by Simon Callow
The prologue went splendidly, especially the moment when, cloaked and fedora-hatted and sporting a fine aquiline nose, Welles made his mythic first entrance as the Guv’nor, in a brilliantly devised cue, suddenly appearing out of the darkness in a luminous cloud of cigar smoke. When the play proper began, the lighting operator – old Alf, presumably – got his cues out of synch. The ship’s crew appeared thrillingly lit among the rigging, but after a moment the light suddenly disappeared, leaving the sailors shouting at each other in the dark, while on the lower deck a blinking Ahab and Pip the cabin boy sat brilliantly illuminated but mute. They swiftly launched into their scene, whereupon the lights immediately switched off them and onto the silent sailors, now crouching below, waiting to make their next entrance. Welles cut in half the scene with Pip, so that finally the lighting operator could catch up with himself.
Meanwhile, Welles’s false nose began to part company with his real one; his attempts to return it to its moorings being increasingly unsuccessful, he ripped it off, hurling it to the floor, presenting the audience with the surprising spectacle of an Ahab who had undergone sudden cosmetic surgery. A further menace now declared itself in the form of Mrs Welles – Paola, Contessa di Girifalco – who had taken it upon herself to stand in the wings with the script and whenever (as quite often proved to be the case) Welles was unable to remember his next line, she would sing it out to him in a crystal-clear, Italian-accented voice audible on the other side of St Martin’s Lane. This might have been helpful, but Welles was much given to significant pauses, which Mrs W interpreted as failures of memory. Eventually, in an aside, he despatched Pip the cabin boy to silence her.
None of this disturbed the audience in the least. They understood perfectly well, as Joan Plowright observed, that Captain Ahab was also the actor-manager directing what was a rehearsal; so, for all they knew, anything that happened could have been in the script. At the intermission, the crew created the whaling ship by setting a rostrum in the auditorium. ‘Well-dressed spectators shrank in their seats from the proximity of burly perspiration,’ wrote Kenneth Williams in Just Williams. One lady’s box of chocolates got squashed on her lap, at which she protested loudly; and the spectators in the circle completely lost sight of the cast. ‘They rose in their seats to extend their view, provoking cries of “Sit down!” from those seated behind. Orson, with his hand raised for the harpoon, was roaring “Shut up!” to the audience between his vengeful curses, and we eventually returned to the stage amidst considerable confusion.’
Nonetheless, the sea-chase went splendidly well, the climax riveting, the theatre in almost complete darkness except for a single light on Welles’s face; at last, when the tension was all but unbearable, he launched the harpoon, but the rope attached to the harpoon somehow twined itself round Ahab’s leg, dragging him into the water; down they went together, Ahab and the whale and the rest of the crew, leaving only Ishmael (Gordon Jackson) solemnly describing the scene as the lights gradually faded to black. After a long silent pause, the stage lights began to come up again, revealing Welles not as Ahab, but as the Guv’nor. Taking out a cigar and lighting it, he walked over to the prompt corner, picked up the script of the play, closed it and then, turning back to one of the stagehands, said, ‘You can bring down the curtain.’ Peter Sallis, playing the stage manager and a dozen other parts, remembered:
‘As [the curtain] touches the floor the audience stand and they are shouting and they are clapping and they are cheering, our audience that Orson, by sheer willpower I would say, has won over. He’s had a bit of help from others in the cast, of course, but it begins to dawn on us all that this is Orson’s night. It’s the first time we’ve actually seen him or heard him get it right and it’s magical. We line up for our curtain call, and we’re just in one line with Orson in the middle, and although we don’t turn inwards, I think mentally we all do, we all bow invisibly to Orson. It is his night.’20
