by Simon Callow
The absence of both leading men from rehearsals (there was no question but that they were the stars of the show; the contract with the Theatre Guild bound both of them to do two more shows for the Guild) was a serious limitation; when one of them was also the director, it became crippling. When Welles did show up, he was never on time, and filled most of what was left of the rehearsal period with elaborate explanations for his lateness. Houseman noted his use of anecdote, no longer as a rehearsal technique, à la Guthrie McClintic, but as a work evasion tactic. There were cycles of stories: ‘those vaguely based on truth … including encounters with Isadora Duncan in Paris … bullfighting … and the Glaoui. There was also an Oriental cycle … then there were fantasies that were invented on the spot out of sheer exuberance or to cover up some particularly outrageous piece of behaviour.’11 The anecdotal filibustering technique had another use, too: avoiding surveillance by the Theatre Guild, representatives of whom would drop by from time to time to see how things were coming along. All pretence of rehearsal would be suspended, Welles would call for a bottle of whiskey, and the actors would sit round while he entertained. Eventually the Theatre Guild people would depart, none the wiser. Richard France notes that the Guild, among the shrewdest, most experienced and effective operators in the American theatre was ‘inordinately willing to suspend their disbelief and abandon their usual procedures in the hopes of cashing in on the Mercury Theatre’s mysterious aura of success’.12 This was unlike anything they had ever seen before; it might just work.
Welles’s one interest in Five Kings was staging it; without the turntable, he had no motive to work. Indeed, one of the problems Welles had increasingly to face in the theatre was that, denied the enormous resources of the Federal Theatre Project, his method of working without any plan, without even any tentative moves, of depending on the inspiration of the moment and what the other actors and the setting could offer him, was totally impractical. Only a fully subsidised European State Theatre could have provided him with what he wanted: the full set in the rehearsal room from the first day. So he stayed away, until the technical period, when he could really work on the set. Meanwhile the other actors struggled on as best they could. This was not very well at all. They were in the dark, despite all the preparatory work that had been done when the show was going to be part of the Mercury’s New York seasons: all the research into the historical background, previous productions and past performances; all the company fencing lessons and martial technique classes (including special classes in cross-bow work). All this good work continued. But not only were the leading actors and the director rarely in attendance, there was no script. There had been no read-through; no one had seen the complete adaptation, for the good reason that there wasn’t one. Chubby Sherman’s joke to The New York Times that ‘one actor asked another actor in our bunch when we’d start rehearsing Henry IV. The second answered: “Oh, when Orson’s finished writing it”’ no longer seemed so funny.
After reciting a couple of the speeches of Chorus from Henry V to immense approval, Robert Speaight was told not to bother to come to rehearsals at all; he needn’t come back till the technical period in Boston. He was the linkman; as there was nothing to link yet, what would be the point of hanging around? It may be suspected that Welles was happy not to have the punctilious, slightly pretentious actor around; it might have made him feel nervous. There is a strong sense, through all the whiskey fumes and raconteurial bonhomie, of a growing terror about the reality of getting the monster on the stage; but also of a growing resentment at the pressure. All work and no play was making Orson a very grumpy boy. He wanted to have fun; instead he had to work. Why had it all become so difficult? His relationship with Meredith gave him a sort of encouragement; the two naughty boys who had to be broken up. They played truant together. The Director As Truant would make an interesting, if brief, study, Welles being pretty well the only instance in recorded history. The director, if he does nothing else, simply has to be there, and he has to be there on time. Punctuality is not merely the politeness of directors; it is their raison d’être. They create the rhythm, the attitudes, the energy of the enterprise. On Five Kings, Welles was abdicating from that crucial responsibility.
