Orson Welles, Vol I

by Simon Callow

  Over the two years of the programme’s run, a galaxy of stars appeared: Beatrice Lillie, Katharine Hepburn, Burgess Meredith, Helen Hayes in the first couple of months alone. The choice of works was more downmarket, less idiosyncratic, than those of the Mercury of the Air, often featuring bestsellers of the previous decade; though from time to time, Welles remade successes from the Mercury seasons. Some of the zip seemed to have gone out of it. ‘The thing became a constant squabble with the soup-maker – a compromise between Saturday Evening Post material and material not necessarily highbrow but of some human and aesthetic interest,’ wrote Houseman. ‘Alas an end of our fun.’

  The constant squabble grew in intensity over the two years; shortly after launching the new programme, however, Welles and Houseman became involved in a new theatrical venture compared to which a month in the Gulag Archipelago would have seemed fun. This was the much announced, much postponed Wars of the Roses cycle Five Kings, the one remaining Mercury project still to be honoured. In the heady days of May 1938, at the end of their triumphant first season, Houseman had entered into partnership with the Theatre Guild, to co-produce the vast – and as yet unwritten – adaptation of the two parts of Henry IV, Henry V, Henry VI (all three parts), and Richard III. The Guild, for nearly twenty years the dominant organisation in the American theatre, was brilliantly administered and run, but currently uninspired; much of its vigour had evaporated when the two factions that became the Group Theatre and the Playwrights’ Company had broken away. The Mercury seemed irresistibly vital, and apparently infallibly successful. ‘One of our board members, in an objective mood, analysed our situation,’ wrote Lawrence Langner in his sly, witty memoir, The Magic Curtain, ‘and decided that what we needed was more contact with “youth”.’

  They were willing to pay for their rejuvenation: Houseman struck a brilliant deal by which the Mercury contributed only $10,000 (five in cash, five in services) to the total budget of $40,000, while availing itself of the Guild’s organisation and (most attractive of all) its built-in subscription audience in several major cities (Boston, Baltimore, Washington, Philadelphia) to which they would tour before opening in New York. For Houseman, there was also a pleasing personal dimension to the arrangement; only four years before, Langner and his partner had sacked him as director of Maxwell Anderson’s Valley Forge. The boot was on the other foot – for the moment, at any rate. It seemed at the time another coup for the Mercury, a clever liaison with an older and maturer partner, and a stunningly audacious idea in itself. The plan was to stage the Falstaff-dominated first half (Two and a Half Kings?) separately, only rehearsing the second half, with Welles as Richard III, once that was successfully running. Finally the two evenings would play alternately; both would be given in one day on Wednesdays and Saturdays. ‘The performance of Shakespeare’s historical plays in batches has become a commonplace of festival showmanship,’3 wrote Houseman. ‘In 1939 it was a bold and original notion.’

  The idea clearly had its roots in his Todd School Richard III adaptation. It was, in Welles’s mind, a means of creating a recognisable profile for a number of plays which (with the exception of Richard, one of Barrymore’s great triumphs) had rarely been seen in America. Announcing the production at a luncheon to celebrate Shakespeare’s birthday, Welles said: ‘Some of the plays of Shakespeare have been lost to the living theatre. My new production is an effort to return these to theatre audiences. I hope our performance will make these more lucid.’4 He continued in his neo-Spenglerian vein: ‘so much of everything we seek in art is to be found in the great Shakespeare heritage which will be existing in the world when everything we believe in has ceased to exist.’ This was his credo: great art, above all the plays of Shakespeare, was the one talisman against the welling evil all around and within us. There were, of course, other, simpler motives. Looking back only a year later, Houseman was inclined to give these prominence. ‘I allowed Orson to use the theatre not only as an instrument of personal aggrandisement but as a tilting ground for a particular, senseless and idle competition with an uninteresting and essentially unimportant theatrical competitor by the name of Maurice Evans,’5 he wrote to Virgil Thomson. ‘Five Kings was never a pure aesthetic conception – it was conditioned in its conception and its execution by a desire to go Evans one better in Shakespearean production.’