Moby-Dick took London by storm. In later life Welles thought it the best thing he had ever done in any medium; certainly he received the best reviews he had had since the early days at the Federal Theatre Project and the Mercury. Even the New York Times reported transatlantically: ‘Welles Moby-Dick admired in London.’21 Elizabeth Frank, one of the journalists who had cross-examined Welles with such amused condescension on Press Conference at the beginning of the year, rather finely said in the News Chronicle: ‘As Captain Ahab, Welles has devoured the essence of the living theatre, the lustiness of the Elizabethans, and the fearless innocent eye of the barnstorming Victorians.’22 There was a general sense that he had found a perfect vehicle for his ideas, and a subject that was big enough and rugged enough for his supercharged theatricality. ‘It takes an Orson Welles’, said the Daily Mail, ‘to conjure a ferocious sea drama out of a background of clothes baskets, packing cases and scraps of irrelevant scenery and to send us away with the feeling that we, too, have been grappling for our lives with that whale.’23
The Express, mysteriously describing Welles as ‘the laughing jumbo of Europe’s gay spots’, hailed the play – though its ‘reckless melodrama’ veered between ‘the nonsensical and the flabbergasting’ – ‘the biggest theatrical thunder in years’.24 Welles’s own performance, despite his impressive voice and impressive face, was, The Times felt, inexpressive, nor did he truly dominate the scene;25 Welles’s fan T.C. Worsley of the Financial Times, hailing the production as ‘the purest make-believe, the purest theatre, all embodied out of the imagination alone’ and admiring the company, which acted ‘with every muscle, and bring it triumphantly off’, was also oddly disappointed by Welles himself.26 In the circumstances, it is astonishing that Welles did as well as he did; even he admitted to Richard Watts Jr of the New York Times, after the performance, that ‘he has been so busy with the other aspects of his Melville enterprise that he hasn’t had a chance yet to work out his portrayal of Ahab completely. It is clear’, continued Watts, ‘that he is still feeling his way tentatively through the tumultuous role, and there are times when he is inclined to rumble ominously rather than act. But even now there are flashes of enormous power in his playing, and all the gusto that makes him a fascinating stage figure.’27
It is hard to imagine a more terrifying ordeal for an actor than to expose himself to a role like Othello or Ahab or Lear without being properly prepared for it. It is as if occupying himself with the needs of the physical production and his fellow-actors put off the moment of actually engaging with the awful demands of his own role, so that at the crunch point, all he could do was screw up his eyes and trust in God, like some mad bungee-jumper, but without a safety cord. This is not courage, it is not a challenge: it is fear and denial. The astonishing thing is that, with nothing but intelligence and personality and stamina, Welles was able to do it at all; and that sometimes, but not always, the excitement of the production was in some way enhanced by the extreme uncertainty of the leading actor. Not for everyone, however. ‘The boy wonder pulled out all his theatrical tricks,’ said Robert Otway in the Sunday Graphic, ‘and only succeeded in proving that he was middle-aged. Yes, I was saddened by it all. Miserable, chiefly, at the sight of a one-man band who hasn’t yet learned that it’s better to play one instrument perfectly than to be competent at the lot . . . watch him closely for long and monotony creeps in. He isn’t supple and he isn’t expressive. The real trouble, I suppose,’ he concluded, ‘is simply this: Mr Welles hasn’t the genius to control his own abilities.’28
On the other side of the Atlantic, the influential expatriate English critic Eric Bentley dismissed the show as an example of what he calls ‘American style’ productions: there are, he says, no flesh-and-blood people on stage, ‘there is only a tormented Caravaggist scene, of dangling ropes and shadows and sweat and staring eyes: toiling amateurism brought to a pitch of frenzy’.29 That word again: amateurism. Nobody, favourable or unfavourable, seems to have got what Welles was after. Until the Sunday papers appeared.
The
review Welles was most interested in – Tynan, now at the Observer – transcended all the others, good or bad. As if in recompense for his review of Othello (‘CITIZEN COON’), the critic pulled out all the stops in celebration of the man who was once, and to some degree remained, his idol. Tynan began:
At this stage of his career it is absurd to expect Orson Welles to attempt anything less than the impossible. It is all that is left to him. Mere possible things, like Proust or War and Peace, would confine him. He must choose Moby-Dick, a book whose setting is the open sea, whose hero is more mountain than man and more symbol than either, and whose villain is the supremely unstageable whale . . . yet out of all these impossibilities, Mr Welles has fashioned a piece of pure theatrical megalomania. A sustained assault on the senses which dwarfs anything London has seen since perhaps the Great Fire.
