Orson Welles, Volume 3

by Simon Callow

  Three weeks later, Welles sent Edwards a copy of what he now called Chimes at Midnight, suggesting that they should do the play in tandem with The Merchant of Venice. With the play he included some notes ‘not on staging – but on what you call essence . . . on what I think the play is about’.3 They give a vivid sense of his directorial approach, his sharp understanding of the play and his constant awareness of the audience’s engagement with the characters and their story: here he is discussing adding the scene between Lady Percy and her husband, Hotspur (Act Three, Scene Three of Henry IV, Part One): ‘LADY PERCY MAKES HOTSPUR REAL,’ he says, in capitals. ‘The more real he is, and the more sympathetic as a human being – the better our first act pays off from every point of view . . . I believe that an important part of` Shakespeare’s plan for PART ONE was to make Hotspur actually more sympathetic than Hal.’ A striking thought: ‘THE DEATH OF HOTSPUR,’ he goes on at the top of his voice, ‘IS MORE THAN MERE CLIMAX. It introduces the note of tragedy on which all of PART TWO is based. It makes the final comment on chivalry WHICH IS THE SUBJECT OF PART ONE.’ Welles has a remarkably integrated view of the plays: Hotspur’s death, he says, ‘represents the death of the chivalric idea . . . and also of course it marks a tremendous change in the development of Hal’s character. It is not only that he kills his great challenger in single combat (just as he will kill his great friend in the end) BUT THAT THE PERSON HE KILLS BE REAL AND ATTRACTIVE TO US AS A PERSON.’ Which brings Welles back to Lady Percy: ‘without his wife, Hotspur is greatly lessened as a human figure – as a person we care about, and mourn over when he dies.’ This is very much joined-up thinking about the play. But then his showman’s instincts assert themselves: ‘WITHOUT HOTSPUR’S WIFE WE HAVE NO ATTRACTIVE FEMALE IN THE WHOLE DAMN EVENING ********* Alright, enough of that!’

  The creative temperature was rising; flickerings of theatrical glory were appearing on the horizon. And then, as so often with Welles, it was all snuffed out – on this occasion, because of his commitment to a film whose dates were suddenly brought forward: his second for Richard Fleischer, Crack in the Mirror; it was produced by Darryl Zanuck, who had saved Othello’s bacon at a critical moment, and to whom Welles accordingly felt morally indebted. He would have to pull out of the Dublin Festival, he wrote to Edwards, or at the very most do just two performances of Chimes at Midnight, which made no sense whatever financially.4 He promised to pay for the production himself. But Chimes at Midnight was just the tip of the iceberg: Welles had been made a director of Dublin Gate Productions, and he and MacLiammóir and Edwards had been planning a series of shows, films and television productions, all of which would now be imperilled by the demise of Chimes at Midnight. He proposed various ways around the problem – shifting dates, and so on – most of which would require him to subsidise the venture personally. The letter shows him to have proposed a major programme with the Gate, his old capacity for engendering projects and whipping up enthusiasm for them in no way diminished.

  For Edwards and MacLiammóir it was all deadly earnest; for Welles it was great sport. Just talking about things is no fun – you have to believe that they’re actually going to happen. And before you know where you are, you have a whole year’s work planned out in some detail. There had been, for example, serious discussion of him doing a play based on the great Liam O’Flaherty novel The Informer, set at the time of the Irish Free State, though Welles was not convinced, preferring a story-telling compilation called Tales from the Irish Hills; and at one point he was going to play Willy Loman in Death of a Salesman for them. For a small outfit like Edmóir (Edwards and MacLiammóir’s production company), planning a season like this was life-and-death stuff: no $100,000 cameos for them, if things fell through. In fact Welles had committed a sum of money to Dublin Gate Productions, out of which Edwards was to be paid a retainer, which Welles now increased. Despite the chaos and anxiety he had just unleashed, Welles’s letter to Edwards shows real tenderness and affection. He signs off ‘I love you, Orson’: the O of Orson is smudged, and next to it he has written the phrase ‘blotting his copybook again’.

