by Simon Callow
The two female members of the company, Evelyn Allen and Muriel Brassler, had solid stock experience. Joseph Cotten was invited, of course, and Chubby Sherman, and Francis Carpenter; and an unexpected recruit, Norman Lloyd, leading actor of the Living Newspaper, star of its big success, Power, an actor equally versed in the theories of Stanislavsky and Brecht, and, like many of his generation, suspicious of what he felt to be Welles’s actor-managerial ways and ‘chin-up-to-the-balcony’ acting. For these actors, the great innovation of the age was that for the first time the audience – whether lower-middle-class Jewish (as at The Group) or working class (the Federal Theatre Project) – actually saw themselves onstage. Despite The Cradle Will Rock, clearly the main thrust of Welles’s work was away from this. ‘Orson,’ says Lloyd, ‘was still on the old line.’ Lloyd, surprised at being invited to meet Welles, and prepared to dislike him, had instead, like all the new recruits, been entirely captivated; the stage direction from Doctor Faustus ‘Faust charms him dumb’ might have been coined for Welles. He had assembled for Caesar a group of actors that were diverse, opinionated, talented, ready, willing and, for the most part, young. They had the feeling that they were in on the start of something big, that they were world-beaters. They knew that Welles was in charge, and that they would be executing his will, and that was fine by them, for the time being. The Mercury was now ready for action; Houseman had created the structure for Welles to create extraordinary theatre. It is interesting to know how the young man thus empowered saw his job.
With only four major productions behind him, Welles was, at the age of twenty-two, already fully formed as a director, in his precocious prime. He had already thought a great deal about both directing and acting, and put some of his thoughts into words in an address that he gave to the Theatre Education League just over a year after the Mercury was created; it was later put out as a leaflet under the title The Director in the Theatre Today. Somewhat wild and sensational, partly defensive, wholly combative, it is, for all its incoherence, a uniquely revealing statement of Welles’s practice and a striking revelation of some of his deepest preoccupations. It is also, in its unguarded rashness, highly revealing both of the man and the artist, simultaneously a manifesto and a confession.
‘The director,’ he says, ‘is the servant of that aggregation of talent, of personality, of force and of potence which is a theatrical company.’ It is the director’s job to make everyone as good as possible within the framework of his particular conception of the play. Unexceptionable sentiments. But, he says, echoing the paradox that Harold Clurman found himself struggling with, he must be not only the servant but also the master. And he finds resistance to his masterfulness. ‘The whole business of producing today,’ he says with barely concealed impatience, ‘has made a new aristocracy in the theatre of great men who used to have to say “Yes, sir” and shut up. Someone eventually has to say shut up.’ And who are these talkative aristocrats that need to be silenced? The composer, the lighting designer, the set designer, the choreographer and ‘the actors in the sanctity of the Pennsylvania Drug Store’, all trying, he says, to decide on individual conceptions of the play. This is impossible; it would result in chaos. Unexceptionable, again, if perhaps a little aggressively put.
The set designer draws his full wrath. ‘The director is exasperated and perpetually hindered today because of what the scene designer has done to his art. A director wants a designer because he is a painter, for no other reason. The director is the man of the theatre. He knows how to build scenery and paint it, make it fit, and make it change. If he does not, he should not be a director. The good director knows all about these things and he can plan them for the scene designer. What he wants from a scene designer is painting – artistry; but the man is incapable of anything but blue velvet. He is such a charlatan craftsman that he is of no human use whatever.’ After this sudden outburst, the much put upon twenty-three-year-old testily declares that he would be better off with ‘a youngster fresh from the academy or studio’. Far from backing down from this extraordinary expression of contempt for the skill of one of his prime collaborators, Welles explicitly asserts his superiority to the lot of them. ‘The director must be better than his scene designer, better than his lighting man – better than all of these people in the field of production at least.’
This frank claim to übermensch status out-Craigs Edward Gordon Craig. The designer’s offence, it would seem, is impertinence: he wants to have a say in the look of the production. That cannot be, because the production, at every level and in every detail, must be the result of one man’s vision: the director. In adumbrating this notion – the auteur theory of theatre direction – Welles goes on to define, very specifically, what has come to be known as the concept production: ‘The great field of the director is of course, in conception … one director, for instance, presenting a Moliére comedy may decide that the whole play shows the fundamental hardness of the world.’ This leads him to erect onstage ‘a setting of stainless steel which he decorates with rose leaves to show a kind of hopeless beauty and a sort of basic cruelty’. He admits that the effect of this ‘may be somewhat mysterious to the audience who sees nothing but a group of steel erections and some rose leaves; but this nevertheless is the man’s conception – and it is a valid one.’ If this sounds familiar, it is because it is the story of the art of theatre of the last thirty years.