Then, in a comparison that would have deeply gratified Welles, he continued: ‘It was exactly fifty years ago last Wednesday that Irving made his last appearance in London. I doubt if anyone since then has left his mark more indelibly on every second of a London production than Mr Welles has on this of Moby-Dick.’ In another reference that would have pleased Welles enormously, he says, ‘The technique with which Thornton Wilder evoked “Our Town” is used to evoke “Our Universe.”’
Tynan focuses admiringly on Welles’s use of sound – hardly surprising for the critic who noted of Citizen Kane that listening to the film with one’s eyes shut is as rewarding an experience as watching it. But the review is not an unqualified panegyric. Tynan praises the other actors, but hesitates when he comes to Welles. ‘In aspect, he is a Leviathan plus. He has a voice of bottled thunder, so deeply encasked that one thinks of those liquor advertisements which boast that not a drop is sold till it’s seven years old’ – a strangely prophetic line, foreseeing the Welles who, a quarter of a century later, would assure us that Paul Masson sold no wine before its time. ‘The trouble is that everything he does is on such a vast scale that it quickly becomes monotonous. He is too big for the boots of any part. He reminds one of Macaulay’s conversation, as Carlyle described it: “Very well for a while, but one wouldn’t live under Niagara.” Emotion of any kind he expresses by thrusting out his chin and knitting his eyebrows. Between these twin promontories there juts out a false and quite unnecessary nose.’ Then Tynan makes one of the best jokes of his career: ‘Sir Laurence Olivier began his film of Hamlet with the statement that it was “the tragedy of a man who could not make up his mind.” At one point Mr Welles’s new appendage started to leave its moorings, and Moby-Dick nearly became the tragedy of a man who could not make up his nose.’ He concludes on an exhilaratingly positive, even crusading note:
Earlier in the evening, as the actor-manager, he makes what seems to be a final statement on the relationship of actor to audience: ‘Did you ever,’ he says, ‘hear of an unemployed audience?’ It is a good line; but the truth is that British audiences have been unemployed far too long. If they wish to exert themselves, to have their minds set whirling and their eyes dazzling at sheer theatrical virtuosity, Moby-Dick is their opportunity. With it the theatre becomes once more a house of magic.30
Every word of this peroration would have been music to Welles’s ears, especially, perhaps, the final phrase.
Many of those who saw the show agreed with Tynan’s review. The young Peter Hall, already on the first rung of a career that would make him the dominant figure in the British theatre for twenty-five years, thought it the best production he had ever seen (he thought Othello the worst);31 and the young designer Tony Walton, one of the great innovators of twentieth-century theatre design, saw the production over and over again. But these enthusiastic responses did not, alas, translate into ticket sales. The advance for the show had been poor, to begin with, and business built slowly; only the last few performances of the short run actually sold out, which is surprising: the small theatre held only 650 seats. The cognoscenti came, and pronounced the play thrilling; but, as with so many of Welles’s films, the general public were not drawn to it. His celebrity, which was immense – he generated publicity just by walking into a room – was not of a kind that made people want to see his work; even his new television fame failed to boost sales. Despite the exhilaration of the production, its imagination and its physical commitment, to say nothing of Welles’s charisma and towering presence, it was, at its heart, a deeply nostalgic event, a reinvention of the nineteenth-century theatre; and in England in 1955 a theatre revolution was drawing rapidly nearer.
Only a month after Moby-Dick closed, just 500 yards up the road, at the Arts Theatre, Waiting for Godot began its first English-language run, and the startled West End public was suddenly confronted with the avant-garde at its most uncompromising. The play opened to worse advances than those for Moby-Dick, and people walked out at every performance, but the play steadily gained ground, radically changing the idea of what might be expected from a play; it transferred to larger theatre and ran for six months. Meanwhile, Joan Littlewood, an earthily brilliant genius intent on destroying the bourgeois dominance of theatre, staged and appeared eponymously in the first British production of Brecht’s Mother Courage, which took the theatre in another, more overtly political direction; and only a year later John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger put recognisable contemporary young men and women on the stage. In this company, Welles’s theatrical tour de force seemed rather pointless to the arbiters of taste, but equally failed to please the traditional West End audience, who expected sumptuous sets and glamorous stars. Despite its hommage to the theatrical past, Moby-Dick was in certain ways ahead of its time, notably in its Poor Theatre ethos – no props, no costumes, no sets – and in the emphasis on the ensemble. By the 1960s every regional theatre in Britain was doing productions in the style of Moby-Dick – they were, in fact, quite often doing Moby-Dick – partly for aesthetic reasons, partly out of economic ones and sometimes from political considerations. As so often, Welles was out of synch with his time.