  Edwards acted swiftly: he pulled Chimes at Midnight out of the theatre festival, at no cost to Welles, but at the small price of him promising to put in a personal appearance after one of the shows in the festival, or on a Sunday. ‘I had to take an awful lot of insulting gabble from small fry that I was bluffing,’ wrote Edwards, ‘or that you had no intention of coming at all. This, as you can imagine, made me very angry and I ripped up bellies left and right and swore on the Bible, the Talmud, the Koran and the Dublin telephone Directory in that order, that they lied in their teeth.’5 Edwards then proposed a post-Christmas opening for Chimes at Midnight at the Gaiety Theatre. ‘If,’ he continues, ‘now that you see it, in all its horror it goes beyond your intention or your convenience we are surely old friends enough for you to have a second thought upon the matter with “no offence gave or took”.’ Welles was still definitely on for Chimes at Midnight; and he honoured Edwards’s promise by breezing in from Paris on the last Saturday of the festival at the end of September, showing up at midnight, ‘a burly man in a baggy dinner suit,’ reported the Daily Telegraph’s man in Dublin, ‘with a little fringe of beard that made him look in his own words “like something between Edward VII and an unsuccessful gold miner”’.6 He entertained his packed audience by resorting to the tried-and-tested formula: some Shakespeare, then questions and answers. He talked about Don Quixote – ‘I had to finance it myself because it’s pretty difficult to get a bank to put up money for a film that’s mostly in your head’ – and said he was sorry not to have been able to do Chimes at Midnight at the festival, but then ‘it’s Theatre Festival here the whole year round’. All very charming, and warmly received: no sign of the Catholic Cinema and Theatre Patrons’ Association, no pickets denouncing Stalin’s Star.

  He retreated back to Paris and Crack in the Mirror, playing the double role of a prosperous attorney and a disturbed working-class man, the former rather more convincingly than the latter; meanwhile, Louis Elliman budgeted the show, determining that the only way it could break even would be to do six extra weeks, in add-ition to the four scheduled weeks in Dublin. Belfast could take it for two, then they would need four weeks in English provincial cities, ending up in the West End of London. Simultaneously, as part of the familiar Wellesian pattern, another producer, the Dutchman Jan de Blieck, having got a sniff of all this, proposed a two-production European tour, starting in Paris and then going on to the Benelux countries.

  Edwards got on with trying to cast the play. Maxine Audley, Welles’s feisty Emilia from nearly a decade earlier, was asked to play Portia and Lady Percy; she was not unwilling, but it was uncertain whether they could afford her. An offer for the parts of Hal and either Bassanio or Antonio was put in to Patrick McGoohan, who swiftly turned them down; and a general call was put out for a Mistress Quickly: ‘For this I would like someone who is practically a variety artist in talent.’7 Edwards is writing, but it seems to be Welles who is speaking. The question of who was actually directing the show was never clearly resolved; eventually Edwards was officially credited with the production (‘Staged by Hilton Edwards’), though Welles was clearly the fons et origo of the whole venture.

  By now Jan de Blieck had added Germany to the European tour, which rendered The Merchant of Venice unsuitable: Welles had doubts about the viability of the play so soon after the end of the war. ‘The picture of a Jew to be published just now is not Shylock,’ Welles told the Daily Express. ‘The Jewish story to be told just now is not the one about the pound of flesh. Not so long ago six million Jews were murdered. I think I know what Shakespeare would have felt about that story. I only wish he were alive to write it.’ In its place, Welles proposed doing Twelfth Night in the spirit of P.G. Wodehouse (one of his favourite authors), with himself as Jeeves-Malvolio, surrounded by Orsino-Bertie Wooster and an assortment of Drones. Edwards would be Sir Toby Belch. ‘Toby as an Edwardian
rakehell with curled white mustachios, a monocle and a top hat,’ he wrote to Hilton Edwards. ‘Ought to be great fun for you.’8 By any standards it is astonishing that, just three weeks from the beginning of rehearsals, they were unsure of the second play in their season – the play, indeed, with which they intended to open in Belfast. At one point Webster’s Duchess of Malfi raised its decadent head. Edwards was by no means averse to risk, but all this free-flowing adrenalin was beginning to make him feel ill; in fact he was ill, having had a fall, and was confined to quarters with a temperature of 104. From his sickbed, he uttered a cri de cæur:

  I have a suggestion which will probably make you open the sprinkler stop-valves on me and leave me on the apron singing Abide with Me. However I will risk it. Wouldjever consider concentrating for the moment on one show, Chimes, which is the readiest; spending an all-out effort on it; devoting yourself selflessly to your acting of Falstaff, so that without dissipating energies we could deliver one slap-up production instead of two shaky ones?

