by Simon Callow
There was nothing on it, nothing at all. He got rid of all the thrones, he got rid of everything, and it was just there, just a dirty, empty stage. And nothing happened at all, and the audience got a little bit nervous. And then very, very soft-footedly, starting at the very back – it was a very, very big, deep theatre – comes Edmund the bastard, and he comes down front and says, ‘Thou nature art my goddess’. It was so thrilling, even though the audience didn’t know what the concept was, but they knew that something terrible had happened.19
Welles allowed Fitzgerald’s fifteen-year-old son, Michael Lindsay-Hogg, to sit in on rehearsals; there at least he had a fan: ‘he was glorious at that time,’ wrote Lindsay-Hogg in Luck and Circumstance. ‘Forty years old, tall, broad, dressed in black, starting to be heavy but not nearly with the weight which must have partly killed him. But there was something else to him, a kind of emanation of energy and intelligence, curiosity, and originality.’ Entranced, the boy watched him work. ‘He’d catch my eye often, winking sometimes, sometimes a smile. Or, if one of the actors was not doing a good job, he’d look at me and roll his eyes.’20
The mood in the room was not good. Welles had almost immediately decided he’d made a mistake in casting Viveca Lindfors, who suffered in his eyes from being two things: 1) Swedish, with a heavy accent; and 2) a devout follower of the Method. He made no attempt to conceal his contempt for her. In her desperate struggle with the language, she hired a Shakespearean coach, which only provoked more scorn from Welles. The company were scarcely kinder to her, going into corners to mock her accent. But if they had no time for Lindfors, they had even less for Welles. ‘There was a lot of hatred of Orson in the room,’ said Alvin Epstein, who was personally very happy to be told what to do, as were John Colicos and Roy Dean; others, in that heady dawn of Method exploration and actors’ self-examination, found it intolerable.
At the end of three weeks the disgruntled company moved into the theatre for technical rehearsals, whereupon Welles disappeared into the blackness of the auditorium and addressed the actors through a megaphone; often he would come up onto the stage to adjust a light himself, or set a sound cue, or shift a piece of scenery, and then disappear back into the stalls. In the midst of all this technical activity, he would, just occasionally, make personal contact with an actor; once, completely out of the blue, he approached a particularly unhappy-looking extra playing a knight; this was Julian Barry, later to be the author of the Broadway hit Lenny. ‘Do you know what this play is all about?’ Welles asked him. ‘The play is about a noble knight who sees that the king is making a terrible mistake and he wants to tell him that, but he is not high enough in the court to be able to approach the king and speak with him.’21 A parable, perhaps, of the relationship between a very important and famous director and an extra. But whatever their feelings about rehearsing with him, the company were deeply impressed by Welles’s lighting; often his most striking effects were achieved with great economy: ‘using a few key instruments,’ recollected Maxtone-Graham, ‘he created a marvellous Gothic mood in that cavernous theatre.’22 He made particularly striking use of follow-spots, isolating individuals so that, on their great sloping platforms, they appeared to be suspended in space; the Piranesi patterns on the backcloth likewise seemed to be three-dimensional, free-standing objects.
And all the while, Welles was putting off the awful moment at which he would actually have to play King Lear.
