Orson Welles, Volume 3

by Simon Callow

  With the first night out of the way, work continued on a production that was still undergoing a sustained nervous breakdown. There were nightly note sessions on stage after each performance – ‘requiems’, Gudrun Ure called them – in which Welles would give astoundingly detailed and accurate corrections to the actors and stage crew, followed by rather livelier sessions after in the Turk’s Head, the legendary theatrical hotel, beloved of touring companies. Here the company would repair to Welles’s suite to drink themselves to a standstill, bystanders at a raconteurial Olympics, in which the chief – the only – contenders were Othello and Iago: Welles v. Finch. Finch was usually the victor: his stories of the Australian Bush trumped Welles’s theatrical yarns; as often as not Welles would drift off to sleep, and Finch and Maxine Audley and the rest of the gang would continue to carouse, which eventually caused the entire company to be barred from the hotel. And not only the Othello company – all actors, much to the displeasure of Gladys Cooper, arriving the following week with Noël Coward to do his new play, Relative Values.

  Out of favour with hotel managements the company might be, but it was immensely popular with play-goers; audiences were large and enthusiastic. One stage-struck fifteen-year-old, Brian Blacklock, was mesmerised, not only by Welles’s performance (‘we cowered in the stalls lest his shadow fall on us – or his eye’), but also by the haunting music, ‘provided by a rather fluting troupe of invisible musicians . . . right up to the penultimate scene in the last act, when a faint but lyrical melody breathed in the background. And then the final scene . . . Welles whooped and thundered, then stooped like some monstrous hawk upon its prey, and stifled his wife – all to the same melody, now augmented, and so atmospheric.’ At the curtain call, Welles unexpectedly came to the footlights:

  ‘Ladies and gentlemen,’ he said, ‘in the next-to-last scene some of you may have heard some music in the background. It was from a man with a trumpet, playing in the street outside the stage-door. I sent my dresser out to give him a pound to go away. Which he did. Unhappily, he returned, bringing his friends with him . . . Ladies and gentlemen, tonight History has been made: for the first time in any theatre in the world, Desdemona was done to death to the strains of “Melancholy Baby”.’17

  The unaugmented score, played by the ‘rather fluting troupe of invisible musicians’, relayed on stage via a Panotrope, was the soundtrack of the movie and it was, apart from Welles himself, the only element that the stage production and the movie had in common. A number of the notices for the second and last leg of the tour, in Manchester, were impressed by the effect of the music: ‘clavichord and a choral chant which brought the final curtain down’. But Manchester’s reviewers, though respectful, were less sweepingly enthusiastic than Newcastle’s, expressing reservations about Welles’s performance, which would be echoed by many London critics: ‘He is perplexed and also pathetic; sometimes there are hints almost of a puzzled boy,’ wrote the Guardian.18 Welles began, according to the Evening News, magnificently: ‘all negro and no Moor, this Othello had the bulk of a heavyweight boxer’ (thank you, Fred Vallecca); ‘he rose to his greatest heights in the scenes where Iago’s poison took effect and rarely has the turning of that tortured mind against Desdemona been better shown.’ But then ‘much of the power seemed to go out of him’.19

  A slight bafflement hangs over the reviews. The same critic felt that the production was straining too hard to be a movie: ‘the hand that had rocked the film sets was trying to rule another world’. The Oldham Chronicle was altogether blunter: ‘not the most suspicious critic could have conceived that the production would bore. In this alone, Mr Welles has maintained his reputation for being unexpected.’20 The company continued to work on the production, the hour-long ‘requiems’ continued after each show, and a new company manager, Laurence Olivier’s personal favourite, Diana Boddington, came on board and took things in hand.

