Orson Welles, Vol I

by Simon Callow

  This anxiety did not prevent him from engaging with Welles in huge rows, one of which Welles describes in his screenplay for The Cradle Will Rock: ‘the entire theatre is treated to the alarums and discursions of a classic HOUSEMAN-WELLES difference of opinion. As an actor, trained to project iambic pentameters to the furthest reaches of large rehearsal galleries, ORSON is, inevitably, the noisiest and therefore sounds the more aggressive … HOUSEMAN is busily, but quietly, kindling the flames … if ORSON can roar like a lion, JACK HOUSEMAN has a smiling mouth which “biteth like an adder”.’ But the relationship was as complicated for Welles as it was for Houseman; Welles required approval, as is made clear in a speech a little later on in the same screenplay:

  ORSON

  And Jack, it’s all done with these small pieces of glass – An elegant solution; and you – you don’t even deign to look.

  This is fairly frankly stated: Daddy, look at me. Houseman’s one card was to withhold his approval, while giving Welles pretty well everything else he wanted.

  At this precise moment, however, after the catastrophic first preview of Julius Caesar, both men were equally frightened, and set to work to salvage the show. The sound score was dropped; various other technical modifications were made. There were more cuts to an already very slim text including most of the Octavius/Antony scenes, perhaps because Francis Carpenter, as Octavius, couldn’t handle the part of the ruthless emergent emperor. The crucial scene that required work was, of course, that of Cinna the Poet. They sat down, Welles at his desk, his steak in front of him. ‘Orson would argue with you as he ate, and you got angrier. I thought we’d reached an impasse,’21 says Norman Lloyd. ‘But no – he went my way. And when he went your way! – I played the first part of the scene for pantomimic comedy. Got a lot of laughs. Just becoming aware of this crowd and thinking they had recognised me as a celebrity. Stuffed my pockets with these poems. He seized that right away. They moved in to kill – I was playing it as the poet laureate. He moved these guys in one by one – and the lighting was fantastic – blood red – the set was red too. The way he moved me – there were laughs, and then the laughs got chilly. Taking out these poems. Orson’s direction: the last thing I scream is THE POET. Rush down the ramp – I just disappeared – just this hand, bathed in red light.’

  As so often, solving a particular scene had clarified the entire production. The scene became, in Welles’s word, the fulcrum of the show: by creating a moment of absolute realism, the concept was made to pay off brilliantly, in a way that stretched both backwards and forwards through the rest of the production. The rage of a roused mob, their destruction of an innocent, rather foolish creature, someone immediately recognisable from real life, gave the whole production its authenticity: ‘Its great success was as a political drama written the night before,’22 as Lloyd said. ‘It was Costa-Gavras.’

  The previews resumed; every performance was better than the one before. It needed to be. There was no euphoria; indeed, Coulouris stood in the wings on the penultimate preview, predicting that by Saturday, the Mercury would have folded. It was this preview, a matinee, that, by special dispensation, John Mason Brown, the powerful critic of the New York Post, attended. After the show, he went backstage (unusual behaviour for a critic) and expressed himself enraptured. ‘When he started acting out the whole play, we knew we were a hit.’23 Even more unusually for a critic, he made a suggestion: that the show should end with Antony’s elegy for Brutus. He had clearly grasped the idea that Brutus was the central character. Exhilarated by his enthusiasm, they agreed; Octavius’ final entrance was cut. At the official première that night (in 1937, a first night was crucial: virtually the entire critical fraternity was present) Mason Brown’s response was confirmed: the production became itself, fully, for the first time. From the moment the audience walked into the auditorium to find the New York city fireman required to be present by law, actually onstage, to Coulouris’s ringing delivery, an hour and three quarters and no interval later, of his second funeral oration of the evening (‘And say to all the world this was a man’) the audience was held breathless, erupting at the end in wild applause. Detaching himself from the carousing which followed the triumphant curtain calls, Houseman went out to Times Square to catch the early editions of the newspapers; finding that every one was a rave, he tried to find Welles. Failing to do so, he drifted into a bar, picked up a girl, and took her back to his apartment, where they made love, as he tells us in Run-Through, ‘without a word’ – a characteristically vivid and somehow embarrassing detail: it seems as if he were making love to the wrong person.