When he finally donned the costume and emerged in the extraordinary quasi-expressionist make-up he had devised for the character, he was completely unaccustomed to negotiating the ever-changing set and its treacherous planes, and ill-adjusted to the Stygian gloom that prevailed backstage. There was, as usual with Welles, no dress rehearsal, though at least he had a number of public previews. At the first of these, adrenalised and under-rehearsed (a treacherous combination), he stood at the tip of one of the slopes, which jutted out like the prow of a ship, cried out, ‘O Fool, I shall go mad,’ and scooped up Epstein by the back of his neck and raced upstage down the platform. ‘My feet are hardly touching the ground,’ said Epstein:
because I have this two hundred and twenty five pounds behind me going as fast as he can go, holding me up in the air. I’m really not controlling the movement at all. And we’re heading into the wings and the wings consist of a series of black velour cloths, hiding steel girder lighting posts. Frames to which are attached lighting instruments and he heads for one of those that he thinks is a curtain because he hasn’t done it often enough. He’s raising his arm so I know what he thinks. He thinks it’s a curtain, he can push it aside, and I know it’s a steel girder. And I was wriggling madly not to be crushed against the steel girder. And I managed but of course he didn’t. He went slam into it. I got out of the way and he went smack into it like that.23
In the general kerfuffle, Welles sprained his ankle and – a bit of a tradition with him, this – lost his false nose. Next day the nose was restored and Welles made his way across the set a little more circumspectly, now weighed down with a heavy surgical boot. Accidents continued to happen as the extras and stage crew groped away in the semi-darkness, trying to find the many-coloured marks on the stage that were the temporary resting place for the platforms. At a later preview, the platform representing Dover beach moved too fast and too far, jutting right out into the auditorium. Oblivious of this, Lester Rawlins, as the blinded Gloucester, jumped – ending up not on the expected apron of the stage, but in the lap of a woman in the front row. Gamely he continued with his next line, which happened to be ‘Have I fallen or no?’24
Over the course of the six previews the production got sharper and quicker, and Welles became nimbler with the boot he was still obliged to wear. Finally 12 January 1956 arrived, a real first night at which the press were actually present. Quite understandably, Welles seems to have succumbed to heavy nerves: the jury was assembling for what he had called ‘the most important show of my life’. By some absurd caprice of fate – or perhaps it had been carefully planned – Citizen Kane was playing for a rare revival at the 55th Street Playhouse, an art-house cinema just opposite the City Center, allowing the incoming audience to remind themselves of the competition Welles was up against: himself.
It seems that the combination of anxiety about the play and the performance and pain from his ankle led Welles to administer some alcoholic medication to himself over the course of the evening. By the final curtain, ‘the measured ringing cadences of Lear had metamorphosed into the slightly drunken, nasal bray of Charles Foster Kane,’ noted Welles’s stage manager, John Maxtone-Graham. ‘Either as a result of painkillers or whiskey or both, Welles as Lear was slurring his lines quite badly.’25 Nor was he always able to remember them – when he staggered in with the dead Cordelia in his arms, he repeated Lear’s ‘Howl’ many times more than Shakespeare’s prescribed four, until at last he remembered the next phrase. Welles told Barbara Leaming that what had thrown him that evening was the applause that greeted his entrance: ‘It was so enormous and so long and so sustained that it completely disoriented me.’26
A few nights later he identified a different problem when speaking to the audience at the City Center: on the first night, he said, ‘I began to believe the play, to believe it so terrifyingly that I ceased to communicate with the audience.’27 This question of what was fake and what was real – the conflict between giving in to one’s unconscious and controlling it – had haunted Welles for many years. It is something all actors have to deal with, but for Welles it was deeply problematic. He seemed nervous of his own underlying emotions, clumsy in handling them. The great classical roles, of course, call for intense engagement with the most powerful of human emotions in peculiarly distilled form. The part of King Lear, especially his rapidly developing madness, forces the actor to engage with things that most people would rather avoid; if you open yourself to them too nakedly, it can be dangerous, both to yourself and to the play. For the most part, Welles
kept a large distance between himself and the emotions of the character; at the New York City Center on 12 January 1956, his own feelings and those of King Lear had become dangerously interconnected.
At the curtain call, which was generously applauded, a tired and emotional Welles held up a hand and made a speech in which he expressed his pleasure at being home, an unusually simple sentiment for him. He then walked back with Alvin Epstein across the set, turned a corner and broke his one remaining good ankle. There are other accounts, the most entertaining being Maxtone-Graham’s that when Marlene Dietrich, who had been in the audience, entered his dressing room, Welles said to his wife, ‘Paola, say hello to the most beautiful woman in the world,’ and Paola knocked him to the ground. As often with Welles stories, the most amusing version is the one to go for; either way, Welles, having been legless in one sense during the performance, was now legless in another.
The following day, the actors were summoned to the stage and told that, for obvious reasons, Welles couldn’t go on as Lear, but he wanted to spare the City Center any loss of revenue, so he would talk to the audience, explain what had happened, tell a few stories, perhaps read a few speeches from Lear. The actors were welcome to stay and listen. Few did, unsurprisingly; they had heard all the stories, and wanted to do the play, not listen to Welles in extract.