  Sanity prevailed; Twelfth Night – or would it be The Duchess of Malfi? – was deferred till Chimes at Midnight had opened. Rehearsals began at the YMCA in London in late January. The cast Welles and Edwards had assembled was for the most part young and eager, with a characteristic admixture of the ancient and eccentric. Auditions had created the same stir as his two previous West End productions, but the actors willing to work for a minimum wage and embark on an as-yet-unspecified tour were inevitably going to be less established than the ones he had approached for his stage productions of Othello and Moby-Dick. They arrived in dribs and drabs. Welles went about the process of casting with characteristic originality; he was, as ever, determined to avoid mere competence. First on the scene was Keith Baxter, who was twenty-seven years old, a couple of years out of RADA (his training having been interrupted by two years of National Service in Korea). He had a few small film roles to his name, one of them in Powell and Pressburger’s then-notorious Peeping Tom, but was currently engaged in bottle-washing at Simpson’s restaurant in the Strand. He joined the long queue of hopefuls at the New Theatre in the hope that the smallish but lively part of Prince Hal’s edgy sidekick, Ned Poins, might still be available. Instead he was astonished to come away with the crucial role of Hal, equal in length and importance to the part of Falstaff. Thelma Ruby, thirty-five at the time, an established comedienne with extensive experience in revue but none in classical theatre, was cast as Mistress Quickly (fulfilling the Edwards/Welles criteria for the role); Welles was especially delighted that, like Baxter, she had never done Shakespeare before. Leonard Fenton, a civil engineer in his mid-thirties who had just decided on acting as his career, had been sent along by his new agent, with no expectations of being cast:

  Came into this little room, Hilton was sitting behind this big desk, Orson was standing against the wall. They both said hello, a sort of cursory hello, and Hilton did all the talking. Said we’re looking for a Bardolph, we want him played in an old Cockney dialect. Said, there aren’t any long speeches so we would like you to read a speech of Falstaff’s as Bardolph, in a Cockney dialect. So they gave it to me to look at and I started reading it and then suddenly Orson said, ‘Of course that’s the way that line should be read.’ And I thought is he sending me up? But he wasn’t, he wasn’t. And I got through it, got to the end and Hilton said, ‘thank you very much, very good, thank you. Well, we’ve got your agent’s name and number.’ And Orson said ‘What do you mean get in touch, we want him.’9

  Anne Cunningham, twenty-three, proved to be something of a free spirit. She auditioned with the Rumour speech from Henry IV, Part Two. ‘I jumped about and then I did somersaults and I rode my legs in the air and I threw apples about and it was really very, very odd.’ In the middle of the speech Welles shouted out that it was a ‘very interesting reading. Have you done Shakespeare?’

  And I said, ‘Oh yes, I’ve just done Romeo and Juliet.’ So he said, ‘Oh, did you play Juliet?’ and I said no. He said, ‘Well, you’re too young for the mother, what did you play,’ and I said, and I really said in all seriousness, ‘I didn’t actually have a line, but I had a line addressed to me, “she that makes dainty I warrant you, she, I’ll swear, hath corns.” I mean, I wasn’t a walk-on or an extra, it was really quite important.’10

  He roared with laughter and said, ‘I’ve got to have this girl, I mean, in my company.’ He cast her as Chorus (a somewhat undefined role in the still-being-written Chimes at Midnight) and as Viola in Twelfth Night.

  Everybody was to be cross-cast between the two plays; Baxter was to be Orsino and Ruby Maria. This cross-casting caused difficulties for young Peter Bartlett, fresh from playing Claudio in Much Ado About Nothing at the Open Air Theatre in Regent’s Park: he joined the company to play as cast, and by default ended up playing Hal’s younger brother John of Lancaster, a part that was supposed to double with Viola’s twin, Sebastian, in Twelfth Night. Alas, Bartlett in no way resembled Anne Cunningham, so ‘they put me through a fortnight of torment because young men kept coming round all trying to look like Anne Cunningham and my knowing that if they did they would take away my John of Lancaster from me.’11 No Anne Cunningham lookalikes appeared, so Bartlett kept his John of Lancaster. Aubrey Morris, a short young-old character actor with an interestingly lyrical-comical, slightly grotesque quality, was cast as Justice Silence and Curio in Twelfth Night; Justice Shallow was played by Keith Marsh, equally short. Shorter than both of them by a head was Henry Woolf, who played Nym; he was to play Feste in Twelfth Night. Lady Percy, whose inclusion in Chimes at Midnight Welles had set so much store by, was to be played by Zinnia Charlton (who would also play Olivia), and Doll Tearsheet by the Australian actress Shirley Cameron. By far the most exotic member of the company, and thus irresistible to Welles, was Terence Greenidge, playing the very sober role of the Lord Chief Justice, and the rather more choleric one of the Earl of Northumberland. Barbadian by origin, a founder-member of the Hypocrites Club at Oxford, co-author and director with Evelyn Waugh of the scandalous film Scarlet Woman: An Ecclesiastical Melodrama, in which he also appears as Father Murphy, SJ (‘a very beautiful priest’), Greenidge was the author of some slim volumes of verse, a collection of Four Plays for Pacifists and a critical study of modern university life, Degenerate Oxford? (1930). No Wellesian company was complete without at least one actor with a similarly exotic curriculum vitae.