  The reviews were indeed overwhelming. Though by no means unanimous, they all testified to the fact that something unmissable had happened in the theatre. The reconstruction of a theatre event is always a hazardous matter, but in assessing the reviews of Caesar, we have a useful point of reference. Nearly a year after the first night, Welles and the company recorded as part of the Mercury Theatre of the Air radio series a severely truncated version of the play, interspersed with readings from Plutarch by the leading political commentator of the day, H.V. Kaltenborn. The cast was essentially the same as onstage, (Blitzstein’s music was used, too) and from it we have a fairly good indication of certain aspects of the production. The physical impact, such a vital feature of the show, is obviously absent, but we get a strong sense of how the actors used the verse, and to some extent, how they characterised their roles: Welles is quiet, measured, meditative – a little soporific, in fact; Gabel (Cassius) is intense, neurotic; Holland (Caesar) is stiff and plummy; Coulouris, as Antony, is electrifying: harsh but charismatic, nowhere more so than in the funeral oration over Caesar’s body, which he strikingly orchestrates. All speak in more or less English accents; all handle the verse straightforwardly, with little sense of music – not that Caesar is an especially melodious text. Except for Welles, there is a great urgency about the reading; there is a feeling that space is being made for Brutus’s temperate and considered utterances. It may, of course, have been very different in the theatre. Most reviewers, anyway, were more interested in describing the physical aspect of the production than the acting; above all they were taken by the concept, the energy and the daring. Variety got the mood in its headline: BARD BOFFOLA!

  True to his backstage effusions, John Mason Brown led in the New York Post with the sort of review that guarantees queues round the block: ‘Of all the many new plays and productions the season has so far revealed, this modern-dress version of the mob mischief and demagoguery which can follow the assassination of a dictator is by all odds the most exciting, the most imaginative, the most topical, the most awesome, and the most absorbing. The touch of genius is upon it.’24 He might have been quoting from Skipper Hill: ‘Shakespeare ceases at the Mercury to be there darling of the College Board of Examiners. Unfettered and with all the vigor that was his when he spoke to the groundlings of his own day, he becomes the contemporary of all of us who are Undergroundlings.’ Finally, he did the nicest thing a critic can do: he created of his enthusiasm a few memorable phrases that made his readers feel that they would have failed in their duty to themselves if they had missed the show. ‘Something deathless and dangerous in the world sweeps past you down the darkened aisles at the Mercury and takes possession of the proud, gaunt stage. It is something fearful and ominous, something turbulent and to be dreaded, which distends the drama to include the life of nations as well as of men. It is an ageless warning, made in such arresting terms that it not only gives a new vitality to an ancient story but unrolls in your mind’s eye a map of the world which is increasingly splotched with sickening colors.’ He says, in effect, that what happens on the stage of the Mercury is more important than a mere play. Above all, he seems to be exhilarated by Welles’s sense of freedom in telling the story his own way; a freedom which is, nowadays, the underlying assumption of any production. ‘If the play ceases to be Shakespeare’s tragedy, it does manage to become ours.’