Houseman adds an interesting gloss: he believed Welles to be involved in competitive debauchery with his own dead father: ‘having demonstrated his superiority as an artist and a public figure, he must now defeat his rival on his own grounds – that of Champagne Charley, the man about town … it was as though he was determined to bury the ghost of Richard Welles, once and for all, under the mass of his own excesses.’13 If there was a ghost spurring him on, it is much more likely to have been that of his mother, demanding more and better work from him, refusing to allow him to derive satisfaction from his achievements; the excess was an attempt to escape from that nagging inner voice. Houseman’s description of the scale of his indulgence details the meals, each one a feast; the nightly consumption of one and two bottles of whiskey or brandy; the sexual prowess ‘which was reported in statistical detail … also, apparently, immense’. A final detail of Houseman’s is striking: Welles had bought himself a huge new apartment on East 57th Street, replete with stained glass windows, balcony and monumental fireplace, filled, Houseman says, with enormous furniture: an odd preview of Charles Foster Kane’s ‘Xanadu’. The whole catalogue suggests someone who on the one hand needed to lose himself, on the other to make himself feel bigger. In fact all he succeeded in was becoming bigger – not feeling it.
Eventually (a week later than planned; Baltimore had been dropped) the technical period in Boston arrived: now everything would fall into place. But of course, the precise opposite happened. Jean Rosenthal and her team were as well prepared as they could be; her lighting plot was as thorough as she could make it without Welles’s input. The set was up, and it seemed to be more or less as conceived. However, due to one of a thousand failures of communication, its basic colour had been changed from burgundy to silvery-grey without Millia Davenport, the costume designer, having been notified. She had based the costumes on silver and peach – disastrous against the new colour scheme; virtually every costume had to be remade, dyed or altered in some way. But this was as nothing compared to the gradual realisation that the show, which had never been run from beginning to end, would last about five and a half hours. Panic cutting was immediately undertaken. The forty-six scenes of the three-act show were reduced to thirty-two; entire characters and sub-plots were axed. These cuts, designed to maintain the narrative line, failed however to take into account the turntable, whose moves had been plotted in some detail, linked to particular lines in the dialogue, and now flicked restlessly back and forward, sometimes changing position every thirty seconds. On stage the chaos was complete. The stage management attempted to try out the innumerable mortars required for the show’s many explosions while actors ran through battle scenes, putting their cross-bow classes to the test; arrows flew everywhere, mostly landing in the auditorium into which smoke from the mortars was now belching, while the turntable proved to be totally out of control, either creeping round with infuriating slowness or suddenly whizzing manically off in the opposite direction.
Lighting rehearsals, scheduled for ten in the morning, started at midnight. Welles hurled himself at his task with manic energy. Joseph Hardy, then a Boston drama student, slipped away from his job at the Hide-A-Way Restaurant, hoping to catch a glimpse of him in person. ‘Welles, looking like a large moon-faced boy about six foot two inches was bellowing orders. He shouted Stop that hammering! in such a roar that everyone cringed. When a girl assistant entered from the wings with a problem he embraced her passionately looking aloft and shocking a New England boy of twenty. Welles then stepped into the orchestra and took a belt from a whiskey bottle, barking commands.’14 He demanded a further postponement of the opening; Houseman, under severe financial pressure from the Theatre Guild (who had set an absolute ceiling of $10,000 on expenditure before opening), refused; Welles threw a te
lephone at him. He was, understandably, on the edge of complete hysteria. When one of the actors complained because he kept the company waiting forty minutes while he talked to Meredith, he threw a stool at him. But it was Houseman who bore the brunt of the worst tantrums. Not knowing that Welles had expressly forbidden it, he ordered the prop department to put dry ice in Falstaff’s tankard to simulate mulled wine. Finding it, and finding that Houseman had ordered it, Welles fell to the floor accusing Houseman of having finally succeeded in poisoning him. He then screamed for milk, swigged large quantities of it, spat it up all over the floor, and was finally driven back to the Ritz-Carlton ‘having achieved,’ Houseman drily notes, ‘his real objective, which was, once again, to avoid rehearsing the second act.’15
