – making puppets of the Seven Deadly Sins – described the apparatus required to make the effects work: ‘He had miles of black velvet and tubes of about five foot maybe twenty foot long on the inside of which he had lekolites – and they made columns of light … it is one of the first times they used these long tubes with light in them … they just came down and hit the floor – and they wouldn’t be more than five foot wide.’36 The techniques were those of variety magic acts from time immemorial, allied to the new lighting skills that were being developed day by day.
Paula Laurence, who was playing Helen of Troy, reports the use of columns of black velour ‘to produce Living Statues as in the circus’. The stage was mined with trapdoors: ‘The stage manager of that show must have lost his mind. I think they had fifteen trapdoors, with all kinds of effects and smoke pots and everything.’37 So many holes had been cut in the stage that it had to be reinforced. Further to facilitate the transitions, Welles commissioned Paul Bowles to write linking passages for the unearthly combination of oboe, saxophone, clarinet, trombone, and harp that, in Stark Young’s words, ‘can often float you into the scenes’ Elysium’.38 Sound, as always, was a crucial element in Welles’s production: radio speakers were used to amplify the voices from hell.
Rehearsals took place at night to allow construction by day, and they had to be onstage, with the lights. ‘Going into the Maxine Elliott during rehearsals was like going into the pit of hell,’39 wrote Hallie Flanagan. ‘Total darkness punctuated by stabs of light, trapdoors opening and closing to reveal bewildered stagehands or actors going up, down and around in circles; explosions; properties disappearing in a clap of thunder; and onstage Orson, muttering the mighty lines and interspersing them with fierce adjurations to the invisible but omnipresent Feder. The only point of equilibrium in these midnight seances was Jack Carter, quiet, slightly amused, probably the only actor who ever played Mephisto without raising his voice.’ Welles had taken another gamble on Carter; on the understanding that he would stay with him and Virginia in the duplex on 14th Street for the duration of the run. The rest of the cast were recruited from Horse Eats Hat. Chubby Sherman was playing Robin, the principal comic servant; in the role of the clown, Welles cast the ancient vaudevillian Harry McKee. He put Edwin Denby in charge of him.
‘Go across the street and make a dance for him,’40 Welles told Denby
. ‘I want him to have a dance.’ ‘And I said, “What kind of a dance? You mean a morris dance?” He said, “Yes, yes, anything you want” … I didn’t know what to do because I realised he was an old man … so I said to him, “What could you do?” and he said, “Well, I have this bauble and I could play golf with it.” And I said, “OK” … one time he spat on the floor and pretended it was a golf ball. It was really in the spirit of an Elizabethan clown.’ Just as Denby had been roped in to teach an old man how to morris dance, so Paula Laurence and Virginia Welles were sent off to the public libraries research the costumes, tracing out the patterns for Welles to choose from. His costume drawings (based on what they found and straightforwardly Elizabethan) are skilful and witty; they give, as the best costume designs do, vivid intimations of character, practically useful to the actor. Welles’s adroitness in this area has been little commented on, but it is clear that had he wished to make his living as a designer, he could have done. The industrious wardrobe mistress for Project 891, charged with making up the costumes from these sketches, was Beverly Juno; with her face ‘like a chocolate-box blonde’ she had once been a showgirl. Now she had a bad leg. ‘She liked a drink. I’d go and see her in the wardrobe and she’d say: “Anybody who doesn’t like this life is crazy!” I sure agreed with her.’41
In addition to her ancillary activities as costume researcher, Paula Laurence (the leading lady, after all, however brief her appearances) was told by Welles to make a mask for her character, shiny down white. She got hold of some plaster of Paris, and duly made a life-mask of herself: a tricky business. Welles then came along and painted it with a faintly green tinge, applying brass clippings to it. ‘Orson designed everything you saw on that stage. Everything originated in Orson’s head; it was the duty of everybody to fill it out – it was presented with such clarity.’42 ‘Hands-on’ is a phrase that might have been invented for Welles; it is part of what gave these rehearsals such excitement, an excitement generally absent from a professional theatre in which each department’s activities are strictly demarcated, and the director is an umpire, adjudicating, occasionally advising, but almost never actively participating. On another occasion he demanded a thunder drum; none in existence was terrifying enough. He gave instructions for one to be built: ‘Here was one of the goddam biggest bull-skins you can imagine. They stretched it wet over a frame made of four-by-tens. It was so strong that it pulled the corners of the frame apart. But you never heard a thunder drum like it … all you had to do was take a hammer and just touch it, and you get a sound that went all through the theatre. You could even feel it in your seat.’43 The palpable sense of creativity, not so much striking while the iron is hot, but making the iron hot by striking it, was everywhere, and unforgettable to those involved. No wonder Jack Carter was drawn to it, simply to sit and watch; no cabaret, no mere entertainment could have been as enthralling as watching the show being made before his very eyes in the furnace of Welles’s Promethean art. There was no calmly premeditated master-plan; Welles made it up as he went along. This is the source of its validity. It may also have denied it the solidity which only comes from well-laid foundations.