Welles is momentarily checked in his vision. There is, he acknowledges, a limitation to this approach: ‘The script of a play in most cases, unless it is a Greek Tragedy, or one cast in the highest tragic mould, is a wandering and loosely knit affair embracing many plays.’ If the director is good enough, he says, he can use all of these many plays and force them into a single evening’s entertainment; if he has a special point to make, he will select only one or two. ‘Ideally he owes it to his audience to give them everything the playwright intended.’ Having clearly scored an own goal, Welles uneasily justifies the failure of the work of the modern directors (and by implication, his own) to reveal the plays in all their richness by invoking ‘the disastrous effect of passing time due to the fact that audiences today become restless after a certain volume of words’. He is unable intellectually to justify his unwillingness to engage with the whole play, wandering and loosely knit though – like King Lear or Hamlet, The Cherry Orchard or The Weavers – it may indeed be. His work in the theatre faithfully followed this youthful programme of isolating the elements in the author’s work that interested him and discarding the rest, as it already had in Macbeth, Faustus and Horse Eats Hat. He never seriously attempted to serve the play; only ever to master it.
The relationship with the actors was a slightly different matter. There was mastery here, too, though he liked actors, as a race, and never ceased to think of himself as one, albeit an actor-manager; the director’s main job was ‘to make of acting a better thing’. Laudable aim! How is it to be achieved? He never says. Instead he outlines an ideal of acting to which he himself aspires. Just as Craig’s work seems to exist in the shadow of Henry Irving, whom he revered as a god, for Welles the figure of the old-time star hovers behind a great deal of what he thought about the theatre and about acting. He and his fellow directors, he says, have failed in the past fifty years to do anything to equal their standard of performance. ‘Women do not scream when Othello cuts his throat any more. Everything is nice and artistic today, but no one is really getting under the skin and scratching the nerves of an audience any longer.’
This goes somewhat beyond the usual nostalgia of actors for work of the generation before the generation before one’s own. Like Craig, Welles believed that there were Actors then, with Voices: colossuses who bestrode the stage; perhaps he was thinking of McMaster. Like Craig, however, instead of addressing the decline of acting, he proposes a form of theatre in which a controlling figure organises the regrettably less remarkable human material currently available into interesting patterns and shapes.
Elsewhere, in some fr
agmentary notes on acting jotted down in the form of lecture notes, he observes that ‘everything in the theatre depends on a great personality. There is nothing so valuable, or lasting, or interesting as its stars. In the last analysis, there is no interest in the theatre without some kind of star.’6 Pursuing this argument to startling lengths, he says, ‘Let us remember this – the theatre is nothing but an actor – it is not only nothing without an actor – it is nothing but an actor. There is nothing in the theatre of great moment but Shakespeare. Audiences don’t need Shakespeare, but the actor does. The function of the playwright is to furnish language for the actor. When acting is good enough, it becomes a substitute for a good play. There are no playwrights today because there are no great actors. And there are no great actors in the theatre today.’
Historically, this is bunk, of course: the Golden Age of Great Acting – that of Garrick and Kean and Macready – was the lowest point of dramatic writing in the last four hundred years. On a poetic plane, however, what he says bears some resemblance both to Artaud and to Craig in their hysterical insistence on liberating the actor from the obligation to be figurative, from the human scale: a longing for prehistoric supermen, dinosaur actors; a yearning for some fantasised Primal Force of Nature to sweep through the theatre and obliterate So-Called Civilisation. ‘Great acting is to give an audience a height and awareness of their own being … to give it an exultation in a spiritual or aesthetic sense. The most important spiritual mission of the actor is to make the audience aware that they belong to the human race. Great acting isolates the auditorium from the rest of the world … and by so doing isolates an audience and intensifies its perception of beauty, of emotion, of being alive.’
How is this thrilling result to be achieved? He rejects modern theory – ‘the great contributions to the art of the theatre have been great assaults on the art of acting’ – and denounces all modern forms of acting. English acting is neurasthenic; French acting is worthless: pure style with no real vitality. He decisively rejects psychology as the proper study of actors, and even more completely rejects the notion of transformation. ‘It is absolutely impossible to give a great performance and have a single characteristic that is not the actor’s own. It is impossible for a great actor to be anything but the same in every performance – absolutely impossible. A man may come out as an old man, saying he’s King Lear, but he’s still the same. If he disguises his personality, he cannot be great. He can disguise his general attack, but he cannot disguise himself. He can eliminate from his own personality certain things which are wrong for a particular role, but he cannot add.’
Personality, he believes, is fixed, immutable – and true. One is who one is, and that’s that. He does not admit of the possibility that personality is a selection of elements shaped by education or experience, consciously or not, into a socially acceptable and effective pattern; that one is many different people according to one’s circumstances or the people one is with; that ‘personality’ is a limitation, albeit a socially necessary one, and that the actor’s gift is to be able to release the discarded or repressed possibilities dormant within himself. Welles won’t allow of that, because he daren’t. The mask is the face, he insists. It mustn’t be questioned. You can hide parts of the mask, but you can’t go beyond the mask, much less take it off. This refusal to go beyond the public front denies the possibility of the actor being taken over by the character. ‘It is through elimination that you create a true thing.’