  I went round and met Orson Welles, and I said ‘I’m pleased to meet you’, so he said ‘what do you think?’ So I said ‘well one thing that worried me very much,’ I said straight away, ‘You cannot have lights showing like that.’ And he said ‘Would you mind waiting a minute’, so I went out, and Lovat Fraser went in and he came out again and said ‘My God, you’ve really upset him’, and I said ‘What’s he said?’ ‘“You’re going to put that Boddington woman back on the next train to London”, so I think you’d better go in and explain yourself.’ So I went in again and I said ‘Mr Welles I understand you’re a bit upset about what I said but I’m a very honest person and say exactly what I think and that is what I think’ and he said ‘Diana, we’re going to get on,’ just like that, ‘I know we’re going to get on,’ and we got on for 9 years.21

  Under Boddington’s skilful stage management, the production became more and more fluid, and Welles more and more confident of the text, but there were no significant changes; the matrix had now been fixed.

  On to London. Many of his colleagues noted Welles’s rising levels of anxiety. He appeared remote from the company. Since the anecdotal contests in Newcastle, they had had very little contact with him, apart from the nightly note-marathons in Manchester, during which, clad in a dressing gown, he would swig from a bottle of brandy while they sat there, parched. He had total recall of every aspect of the performance – lights, sound, positions, tempo, inflection – and disgorged himself of all of his observations at leisure. By the time they got to London, the physical production was running smoothly and the company was essentially doing what they were told to do. It was his own performance on which Welles was focused, conscious of the comparisons that would inevitably be made, and of the fact that he was acting in Laurence Olivier’s theatre, under Laurence Olivier’s management. He changed his physical appearance, going from Moor to Berber: on the road, black-skinned, with romantically ruffled shiny Caucasian hair, his nose au naturel, his chin unadorned; in the West End, bull-like, ageing, short-haired, hook-nosed, goatee-bearded, lighter-complexioned. The pre-publicity emphasised his Shakespearean credentials, adding a few more roles to his imaginary CV: King John, Angelo, Coriolanus and Richard III (which, admittedly, he had played at the age of fourteen). The 1936 Harlem Macbeth’s three-month run had now become three years, and Welles was alleged to have directed The Tempest at the Federal Theatre, which he had not. Expectations were running uncomfortably high.

  The first night at the St James Theatre was exactly that: there were no previews, no time to get accustomed to the majestic dimensions of the auditorium; they just had to plunge in. Le tout Londres was there, including royalty, both British (the Duchess of Kent) and Hollywood (Jenifer Jones, Judy Holliday and David O. Selznick), along with half the actors in the business. The Oliviers were blessedly absent, having gone on a cruise to recover from the exertions of their recent New York season, sending Welles a pair of gold cufflinks engraved with the letter O and a card that read, ‘To our very own boy with the love, wishes and pride of his Mom & Pop’ – their running joke about his great size compared with their merely average dimensions. Despite a bronchial and unusually ill-behaved audience, and a slightly recalcitrant wipe-curtain, the production went as well as could have been hoped for; it was so rapturously received that, after six curtain calls, Welles was moved to make a speech in which he said the production was the realisation of a twenty-year ambition, adding, oddly, that he hoped he had been a success, ‘because the play has already been a success for several seasons’.

  The reviews were perfectly respectable, in some cases enthusiastic: ‘An Othello of Pathos,’ cried the Telegraph;22 ‘Orson is a Great Othello,’ averred the Herald.23 There was universal acknowledgement of Welles’s initial physical impact, of the richness of his voice, of the tenderness and gentleness he showed in the role, of his restraint. But the enthusiasm was tempered. English critical discourse of the period tended to box-ticking: did the actor have the correct pathos? Did his voice have the right notes in it? Did he shape the part so that the climaxes lan
ded properly? Was he sufficiently noble? In most of these departments, Welles was felt to have failed. The phrase that recurred was ‘smouldering volcano’; or, as The Stage more elegantly put it, ‘to sit through this production is an experience akin to waiting for a threatening thunderstorm that never arrives in full fury’.24 There was a general feeling of frustration: ‘Orson Welles’s Othello was in some ways the most extraordinary theatrical performance of the year,’ wrote Stephen Williams in the Evening News:

  Here was a magnificent figure of a man, with a presence that overwhelmed one with its majesty, ‘An eye like Mars to threaten and command,’ and a voice that hummed and vibrated like a bass cello. And what did he do with these prodigious gifts? He missed tremendous chances, he either misquoted or threw away some of the most sonorous lines in the language; he seems almost unaware of those pieces of savage, blistering invective with which the demented Moor lacerates his feelings. Othello is a great tragedy; it was a greater tragedy to see all this superb, superabundant vitality kept in leash, this volcanic energy so unnaturally prevented from loosing itself.25

  This was not simply the arrogance of an insular critical establishment: it was felt both by audiences and his fellow-players. Something in the performance failed to ignite. From a visual point of view, it worked splendidly. ‘He had a great flair,’ said Percy Harris, ‘for looking very magnificent.’ More than that, Welles had an extraordinary presence; the image of the character was potent. ‘He looks like some dark monster invading us from Mars,’ said Harold Hobson in the Sunday Times, ‘or a deep-sea diver, or a creature emerging from a fantastical coal mine.’26 T.C. Worsley memorably wrote in the New Statesman:

  this huge, goaded figure rolls onto the stage with a dreadful fog of menace and horror, thickening, wave after wave, with each successive entrance. The very deliberation of his movements, of his great lifted head and rolling bloodshot eye, and the deep slow notes rumbled from his massive chest, pile up the sense of inevitability almost to the point of the unbearable. In the end we long (and isn’t this the point of tragedy?) for the tension to be burst.

  This could be a review of a great actor-manager of the previous century and stands as an eloquent tribute to the physical and, indeed, psychic impact of Welles, which should never be taken for granted: he was a phenomenon. ‘Mr Welles’, Worsley continued, ‘gave off an aura of terror such I have seen no actor before produce.’27

  But to climb the mountain called Othello, neither physical appearance nor charisma nor even inspiration will suffice. It requires unrelenting hard work, mentally, physically and vocally. Welles seems never entirely to have mastered the text, so inevitably he was always enslaved to it, never able to ride it, always hanging on for dear life, or putting on the brakes to slow the play down to the speed of his own thought rather than Othello’s. He was also unable to reveal the character’s detailed progression through the play or indeed its hidden strata. The sections that he had incorporated into the film were naturally the ones he knew best – most notably the scenes in which Iago poisons Othello’s mind: the first was ‘the superb moment of this production’, said Worsley, ‘which brings us to the interval at the highest pitch of expectation’.28 But the second act proved harder to sustain. In the phrase of actor-laddies of yesteryear, he lacked puff: the stamina, both physical and vocal, demanded by these great roles. He was, in a word, unprepared. Fred Vallecca had melted away in Newcastle, and now Welles was simply out of shape. ‘He was terribly fat and he was terribly soft, there was no resilience physically,’ said Percy Harris, who was called on to dress him for a few nights when Welles’s dresser was ill. ‘His shoulders were quite round, and his hips, and his general shape. Nothing stayed on, so the trousers were sort of buttoned onto this strap, and then the jacket. The shirt then had to be on an elastic and had to be outside the trousers, and then the jacket had to be buttoned through too, so it was a sort of waist length jacket. And it had to be buttoned through onto it so that it all stayed on. And then to keep the cloaks on! He had various cloaks, that was very difficult.’29 She sent her assistant, Christopher Morahan, to a Newcastle lingerie manufacturer for a corset for Welles, ‘and of course,’ remembered Morahan, ‘they didn’t believe the measurements. They said there must be some mistake here and then I explained it was for Orson Welles and then they understood perfectly, and ran one up for him.’30