In these situations, the nightmare eventually gives way to mere disaster. Somehow, the show opens; and then – sometimes, but not always – the disaster can be worked on. Very occasionally, it is turned into a triumph. This was not the pattern of Five Kings. The opening night at the Colonial Theatre in Boston was a semi-disaster; it never got very much better, despite a great deal of work by Welles and the company. The show in Boston started as badly as it could have done from a technical point of view. Lawrence Langner wrote an account of it in The Magic Curtain which takes more delight in the misfortune than he may have felt at the time. He describes the unhappy Robert Speaight making his first entrance – the first moment of the show – in total darkness. A spotlight eventually appeared, but never on him. He spent the whole of the Prologue running around the forestage, in pursuit of the light. In the midst of this, a brilliant light suddenly went on behind the silk curtain, revealing the silhouette of a dozen extras strapping on their codpieces. The light went out as suddenly as it had gone on, leaving the Boston audience rubbing its eyes. At this point, according to Dick Barr, an old lady in the front row urgently beckoned the actor. Thoroughly confused, he leaned towards her. ‘Please,’ she said, ‘would you hand this note to Mr Meredith?’ Langner continues: ‘his prologue ultimately over, he tried to get back onto the revolving stage again, which transported him to the wings in imminent peril of his life. The traveller curtains were then drawn open, disclosing a large group of stage hands running off the stage, after which the play proper began.’16
This first scene, over the corpse of Richard II, and the first Boar’s Head scene leading into the robbery went smoothly and effectively enough. At Speaight’s next entrance, he found the light but lost his page in the book from which he was reading; having found it and completed his narration, he avoided the turntable, walking instead along the forestage, from which there was, alas, no exit. ‘By the time he tried to struggle through, the curtains were flung back and covered him in his corner. The next time the curtains were drawn together, Speaight was revealed crouching in the corner.’ Trying to escape, he broke through the curtains, but by now the turntable was revolving, so, to avoid being struck again by scenery, the desperate actor leaped off the forestage into the orchestra pit, to the delighted applause of the audience, who from that point on broke into merry smiles at his every appearance, in anticipation of further catastrophe. The smile would soon be on the other side of their faces. People in the front rows fled as the turntable whizzed round at increasingly alarming speed, hurling pieces of wooden scenery and flaming arrows into their laps; at one point, it moved so swiftly that extras were thrown off it and into the wings. Reversing Karl Marx’s axiom about great events always recurring, the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce, Five Kings was like a tragic re-run of Horse Eats Hat. All the carefully rehearsed calamities of that show returned, but for real. Small wonder that by the time the traveller curtain had travelled its last – 12.20 a.m., four and a quarter hours after the show had begun – the auditorium was less full than at the beginning. The curtain call, however, was effusive – partly orchestrated by Gertrude Lawrence and her Skylark company who were in the audience. ‘Not until Mr Welles, still wearing the flesh of Falstaff, expressed appreciation and voiced apology,’17 reported The New York Times, ‘were his admirers content to depart. By all tokens, they would have remained if his Five Kings had been raised to ten or a dozen.’ It was one of those evenings, characteristic of the preview period and the out-of-town tour, where the audience, though aware of problems and shortcomings, feels that it has been on a long journey with the performers; that it has climbed Everest with them.
The reviews were on the whole generous in overlooking the running problems (‘when practice oils up the mechanics of the revolving stage, those thirty-two scenes will be gone with the wind before you can say Five Kings’) and by no means unanimously unenthusiastic. ‘FIVE KINGS EXCITING FOR WORLD PREMIER AUDIENCE’18 said the Boston Evening American’s Peggy Doyle: ‘If they don’t stop him, the fat boy of Broadway is going to make Shakespeare competition for Hellzapoppin. He is a director-producer to reckon with and his motion-picture technique in the handling of this fast-paced production with the chorus or interlocutor in place of subtitles, an inspiration.’ The cinematic quality of the production was lost on no one. The chief fascination for most reviewers was Welles’s Falstaff: Miss Doyle was transported. ‘We wouldn’t change an eyelash shading his rheumy eye. He is magnificently lusty and splendidly vulgar, and when he is practising his inveterate habit of playing on words, robustly comic. The wonder of it is that this voluminous old bag of wind and wit is actually a handsome, 23-year-old youth under his blowsy gray wig and filthy ragtag garments.’ There was more wonder from Miss Doyle’s colleague, L.A. Sloper, despite reservations: ‘There are moments when mannerisms intrude. Mr Welles has an odd habit of dividing his sentences abruptly in the middle, without reference to meaning or to dramatic effect.’19 He was particularly enthusiastic about ‘something human and something pathetic that endears him to us. This human quality and this pathos were deftly caught by Mr Welles.’ He describes a moment that throws us twenty-five years ahead to the film Chimes at Midnight. ‘There was a touching dignity in the quiet way in which Sir John turns to speak with Shallow of the money he owes him, and then leaves the stage, his vast bulk accompanied only by the tiny figure of his page. This was the high point,’ says Mr Sloper, in a gentle allusion to the length of the show, ‘of as much of the presentation as I was able to see last night.’