Welles offers an interesting little parable of the birth of acting. ‘An actor is a story teller. They are actors because there is an urge on the part of the community to exhibit themselves.’ He seems to be describing two completely different things: 1 The urge to tell stories; 2 The urge to exhibit oneself. The urge, therefore, to tell stories in public? But that’s simply a professional story teller; you don’t need to be an actor for that. ‘Then somebody else jumped up, wanting to be the tiger, or the bison, or one of the characters in the story.’ Now he’s talking about acting. Up till now, he’s been describing the writer and/or the director. The urge to impersonate, in its most literal sense, is surely the essence of the actor: to become somebody else. This is not an attractive idea to Welles, who had worked so hard to become what he was. He will accept – has to accept, since so much of his living came from it on the radio – that the urge to imitate is part of being an actor (which it certainly is) but impersonation is something else again. Impersonation is the aspect of the actor’s art which is responsible for the historic distrust of the profession: stealing someone else’s soul, and giving up your own shape: forcing the question: Who are you, really? Impersonation is to be taken over, to give in – but Welles must dominate. He has to be on top.
‘It is impossible to be a great actor unless you deal with your audience,’ he writes. ‘You can deal with them contemptuously – but you must deal with them … a great actor is no greater than what he does to his audience.’ He seems not to admit of the possibility that the audience can influence the actor’s performance: that thanks to them he could transcend himself completely. No. He says: the actor controls the audience totally, that’s what’s so great about it. Equally, he is saying that actors are born, not made, and that there is no system of work on oneself or one’s art that can produce great acting. ‘And there are no great actors in the theatre today.’
In their absence, who then is to control the audience? Why, the director, of course. Noting that the old-time star went out at the same time as the director came in, he observes that ‘nobody has read the last chapter of the detective story and discovered that this old-time star did not go out. He merely sits in the fifth row and is the director.’ As a matter of fact, the old-time star was a director, too, like Irving or Tree; but the point is well made. The director is now the star. Welles rebelled against this idea, while at the same time embodying it to a greater degree than anyone, perhaps, in the history of the theatre. The show was always the star in a Welles production. But Welles doesn’t really approve of ‘the director’ – the others, that is. He berates those ‘American, English and Continental directors of excessive eccentricities imposing their tastes and their inhibitions, their inordinate love of various obscure theatrical elements, on an entire pattern of theatrical culture’. He believes that the director ‘so far has done more harm than good in exact proportion to his ability’. As elsewhere in this little booklet, Welles seems to be arguing with – and often against – himself, both as actor and director, mentally struggling to justify a gut instinct that seems to him somehow wrong. Great actors are this, he says, and then seems suddenly to wonder whether it describes him; directors shouldn’t be that, he says, and then wonders whether he hasn’t just described himself.
The Director in the Theatre Today is a curious document: the work of an arrogant, talented young man, intoxicated with the power of his gift, dreaming of a theatre which would transcend everyday reality and offer astonishing visions, it is fundamentally confused. He longs to be a great actor himself, but postulates a notion of great acting so exalted that no one, including himself, could possibly fulfil it. He clearly believes himself to be a great director, but disapproves of the very idea of directing as a feeble substitute for the great acting that should properly be holding the stage. He loves great writing, but believes that that, too, is secondary to great acting – if only there were any about. This obsession with the Great Actor, or the Old-Time Star, seems (as, again, it did for Craig) to have a little something to do with a longed-for Father, the superhuman, lordly figure, whom one aspires to be. There is a lurking feeling that what he himself wants to be is not a director at all, but an old-time star. If only one were an old-time star, people would respect one, one would be someone. Many years later, interviewed for the BBC by Leslie Megahey, he said, ‘I have a kind of personality which requires that I play certain kinds of parts, or I discombobulate the scene … there used to be a form, a division of actors in France, in the Comédie Française, who were called king actor
s. And I’m a king actor, maybe a bad one, but that’s what I am, you see. And I have to play authoritative roles.’ He adds: ‘but Truffaut was quite right when he says about me that I show the fragility of the great authority, and that’s the thing I do.’
This comment of Truffaut’s is a dazzling aperçu, a key to all of Welles’s acting; his power, while undeniable, seems assumed, put on – like a false nose – and thus vulnerable. It seems as if behind the king, there is a little boy rather desperately playing at being a king. Thus his portrayal of power comes to seem a critique of power: man, proud man, drest in a little brief authority. There is something unself-convinced, both about the role and the actor. It is doubly poignant; a kingly personage whose authority is questionable, played by an actor whose own claim to greatness is not believed in by himself. He could only be, in his own eyes, a great actor, if he was to be an actor at all; and yet he feels shifty about making the claim. It is as if it were a reluctant and unsuitable destiny; like Barrymore, in a remark already quoted from an awkward exchange with Peter Bogdanovich, he ‘played the part of an actor because that was the role he’d been given by life’.7 The notion of acting – great acting – as a burden he’d been born to, willy-nilly, is a common one with Welles.