  Two members of the cast were there for what might be called Hiltonic reasons: twenty-seven-year-old Patrick Bedford, a strikingly handsome actor from the backstreets of Dublin, played Poins and Davy, Shallow’s man; he was Edwards’s current boyfriend, part of the complicated ménage maintained by Edwards and MacLiammóir at Harcourt Terrace, their elegant Georgian home in Dublin. The other actor proposed by Edwards – attached as assistant to the directors, and featuring as Gower and Feeble, among sundry other spit-and-cough roles – was Geraldine Fitzgerald’s son, Michael Lindsay-Hogg, now nineteen years old and nominally studying at Oxford University, but grounded in Dublin with his mother because of debts run up during his first term. He was of course delighted to be liberated from the Dublin suburbs by Edwards’s suggestion that he join the Chimes at Midnight company. The critical role of King Henry IV, almost equal in importance to the roles of Falstaff and Hal, was to be played by Reginald Jarman (‘pro-tem’, Welles’s casting notes say: he was confidently expecting to inveigle MacLiammóir into playing the part when he came back from America, just before opening night in Belfast). Jarman was a veteran of the Gate, and an old pal of Edwards’s – solid, pipe-smoking, deaf: ‘I’m deaf in this ear, old boy,’ he told Baxter, ‘speak in this ear.’ When Baxter approached Jarman’s other ear, he found a huge deaf-aid. ‘I cover it up with a cunning disguise,’ cried Jarman, triumphantly. The disguise was several layers of Elastoplast and his own rather bad wig.12 Two crucial parts were still uncast by the time of the first read-through of the play: Pistol and Hotspur. Julian Glover was very nearly cast in the ro
le, but made it a condition that his new wife would also join the company. This was Eileen Atkins; a missed opportunity there.

  At the first rehearsal they read the play through, recollected Thelma Ruby:

  and Hilton said there was a whole pile of drawings of where he wanted everyone to move and how he wanted everything done. It was all, he said, thought out and it was carefully planned and then he said, ‘Now, I’d like you to work this way with me, I’d like you, if you have any suggestions and you want to change anything to do it afterwards, but first of all I would like to do the plan as I’ve planned it.’ And Orson said, ‘If I can do that then the rest of them can.’13

  It is hard to imagine any way of working less congenial to Welles. That afternoon he announced that he had a terrible toothache. ‘My dear boy,’ said Edwards, ‘you must see a dentist.’ ‘Yes, I think I should,’ replied Welles. ‘And so,’ recalls Michael Lindsay-Hogg, ‘Orson went to see his dentist. Who was in Rome.’14 Welles reappeared two weeks later, by which time Edwards, working diligently, had staged the play as well as he could in the absence of the central character. They now finally cast the not-insignificant parts of Pistol (Rory MacDermot, a solid forty-five-year-old actor of the old school) and Hotspur, for whom they chose a startling young actor from Canada, Alexis Kanner, seventeen but claiming to be twenty-seven. He had just come from a season at the Birmingham Rep, in which, again lying about his age, he had played an acclaimed Caliban. He was a turbulent individual, possessed of what Baxter carefully described as ‘raw unfocussed talent’, and his arrival in the company introduced a new and dangerous energy into the proceedings. ‘A mutinous character’, Michael Lindsay-Hogg called him, and the relatively short part of Hotspur – dead at the interval – scarcely satisfied Kanner’s huge need for attention and exposure. He concentrated on making the fight between him and Hal as life-threatening as possible, so much so that the official fight director walked out; he was never replaced.