  The acting was widely li
ked. The New York Times’s Brooks Atkinson (describing the production as ‘modern variations on the theme of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar’)25 thought Welles’s Brutus ‘an admirable study in the somber tones of reverie and calm introspection: it is all kindness, reluctance and remorse.’ (Mason Brown similarly had written of Welles’s uncommon gift for speaking great words simply: ‘the deliberation of his speech is the mark of the honesty which flames within him. His reticent Brutus is at once a foil to the staginess of the production as a whole …’) Once the physical impact of the production had been absorbed, Atkinson – returning to the play the following week – found himself troubled by something, something which troubled many others: the political meaning of the production. What was Welles saying? And was it what Shakespeare was saying? ‘In the Shakespeare ethic, Brutus is the murderer of a ruler … Shakespeare was in no mood to champion revolutions against the established government … and this fact has the somewhat ambiguous effect on a modern-dress Julius Caesar of implying that there is no use rebelling against a fascist state – which may be true, although a great many people hate to think so.’ The Daily Worker, while delighted by the demise of Brutus – ‘a wavering liberal’26 – complained that the idea of one dictator following another was a fascist notion; the production was guilty, he found – using the language of Moscow and Lunarcharsky – of ‘formalism’. Especially regrettable for the Worker was the ‘slanderous’ picture of the masses. Political analysis was outside the scope of most critics (though Stark Young made a strong point about Welles’s failure to grasp Shakespeare’s notion of aristocracy). The great thrill was that the Mercury had made Shakespeare seem newly written: ‘It is as if,’ according to John Anderson in the New York Journal American, ‘a great poet had risen in our midst only yesterday, a poet who seems to understand the movies as profoundly as he does the human heart.’27

  Of the acting, Anderson (sharp and sometimes hard to please) said, with careful choice of words, that it was ‘the complete expression of the idea’. He was not unaware of limitations in Welles’s acting, while admiring his Brutus. ‘His stage effectiveness lies almost entirely in his voice, for while his mannerisms are less noticeable than they used to be, they do touch the portrait, though they put no blemish on such magnificent passages as his speech in the forum.’ Coulouris and Gabel (‘hardly the lean and hungry Cassius, is altogether admirable as a short and stoutish one’) are singled out for praise.

  By violent contrast (and it must be remembered that virtually all criticism, then as now, is hyperbole, in one direction or the other), Richard Lockridge in the New York Sun wrote that the more successful scenes were those which permitted mass movement; these went ‘with electric quickness’. ‘It is,’ he continued, ‘when the play turns to individuals that its tempo slumps, perhaps because the method is essentially opposed to individualism, perhaps merely because the actors are not as expert as the electricians.’28 For Lockridge, the ‘somber tones’ and conversational reticence of Welles’s Brutus – so admired by others – were an obstacle; he identifies a life-long tendency of Welles’s acting in a neat phrase. ‘Mr Welles directs for the theatre, but he acts for literature, and the two have never seemed further apart … it is Mr Welles who puts the brakes on, and if the production drags, I’m afraid it is his fault.’

  The critical impact of the cutting was sharply assessed by the influential Edith Isaacs, writing in Theatre Monthly. ‘With most of Antony excised to keep the character of Brutus always as the focus of attention, this elimination of contrasts dulls the interest, releases the grip of the story before the play is done. It seems as if the slow and over-thoughtful pacing of the performance might, to emotional advantage, well have been hastened to make room for more of the actual play, which is not a philosophic study but spirited melodrama.’29 Perhaps it might have been franker if they had called the play Brutus, after all.

  For the most part, even the severest critics allowed the production its vitality, even Stark Young, the most respected of current practitioners, but he was none the less ‘on the whole pretty much disappointed’.30 What has happened, he says, putting his finger precisely on Welles’s method, is ‘the hitting of one of Shakespeare’s fundamental themes and freeing it from certain conceptions, motifs and qualifications, so that it is thus brought straight out into the audience, the present-day American audience, watching it there in the Mercury Theatre.’ But this, he implies, is not enough.

  Even less was it enough for Mary McCarthy, writing in the little magazine, Partisan Review. McCarthy (somewhat dauntingly described on the blurb of her collected reviews – ‘the pathology of the New York Theatre’ – as ‘quite possibly the cleverest writer the US has ever produced’) regarded Welles from the beginning with suspicion. Despite this bias, her accounts of the productions are invariably illuminating. She applies a lethally sharp critical mind to matters which are generally the subject of rhetoric, and, as noted above, hyperbole, positive or negative. ‘The production of Caesar turns into a battleground between Mr Welles’s play and Shakespeare’s play. Mr Welles has cut the play to pieces – turned Cassius into a shrewd and jovial comedian; Caesar into a mechanical, expressionless robot; Antony into a repulsive and sinister demagogue.’31 As for Welles’s performance, she goes for the jugular. ‘Cloying and monotonous, his performance seemed to be based on the single theory that if you drop your voice two registers below those of the other actors, you will give an impression of innocent saintliness.’