As usual with him, he considered the show to be a permanent work-in-progress, and during its short run he continued shuffling scenes and rewriting to the last performance, more often than not without notifying anyone else. ‘He would sometimes reel off a great speech that we had never heard before,’ wrote Joan Plowright. ‘Having worked on his adaptation for several years, there were obviously chunks of it that had not been included in the present version, and which he would revert to without any warning when the fancy took him.’32 On one occasion Peter Sallis was standing in the semi-darkness with Wensley Pithey and Patrick McGoohan, waiting for Ahab:
And then there emerged behind the packing cases, what at first looked like a white mop, and then it went on and it was obvious that there was going to be a face. There were two enormous great white eyebrows. There were two tiny holes where the eyes were, and then this white moustache and beard, which out father-christmased Father Christmas. It went down to his navel. Orson, for it was indeed he, said, ‘There are whales hereabouts, I smell ’em. Look sharp for the whales, all of ya, and if ya see a white one, split ya lungs for ’im.’ I had to say to McGoohan, ‘What do you think of that, now, Mr Starbuck? Ain’t there a small drop o’ something queer about that, eh?’ We managed to get through it, but it was a glorious moment.33
On another occasion Kenneth Williams, as the carpenter Elijah, had a long speech about carving Ahab a false leg made from ivory. Welles suddenly leaned over his kneeling figure and muttered, ‘Get off.’ ‘I rose muttering a lame ad lib, “God bless you, Captain,” and backed away into the wings with the scene unfinished.’ Joan Plowright was waiting for her next scene:
She rushed on saying her line, ‘Oh Captain put thy hand in mine, the black and white together . . .’ with such incoherent haste that Orson was quite taken aback, but Joan rattled on with the speed of a Gatling gun about white being black and black becoming white, till it sounded like a high-speed detergent commercial.
Afterwards Williams
went to Welles’s dressing room and asked why he had cut the dialogue so drastically. ‘“You bored me,” he said shortly, and if there’s a snappy answer to that I haven’t found it.’34
But he was equally capable of sudden inspiration. On one occasion, says Plowright, he gave a magnificent performance, ‘full of such passion and power and depth of sorrow that we actors were all mesmerized and felt we were in the presence of a wayward genius. He couldn’t always do it like that; if he wasn’t in the mood his wicked sense of mischief would reassert itself.’35 He affected not to be distressed by the poor business, telling Plowright, ‘there’ll be the hits when everybody is excited about you, in parts you were born to play, and everyone loves you. The other times there will always be a percentage of the audience, perhaps very small, sometimes a bit bigger, who don’t go for your chemistry. There’s nothing to be done about that. But if they don’t go for your chemistry, make sure they admire your skill.’
In truth, Welles harboured a deep conviction that ‘the general public don’t like me’, as he had said to Gudrun Ure. There was a sense of loneliness about the man: Joan Plowright had a curiously touching vision of him one night after a show at the Duke of York’s Theatre. Paola was kneeling on the floor with a basin of water, bathing his feet. ‘He was gazing down at her with the grateful eyes of a small boy, when I stopped by to say goodnight. “Where are you going, Snooks?” he asked me. (He had christened me Snooks on the second day of rehearsal.)’ If Plowright had known that this is what Welles and MacLiammóir had venomously dubbed Suzanne Cloutier on Othello, she might not have been quite so touched. ‘It was perhaps the two bottles of wine under my arm that had prompted the question. I told him we were having a cheese-and-wine party in Kenneth’s flat. “Why wasn’t I invited?” he asked plaintively . . . he looked so vulnerable and deflated that I felt I could willingly have joined Paola on the floor and helped to bathe his swollen feet.’36