There was no announcement before the curtain went up so, when it did, the audience was astonished to see, not a palace in Ancient Britain and a mad old king, but a fresh-faced Welles in a lounge suit sitting comfortably in a wheelchair with a table and a carafe of water at his side. ‘Ladies and gentlemen, I am Orson Welles,’ he said, ‘and there will be no performance of King Lear this evening. We will not dance The Red Shoes.’28 He then told them that he had exactly quarter of an hour to prevent them from going for a refund, after which time the box office would be closed, and that he proposed doing so by telling them jokes and performing conjuring tricks: 75 per cent of the audience elected to stay. As the remaining 25 per cent vacated their seats, a voice called from way, way up in the balcony: ‘It’s kind of lonely up here. Can we come down?’ They did, and Welles engaged his slightly dwindled audience effortlessly, as only he could. With genuine humility (and Welles’s humility was absolutely genuine) he confided in them his conviction that the show had not gone well the night before because of his excessive belief in the character and his situation, and then he spoke a number of the speeches as he felt they should have gone, and those who were present felt they had never heard Lear more movingly or beautifully spoken. He kept them spellbound for an hour and a half, and they went home happy.
The reviews had by now come out. They were not, on the whole, good. The tone was sorrowful rather than angry; as usual, they were not so much reviews as enquiries into the Welles problem. The New York Times – then, as now, the crucial review – made an interesting distinction: ‘Mr Welles has a genius for the theatre. It is fine to have him back again. And it is easy to appreciate his attack on the problems of staging a fiery Elizabethan drama. But the attack has left Shakespeare prostrate. Mr Welles’s talent does not equal his genius.’ For all the flair and energy of the staging, Welles did not, the Times felt, get inside the character of Lear, ‘nor does his production get into the heart of the poem’.29 The New York Herald Tribune was surprised and disappointed by how unexciting it all was: ‘an evening of hope deferred and valiant efforts but mildly rewarded’.30 Like many other critics, the Saturday Review attacked Welles’s speaking of the verse, describing it as coming not in ‘the torrents of emotion and word music that it is but in fitful splashes like a faulty spigot when a bit of air has got into the plumbing’. Instead of a stimulating beginning to Welles’s projected repertory season, what emerged was ‘a heavy and meaningless thing that resembles bad, old-fashioned opera more than it does a fresh approach to the classics’.31
Walter Kerr, who five years earlier had so forcefully delivered his negative verdict on Welles, seemed inclined to be more generous. He vividly describes the scene in which Lear divides the kingdom up. A gigantic map is brought on: ‘As [Lear] begs Cordelia for a loving word, the map is stretched taut and tempting across his breast. Then when Cordelia has stuck to her guns, he charges right through, splitting Britain open like a paper-hoop in a three ring circus. And when he has finished lashing his daughter with his tongue, he slashes at her with the remnants of the map.’ Kerr gives a sense of Welles’s radical lighting effects: when Lear and the Fool made for the heath, Welles bathed himself in a deep blue spotlight, while the Fool – ‘looking like a donkey-eared Pinocchio’ – stared up into a green one, as violent flashes of pure white streak the ruined arches and pitted windows behind them. And at Lear’s sobering realisation that he is a man more sinned against than sinning, ‘the Fool sang Feste’s song from the end of Twelfth Night, “The rain it raineth every day”, an extraordinary juxtaposition of different worlds.’
Kerr makes all this sound rather interesting. Inevitably, there is a but coming: ‘but every effect is a bequest of Mr Welles’s inventive but much too conniving mind. His heart seems to have nothing to say.’ The result, Kerr says, is ‘an intelligent automaton at centre stage’. And he has imposed the same ‘hard-driven monotony’ on the rest of the company, ‘all of them . . . divested of feeling, of intimacy, of direct personality’.32 This is a consistent accusation against his acting, on both sides of the Atlantic, and it is something recognisable from his work as an actor on screen. Wolcott Gibbs, the New Yorker’s man, under the heading ‘The Schizo King’ – it is not entirely clear whether the headline refers to Lear or to Welles – acutely suggests that ‘the secret of Mr Welles may be that he is under some inward compulsion to create something larger, more cryptic, and more various than any the author had in mind’.33 Welles’s enthusiasm and energy were not in doubt, said Gibbs, but his performance of Lear was ‘almost continuously self-defeating’. The majority verdict was clear. Welles had been weighed in the balance and found wanting, both as director and as actor.