That, as they say, was the end of the good news. John K. Hutchens, the formidable critic of the Boston Evening Transcript, weighed in, pulling no punches: ‘To this courier, just back from Agincourt, it seems a ponderous marathon without style or particular point of view and utterly lacking in the magic with which this same Mercury Theatre once finely honored the bard in Caesar. Circus is no casual word for it.’20 Nor was he impressed by Welles: ‘Mr Welles is simply not funny here. His humor, such as it is, does not bubble up out of the great Falstaffian heart. It is laconic and mechanical.’ Even Hutchens, though, was struck by the pathos he brought to the renunciation scene. Praising Meredith and Speaight (but not John Emery: ‘having shouted himself hoarse, he was not at his best’) he concluded ‘when it is all over, you find yourself wishing that they had done one play instead of three, and had done it three times as well’.
Or had six months to rehearse it, perhaps. From now until the show was finally closed down, Welles never ceased trying to pull Five Kings together. This was, after all, only the first leg of an out-of-town tour. The New York press was hovering. Variety, in its brass tacks way, had already passed judgement: ‘Orson Welles has bitten off a big hunk in his production of Five Kings, and he will have to do a lot of chewing during the tryout here.’21 Its prescription for success was to cut more. The Times was troubled by the turntable: ‘Like Ol’ Man River, it threatens to engulf the show as it still keeps rollin’ along.’22 Time was witty, too, but more sceptical: ‘What might have been a tour de force jumps so fast from one thing to another as to be a non-sequitur de force. Five Kings covers Shakespeare as a two-day Cook’s tour covers England: 8.45 visit Mistress Quickly’s Inn. See Falstaff, Prince Hal, Bardolph, Poins. 9
.31: Good view from the train (no time to get off) of the Justice Shallow country. 9.58: Trip to Shrewsbury. See Hotspur killed.’23
The verdict was unanimous: the show was too long and too incident-packed. The inherent difficulty for Welles in working on the show was that if he addressed the first problem – the length – he compounded the second: the relentlessly episodic text. Each scene was already passing too quickly to be savoured. Shorten a scene, and it would be over before it had begun. By the end of the Boston run he had managed to cut the show down to two acts, to be played in three and a half hours. This was still too long, both for audiences and in terms of overtime payments to stage-hands (who earned, in a figure quoted in the press, an enormous $5,700 for the sixth week of onstage rehearsals), and there was no marked gain in focus or narrative coherence. The show moved to Washington, where the headlines were more affirmative (FIVE KINGS IS VITAL, LIVING DRAMA; FIVE KINGS IS DRAMA OF UNIQUE DESIGN). But the financial position was desperate. The revised tour schedule (Pittsburgh, Detroit, Chicago) had been abandoned; only Philadelphia remained. His relationship with the Guild hung by a thread. The costs of the show were increasing by leaps and bounds, having already exceeded the original $40,000 budget by $25,000, and the returns at the box office were unremarkable. Welles himself (having taken a cut in salary to $150) had poured thousands of his own dollars into the show in Boston and was now desperately trying to raise money by any means he could. (The one person who offered to invest in the show was his friend Toots Shor; Welles refused to let him risk his New York restaurant. A show is just a show, after all, but a restaurant …) Unsuccessful in his efforts, he attempted to release what was left of his father’s legacy, not due until May 1940; Dr Bernstein was adamantly opposed, nor would the bank contemplate it.