  Ambition and rivalry have powerfully fuelled many a great performance and production; purity of motive is no prerequisite for great art. Houseman is untypically prim here; though there is no question that Welles’s feelings about Evans were somewhat unhinged. Thirty years later, he was still in a lather about him. ‘Almost any bum can get a crack at Boris Godunov or Lear,’6 he told Peter Bogdanovich. ‘Sometimes the bums even make it with the public. Look at Maurice Evans.’ ‘Bad?’ enquires Bogdanovich. ‘Worse!’ Welles roars back. ‘He was poor.’ The distinction is a good one. In every generation, there are a number of actors whose success mystifies their fellow players. For reasons that are never entirely clear the press and the public appear to elect to the summit of the profession actors of no discernible physical, vocal, intellectual or sexual distinction. They are constantly cast in leading roles, and are invariably well reviewed in them. If there are prizes to be won, they will win them; when they do, they are held up as an example to all: the good little boys and girls of the business. It would appear that Maurice Evans was one of these: teachers’ pet for a whole generation of American reviewers. He has left almost no trace behind him, apart from his glowing encomia in the pages of the American press. People who saw his performances can remember nothing about them, though, equally, they can find nothing on which to fault him. He was intelligent, polished, well spoken, pleasant enough to look at, with the small features of a nicely groomed toy dog, an impeccable professional down to his manicured finger-nails.

  In short, he was everything that Orson Welles was not. Fifteen years older than Welles, the English actor had arrived in America to replace Basil Rathbone as Katharine Cornell’s Romeo. He had been acclaimed for that, and for pretty well everything else he did. His Napoleon in St Helena, his Richard II and his Hamlet (favourably compared to Gielgud’s) were lauded to the heavens. It was when he played, to ever riper superlatives, the role of Falstaff (‘a part which Orson regarded,’7 said Houseman, ‘as he did every great classical part, as exclusively his own’) in repertory with Richard II, that Welles was goaded beyond endurance. Five Kings was, as Houseman put it, ‘a means of dealing a crushing blow to that English upstart’. It would ‘by its sheer magnitude … reduce Mr Evans once and for all to his true pygmy stature.’ It was not to be; Evans’s career continued unchecked. There followed a triumphant cockney Malvolio, then Macbeth with Judith Anderson; with Dial M for Murder he became a boulevard star and a millionaire. His last great role was – a final slap in the face for Welles – a definitive Captain Shotover in Heartbreak House. Nothing, Peter Ustinov notes in Dear Me, rankles as much as the undeserved success of contemporaries; Evans’s career never ceased to bewilder and enrage Welles. For the purposes of Five Kings, this excess of contempt had an unfortunate effect on the clarity of his thinking about the vast project.

  Meanwhile, the publicity machine swung into action. The first task was to explain the resurrection of the Mercury. Herbert Drake (later Welles’s personal publicist) protested in his ‘Playbill’ column in the New York Herald Tribune that reports of the Mercury’s death had been greatly exaggerated: ‘That subdued muttering you hear these days is made by the disgruntled mourners over the Mercury Theatre’s bier who are being set on their ears by the renewed activity in that most stimulating of the current theatres.’8 Five Kings, he reports, ‘the much heralded and much disbelieved Five Kings’ is cast and ready to go into rehearsal. The Mercury is dead; long live the Mercury! Drake reports that the details of the operation of the tour were being worked on; the problem was how to combine it with the radio operation. ‘John Houseman, partner and detail arranger for the soaring ideas of Welles,’ says Drake, in
a phrase that must have delighted Houseman, ‘suspects that the company will give three matinees instead.’ Campbell’s Playhouse was transmitted on a weekday; there could be no question of ambulance ferries between onstage appearances. Something much more elaborate was being schemed. ‘Welles’s participation in the radio broadcasts will be by remote control. He will speed to the nearest large station and will recite his lines in tune with his unseen supporting cast here in New York.’ It was not enough that he was attempting to play one of the greatest roles in dramatic literature, at the same time directing a company of forty-two players; not enough that he was attempting to forge seven sprawling plays into two coherent evenings in the theatre. He also had to be involved in lightning dashes to far-flung studios to record radio shows under the most peculiar circumstances. Had Welles attempted to swim the channel, you feel, he would have been performing his conjuring act at the same time; had he played the ‘Emperor’ Concerto, it would have been while cooking lobster thermidor. It was part of the myth; people expected it. He rather liked it himself.