One critic, however, came to a radically different verdict. Richard Hayes wrote in Commonweal that as he did not belong to the generation for which Welles appeared to have been ‘a traumatic experience’ he had approached the production ‘untrammelled by the expectations and suppositions of prejudice’. It was not all, for him, ‘the meagre failure the newspaper critics might have led one to anticipate, but a Lear of much intelligence and ingenuity’. Though he found it lacking in personal resonance, it had ‘inward moments of some beauty and depth’. He questioned his colleagues’ reactions: was there not, he asked, ‘something punishing and harsh in the meagre critical and popular response to Mr Welles’s elaborate production? How do we make the prodigy pay for his early audacities long after he has sloughed them off?’ If Welles was not the absolute Lear of his generation, at least he came out of the attempt ‘with a brighter honour than so many of his contemporaries who have settled for such mild victories. Quite possibly he does lack “a sense of direction” as we so consistently remind him, yet at least his confusion is the distress of plenty, not poverty.’34
A balanced appraisal: it is true that Welles never settles for the easy option. It is also true that he was to some extent in thrall to his own generation, who found it hard to forgive him for not having had the career they had projected for him, nor had he yet – either in America or in England – connected to a younger generation. This King Lear was hopelessly old-fashioned to the young and simply flat-footed to the middle-aged; but for the latter group, it was not merely disappointing, it was heartbreaking. On the first night at City Center, Paula Laurence and José Ferrer sat together: Laurence had been Welles’s Helen of Troy in the 1937 Dr Faustus, and Ferrer was then a shining beacon of classical acting on the Broadway stage. After the curtain fell on the first night, they remained in the stalls when the rest of the audience had left and wept.35
Welles himself took the reviews, as he took all reviews, on the chin. The day after his one
-man performance the company was called in to restage the entire production to accommodate the wheelchair. Certain effects became impossible – Welles could never negotiate the sloping platforms, for example, not even pushed by Alvin Epstein (‘Miss Bedpan’, as Epstein thereafter called himself, after Sheridan Whiteside’s nurse in The Man Who Came to Dinner, another play featuring a grumpy old man in a wheelchair). Remarkably enough, the general view among the company was that the production, and his own performance, took a huge turn for the better once Welles was in his wheelchair. He rapidly mastered its possibilities ‘and got incredibly adept with it, as you might imagine’, according to Geraldine Fitzgerald. ‘He’d hardly had it an hour before he could have been in one of Chaplin’s shows.’36 But it went further than that. In the wheelchair, said Viveca Lindfors, ‘his performance improved extraordinarily, as if confinement forced him to use a deeper, more private part of himself and give up the image of the giant Welles.’37 This observation touches profoundly on the wellsprings of Welles’s behaviour, the constant need to assert and emphasise the very thing he had for nothing: his scale, which runs parallel to his constant need to assert his versatility. If he didn’t assert his size, he would feel small; if he didn’t advertise his multifaceted brilliance, people would think him ordinary. Here, in the wheelchair, through no fault of his own, he had to acknowledge his limitations: no one could blame him for simply playing the character and the situation. In many senses, he had taken the weight off himself.
Interestingly, he made no attempt to customise the wheelchair, to dull down its high chromium shine. He wasn’t King Lear: he was clearly an actor with two damaged ankles in a wheelchair. The burden of impersonation had been lifted from him: now he could just speak the lines with truth and engagement, as he had done when he was talking to the audience in his lounge suit. (It is notable that Richard Hayes’s friendly and sympathetic review in Commonweal was of a performance in the wheelchair.) Welles spotted another gain in the situation, another theatrical opportunity. Every night, before the curtain went up, he made an announcement through an off-stage microphone: ‘Ladies and gentlemen, there is a tradition in the Chinese theatre that the prop man, however active on stage, is invisible. That is the way I hope you will look at King Lear’s wheelchair.’38 This statement engendered a perfectly Brechtian state of mind in the audience: do not expect any illusions; everything you see will be true. An illusion in itself, of course, and thus a perfectly Wellesian moment, too.