The journalist Helen Ormsbee, who was often to write about Welles, came to interview him in the midst of all this activity. Under a typical headline (ACTOR, WRITER, DIRECTOR AND NOT QUITE 22) she described the scene: ‘Orson Welles is a young man to delight the heart of the original Doctor Faustus, that legendary magician of the sixteenth century. For Welles practices the art of acting with the aid of strange processes. He appears and disappears on stage amid blinding flashes of light, he directs rehearsals by talking into a machine that carries his voice wherever he wants it to; he knows his way about those resorts of necromancy known as broadcasting stations.’ Orson told her that ‘our aim is to create on modern spectators an effect corresponding to the effect in 1589 when the play was new. We want to rouse the same magical feeling, but we use modern methods … I think Marlowe would be delighted … every production of our classics should make its own impact in its own way …’ Then his fascination with his new toy bubbled over: ‘the production’s greatest novelty is the use of the radio method of directing. It was a big timesaver. Whenever I wanted anything or anybody, I spoke into a microphone, and my voice reached the remotest parts of the building. People came running as if they had heard Gabriel blow his trumpet.’ Another form of magic, giving delusions of God-like power proving equally insubstantial when the current is switched off. Perhaps this is what gave Feder his image of Welles as the Wizard of Oz.
Welles was keen to tell Ormbee about another of his innovations: a thrust stage, the first ever in a Broadway theatre. ‘The performer frankly admits that the audience is present. Sometimes he talks to it, whereas with the picture-frame, the audience is assumed to be non-existent.’ Like the skilled magician he was, Welles loved to insist that there was nothing up his sleeve. This apparently Brechtian notion was not so much a verfremdungseffekt as a ploy to take the audience into his confidence, only to pull the carpet from under their feet. (He made a curious observation about the apron stage, quoted by Richard France, which, like many of his sayings, is bewilderingly the opposite of the truth. ‘The apron causes the actor to use a larger manner and more voice than when he is separated from his listeners by the proscenium arch. The nearer you are the bigger you must speak, to hold attention.’44 Gnomic remarks of this sort – he had, all his life, a weakness for obiter dicta – make one wonder how much he really knew about acting. It may be that the thought is only half formed, released before it had reached its definitive meaning; it is certainly true that you need as much energy if you’re in close proximity to the audience, but you most certainly don’t need more voice, or a bigger manner. This is just wrong.)
The technical rehearsals were held after the stage crew and the actors had gone home, leaving only volunteers (generally including Jack Carter, ‘girlfriends’, and Virginia) to stand under the lights while they were focused. There was much shouting, mainly by Welles and Abe Feder. Around four, hamburgers, milkshakes and brandy were brought in; they would break at 8 ‘because we couldn’t see any more, but also because Welles usually had a radio call at nine … despite their satanic complication, I remember those unending electrical sessions with pleasure as a time when we were all very close together – in our work and in our lives.’45 Houseman well describes the pleasure of technical rehearsals when everything is practical, and things begin to happen before your eyes: effects dreamed of now actually being realised, others unimagined suddenly occurring as if by divine intervention. Though often fraught, these sessions are the first real intimation of what it is you might all have been striving for. Especially if they run on into the small hours – in Welles’s case, the larger hours – there is great intimacy in the camaraderie of the team effort, everybody tiring together, surrounded by the debris of the production, empty coffee cups and cigarette butts, all the usual rules of conduct in the auditorium suspended.
As Welles went off to his first radio job of the day Houseman would then go home to his girlfriend (who as it happened was born, Houseman does not fail to note, with appropriate irony, on the same hour on the same day in the same month of the same year as Welles) and they would make love, have breakfast, and sleep; then he would go back to work again. To Mrs Leaming, this identity of the birth dates of his mistress and his partner is scandalous, proof positive of his unhealthy interest in Welles. To Houseman, it is entirely appropriate and agreeable, a symptom of the rightness of things at this period. He was – ten, or even fifteen, years late – living out his youth, through and with Welles. This was the epoch of their greatest closeness, though never at any time was there anything remotely resembling harmony. As the first night approached, Welles became more tense and neurotic, ‘pathologically reluctant’ to expose his work to Houseman, whose judgement he trusted. The relationship was always most strained when Welles was, as now, playing the leading role. ‘At such times, I became not merely the hated figure of aut
hority, to be defied and outwitted as I refused further delays and escapes, but the first hostile witness to the ghastly struggle between narcissism and self-loathing that characterised Orson’s approach to a part.’ After that he was welcome again.
‘It became my main responsibility to preserve him from exhaustion and confusion, to disentangle the essentials of the production as he had originally conceived it from that obsessive preoccupation with insignificant detail in which he was inclined to seek refuge when fatigue or self-doubt had begun to wear him down.’ He was tired; dangerously so, kept going by tobacco and alcohol and pills. He could have taken a little time off from the radio shows, at least during the period of technical and dress rehearsals, until the play had properly opened. If anything, he seemed to increase his workload, to flog himself on near to the point of collapse. ‘Welles’s dress rehearsals and previews were nearly always catastrophic – especially if he was performing. I think he enjoyed these near disasters; they gave him a pleasing sense, later, of having brought order out of chaos and of having, singlehanded, plucked victory from defeat … suffering more than the usual actor’s fears, Orson welcomed and exploited … technical hazards as a means of delaying the hideous moment when he must finally come out onstage and deliver a performance.’ On one occasion, Welles, backstage, overheard two familiar voices: the painter Pavel Tchelitchew and his friend Charles-Henri Ford. He summoned Houseman, refusing to perform unless they were removed. As they left, reports Houseman, ‘I could hear Orson’s voice from behind the curtain howling triumphantly of Russian pederasts and international whores.’
The first night was on 8 January 1937, and the audience had been well primed for the show by the advance publicity:
ANNOUNCING
A production extraordinary!