  The press releases continued, stressing the scale of ‘the glamorous project’. ‘Never before has the entire series [of Histories] been coordinated for presentation in their historic sequence … probably one of the most ambitious events ever to be undertaken on the English-speaking stage.’ Expected contemporary parallels (which required no pointing as the second European Civil War of the Twentieth Century grew daily more imminent) were avoided except in the most general terms; instead Houseman’s press release shrewdly played to the escapist longings of the American public in 1939. ‘Picture the interest we should feel today seeing a trilogy giving the history of the House of Windsor, concluding, perhaps, with Edward VIII’s farewell address, and we can know why the histories were so popular in their own day.’ Aware of a need to prepare audiences for the epic quality of the chronicle plays, he added that ‘only by combining them can an audience grasp both their historical significance and the development of their characters as they move from play to play … Falstaff, Hal and Hotspur are three great characters, but in Henry IV, Part I they are both incomplete. Only when their scenes in Part 1 are succeeded by the ones in Part 2 do they really work their spell.’ This of course is true, and it is also true that there is a considerable amount of both parts of the play which does not directly concern the three central characters. Welles’s approach to the text was, as before, that of an actor-manager; his cutting of it served above all to focus on the great roles and eliminate what was not essential to them. Moreover, he would be stealing a march over that fraud Evans, who never played Part 2, though even he had interpolated into Part 1 the Recruiting scene from that play.

  The publicity generated considerable excitement, as well as a certain amount of good-natured joshing about the length of time the project had taken to materialise. Welles’s prodigiousness was now the subject of wry humour. A cartoon in The New Yorker shows him at his desk, a pair of scissors in his hand, a pot of glue at his side, hacking up the Complete Works while Shakespeare looks sternly on through the window against a Manhattan skyline. The expression on his face is of a sort of childish intensity, his tongue slightly protruding from his mouth. The cast he had assembled was starrier than usual for the Mercury: his Hotspur was John Emery, Laertes to Gielgud’s Broadway Hamlet and, famously and disastrously, Antony to his wife Tallulah Bankhead’s Cleopatra. Hal was Burgess Meredith, hot from triumphs in Maxwell Anderson, accustomed, therefore, to verse, but not to Shakespeare in which this would be his debut. Welles’s Falstaff would complete the central trio of characters identified by Houseman; but there was a fourth crucial piece of casting to be accomplished: Chorus.

  Welles extended the function of the Chorus – who figures so prominently in Henry V, but not elsewhere – so that he became, in effect, the historian Holinshed from whom Shakespeare had drawn so much of the detail of the play. The additional text was taken directly from the Chronicles. Welles’s first choice for the part was Thornton Wilder, who had recently scored something of a success as the Stage Manager in his own play Our Town; when Wilder demurred, Welles asked Robert Speaight, the English actor who had created the role of Becket in Murder in the Cathedral, which he had toured in America. Morris Ankrum, an experienced Shakespearean director and actor, was to play Henry IV. There was thus great strength at the top of the company. The rest of the actors were drawn from the usual pool: people from earlier Mercury shows like Edgar Barrier, Eustace Wyatt and George Duthie plus a handful of trainees and stage managers (Dick Baer, Bill Alland, Dick Wilson); Lawrence Fletcher who had played the title role in Julius Caesar on the road; radio actors (Erskine Sandford, John Adair, Frank Readick); a number of rather vapid actresses, following the pattern Houseman had discerned at the time of Caesar; the vaudeville artist Gus Schilling as Bardolph; and Francis Carpenter, still screaming, still fiercely loyal, still apparently indispensable to Welles. A more unusual piece of casting was that of James Morcom as Shadow. Morcom was the designer of Five Kings. In name only, of course. Welles’s adaptation was specifically intended to play on a set of which the essential element was a turntable. Morcom’s task was to make this scenic idea actually work. It defeated him; but then, Five Kings defeated everyone.