  Her peroration decisively rejects Welles’s approach to the play, and to plays in general: ‘if the classics are to play an important role in the American theatre, their contents ought at least to be examined. To encrust them with traditional ornament or to cut them up into newspaper headlines is to shut them off from the world and the theatre. Acting as an art cannot exist by itself; it must feed on the material of the plays.’ This was the essence of the critical debate which centred on Welles (George Jean Nathan made the point more jokily in Newsweek: ‘playing Julius Caesar in modern dress strikes me as being of a piece with playing Room Service in togas’),32 and it is one which still rages today: do you use a play, or do you realise it? For Welles, there was no question.

  Nathan had a more serious point to make in his Scribner’s piece on the production; hoping that ‘the hysterical critical endorsement’33 visited on its initial offering would not turn its head, he put their achievement in perspective. ‘For a similar employment of lights, let the critics be reminded of the productions at least twenty years ago of Linnebach and Pasetti in Munich. As for a similar employment of platforms of different levels, let them be referred to the productions of Jessner and Pirchan in Berlin at about the same time. As for the bare walls, let them be prompted on the earliest productions of the celebrated Habima troupe. Good luck, Mr Welles and Mr Houseman, and don’t let ’em hear you chuckle.’

  Mr Welles and Mr Houseman were, indeed, chuckling fit to bust. The show was an enormous success, and so was their new theatre. The show’s triumph was absolutely associated with Welles’s name. Earlier productions at Project 891 and in Harlem had seemed to be somehow a joint effort (though no one was quite sure who had done what): Caesar was Welles’s alone. Jean Rosenthal wrote a slightly bitter little paragraph on the subject: ‘Julius Caesar opened with tremendous éclat. Houseman explained, exactly how I have forgotten, that despite the incidental courtesies of the profession, it was important that Orson be given sole credit for everything. However, it did get around in the profession that Sam had designed the scenery and I had done the lighting.’34 John Anderson had written at the beginning of his notice: ‘Let it be set down at once, without “ifs” and “buts” of a niggling season, that this is the most exciting event in our theatre … it would have been a fascinating experiment even if it had failed. That it succeeds so splendidly is enough to blow the hinges off the dictionary. Since Orson Welles is the moving spirit of this new group, and this Caesar’s deeply affecting Brutus, his must be most of the credit.’ He was absolutel
y right: Welles was the moving spirit: his was the audacious approach, his the ceaseless invention, his the adrenalising inspiration. As in any collective activity, however, no one person is responsible for the end result.

  Collective achievement is hard to personalise. It is in the nature of the press and its hand-maiden, the press office, to simplify things, to seek and to some extent create larger-than-life, uniquely gifted and effective individuals, to build them up even further – and then to break them, which makes an even better story. This was a process which found a willing ally in Welles. Six months later, in a Time magazine profile (MARVELOUS BOY), events surrounding Julius Caesar had become mythologised in the paper’s unmistakable prose: ‘After a succession of muffled death-rattles backstage, the Mercury came to its first play’s first night. On November 11th it produced Julius Caesar. On November 12th the public was informed that Shakespeare’s five-act classic had: 1) been turned into a one-act cyclone, 2) on a bare stage, 3) in modern dress, 4) with modern meaning, 5) gone over with the loudest bang that Shakespeare lovers could recall. And decidedly First in Rome had been Director Orson Welles for managing the entire production, Actor Orson Welles for making Brutus come alive in a blue-serge suit.’35 The ‘muffled death-rattles’ became a distant memory; it was as if everything had proceeded according to a preordained plan. Welles was interviewed and photographed everywhere; no paper could afford not to carry news of the latest phenomenon.