  Welles was scarcely in better shape vocally, having taken no care of his peerless instrument; The Blessed and the Damned had not challenged him in that way, much less An Evening with Orson Welles, and his last appearance on stage before that had been Around the World, which had simply been a lot of shouting. His lack of flexibility, allied to his native sonorousness, led to monotony. Not long after the production closed, Olivier – who had returned to England soon after Othello’s opening night – observed this of Welles’s performance: ‘Anything that might be said to have detracted from his Othello was purely on the technical side, and was due to his being out of practice physically. The extra special kind of breath control, and in true fact simply the athlete’s training necessary for the weightier Shakespearean roles, let him down on the big speeches and high-flying scenes.’ He went on to say that ‘it would of course have been better for him, as it is always better for anybody embroiled in one of these parts, to have somebody else direct the play for him, but it is Orson’s magician’s training that makes him want to handle the whole works. One day I feel certain that his talent for pure acting will receive the recognition and acclamation that it merits.’31

  Again and again, this view was repeated: Welles the director had let down Welles the actor. He had not allowed himself to be directed on stage by anyone since he was nineteen, when he played first Mercutio, then Tybalt for Guthrie McClintic. ‘If ever Mister Welles chooses to play the role again and subjects himself to the discipline of being directed by a Benthall or a Gielgud,’ opined the News Chronicle of Welles’s Othello, ‘then fight, bribe or bludgeon your way into the theatre, for that will be a performance echoing down the ages.’32 Not only when he was rehearsing, but during the run itself, more than half of Welles’s mind was on his fellow-actors, the lighting, the stage machinery. The slow, selfish growth of a performance within an actor over the course of rehearsal and performance never happened for him.

  The physical production of Othello was mostly dismissed as simultaneously dull and hyperactive; Welles’s tinkering with the text – changing words, reordering scenes, inventing silent action – was sniffily disapproved of, although within a decade such things would become commonplace at the future National Theatre and Royal Shakespeare Company. The curious effect of his artificially induced proportions was noted with puzzlement: in some quarters, this giant Othello’s relationship with a Desdemona who was just over five foot tall was considered grotesque. His altitude literally set this Othello apart from all the others, a situation compounded by his instruction to his fellow-actors never to touch him or approach him too closely – an old-time actor-manager’s demand. The result was to isolate Othello. Whether this was Welles’s conception of the character or was simply the outcome of his desire to dominate absolutely, this isolation had a secondary but very significant consequence: he was unable to form any detailed relationships with the other characters, which meant that he was condemned to repeat the image he first presented.

  In the review that dominated all the others, that of Kenneth Tynan in the Evening Standard, one terrible noun was slapped down on the table: ‘No doubt about it, Orson Welles has the courage of his restrictions. In last night’s boldly staged Othello at the St James’s Theatre, he gave a performance brave and glorious to the eye; but it was the performance of a magnificent amateur.’33 ‘EVENING PAPERS ARE FINE,’ Welles telegraphed Olivier the day after the first night, ‘BUT TYNAN SAYS I’M AN AMATEUR STOP WIRE INSTRUCTIONS.’ The Standard’s headline – now distressing merely to quote – was, even for 1951, a bit of a shocker: ‘CITIZEN COON’. In this production, Tynan said, ‘a who
le generation was on trial. If Welles was wrong, if a contemporary approach to Shakespeare in his thunderbolt hands failed, then we were all wrong.’ In fact, almost uniquely among his fellow-critics, Tynan found the production, with its hints of Berliner Ensemble style, admirable.

  He sacrificed much to give us a credible account of a play which bristles with illogicalities. The conception was visually flawless – Cassio’s drunk scene became a vivid blaze of mutiny, and the killing of Desdemona with crimson awnings over a white couch, and the high rostrum towering behind, can never have looked more splendid.

  But Welles’s own performance dismayed him. It was, Tynan said:

  a huge shrug. He was grand and gross, and wore some garish costumes superbly. His close-cropped head was starkly military, and he never looked in need of a banjo. But his voice, a musical instrument in one octave, lacked range; he toyed moodily with every inflection. His face expressed wryness and strangulation but little else. And his body relaxation frequently verged on sloth. Above all, he never built to a vocal climax: he positively waded through the great speeches, pausing before the stronger words like a landing craft breasting a swell . . . Welles’s Othello is the lordly and mannered performance we saw in Citizen Kane, slightly adapted.34