  Lawrence Langner claimed to have foreseen the tragedy at the first demonstration of the model. ‘I was introduced to a young lady who showed me a large model consisting of a rotating stage carrying miscellaneous-looking structures made out of pieces of cigar boxes connecting into something that resembled a mediaeval city made of banana crates and painted dark brown. I remarked that it would be quite impossible to tour the play, as it would take at least two days to set up this cumbersome scenery in a theatre, in travelling from one town to the next.’9 This insight was swept away in the general enthusiasm inspired by the notion. Jean Rosenthal (the ‘young lady’ referred to by Langner) wrote later that ‘once again, Orson was startlingly lucid about what he wanted and how it should look’. Two very attractive woodcuts by James Morcom give an excellent sense of the rough-hewn London that Welles wanted to put on stage: with its towering street scenes constructed out of bare wood (beech, birch and maple, cut into narrow slats), it was The Shoemaker’s Holiday on wheels.

  The settings were contained on a twenty-eight-foot revolve, and were constantly to be replaced or reversed during the action to create new locations. There were two sorts of scenes: those set in London (with the royal castle and the Boar’s Head tavern, a street running through centre) and those set on the battlefield, where mounds and hillocks were created by wooden ramps. There was in addition a small flight of stairs to give a second level in the tavern scenes, a wooden curtain and gothic screen for playing scenes on the apron while the setting was being changed from behind, plus, more informally, a traveller curtain, in front of which Speaight as Chorus/Holinshed would stand. And finally – crucially – there was the turntable, designed not merely to facilitate changes from one scene to the next but to create the effect, as Andrea Nouryeh describes it, of a travelling shot, the actors seeming to pass through a moving landscape.

  It is easy to see why not only Rosenthal and the technical staff but the actors too were excited by the concept. It offered an eventful fluidity far away both from the measured progress of set-bound productions and from the scenic anonymity of those which depend entirely on light to change the location. Moreover, the cinematic concept of travelling sequences on the turntable (pioneered by Piscator and Brecht in Berlin) offered the possibility of something quite new – or perhaps something quite old, a reversion, as so often with Welles, to the Victorian theatre and its travelling painted-canvas panoramas which Wagner put to such extraordinary use in Parsifal. The difficulty with productions that are inextricably linked to machinery is, first, that the machinery must work; and secondly, that the action must be rehearsed on it. Neither condition obtained on Five Kings. Rehearsals took place in a room in the Claridge Hotel which was much too small for the large company, even without the turntable. In the abse
nce of that item, Welles found that there was little he could do in terms of staging, so he simply stayed away for a great deal of the allocated five weeks. Richard Barr stood in for him – ‘much to the annoyance of Burgess Meredith. He was monumentally impatient with my twenty-one-year-old interpretation, but’10 – unlike his boss – ‘I did know the lines.’ Denied the experience of Welles’s twenty-three-year-old interpretation, Meredith took to staying away as well (after one spree he telegraphed Welles, ‘Dear Orson, Where am I? Buzz’); in fact, he and Welles frequently stayed away together. They had become soul-mates before rehearsals started, both in love with the idea of the actor as outsider, roaring their way through the night in various dives and various arms, both extravagantly moved by Great Art (Meredith took to his bed – whether alone or accompanied, history does not relate – on hearing of the death of Yeats). ‘I was fascinated by the talents of Orson Welles,’ he said many years later in an interview, ‘and I joined him in Five Kings. We thought we’d combine our immortal talents, but we shared colossal disaster instead.’