Orson Welles, Volume 3

by Simon Callow

  The reviews were entirely approving. Taken together, they constitute perhaps the best set of reviews Welles ever had for anything in his career. ‘Welles’s Falstaff is a gigantic figure,’ said the Northern Whig.29 The Dublin Irish Times deeply admired Welles’s ‘wonderful presentation of Falstaff . . . everything was perfectly timed. It was a presentation which will be long remembered and who knows, may make Belfast audiences more critical of actors whom for want of a yardstick, we have labelled outstanding . . . it was a triumph for Hilton Edwards.’30 The national press vied with the local, to praise the show: ‘A towering Wellesian Première,’ announced the influential Manchester Guardian, which found that Welles’s proclaimed intention of providing a synthesis of the chronicle plays with Falstaff as its hero did less than justice to himself, both as compiler and as actor:

  His quite remarkable performance, and Hilton Edwards’s production in this world premiere, are geared to a different purpose. They are notably directed to presenting the Plantagenet world as an Elizabethan understood it, and the genesis and development of the great Henry . . . [Welles’s] Falstaff is no personality cult, as it could so easily have been. This is Shakespeare’s Falstaff, the old philosopher-rake; he seems to have gone into the depths of the man’s humorous soul for wisdom and then to utter it casually in a voice of incomparable richness.31

  The London Times said that Welles ‘gets every ounce of the philosophy, the ribaldry, the jesting; he changes with consummate skill from mood to mood and his was a performance that marks him as the ideal Falstaff . . . his superb acting did not dominate that of the others: it did not. What it doubtless did was to inspire the rest of the cast.’32

  These are rave reviews. Any producer worth his salt would have built on them: great commercial triumphs have been constructed on far less. Who knows? Perhaps that first night in Belfast was one of those rare press nights where the god capriciously descends and sets the town on fire, only to beat a swift retreat the following night; perhaps the show, briefly bound together by a combination of terror and primitive survival instinct, then fell apart. As far as Welles was concerned, they had just begun. The following day he acted decisively on a matter that had been troubling him. Scarcely having been at rehearsals, most of the scenes he was not in had passed him by. Now that he could look beyond his own problems, he finally saw them, and did not care for much of what he saw. Most of all, he was appalled by the performance of Zinnia Charlton as Lady Percy. At 8 a.m. on the morning of the second performance she received a letter saying: ‘I have decided to try Anne Cunningham as Lady Hotspur tonight. Orson.’ Meanwhile, Anne Cunningham received a note saying she was not to play Chorus that night, but Lady Hotspur. The sacked actress appeared at the theatre and wailed at Orson. ‘Why are you so upset?’ he said. ‘I’ve just cast you as Olivia in Twelth Night. You have that very special quality, repose. You’re perfect for Olivia.’33 In addition to playing Pistol, Rory MacDermot now took over as Chorus, wearing a cloak to conceal the book, because he had had no time to learn the part. That afternoon Welles rehearsed the Lady Percy scene with Cunningham and Kanner as Hotspur, demonstrating exactly how it should be done. ‘I must say it was thrilling,’ said Cunningham. ‘Orson played Lady Percy brilliantly. I thought I’d never be able to match it.’34 On she went that night. The following day, without a word of explanation, Welles cut the scene altogether – the scene he had set such store by; and that night, the third performance, after the interval, the two discarded Lady Percys, Anne Cunningham and Zinnia Charlton, made themselves up to the hilt, put on their evening dresses, sat in one of the boxes and watched the performance, with every sign of pleasure. Thereafter, Cunningham’s role in the second half of the show was reduced to ‘running about, screaming a lot’,35 while Charlton sat in her digs, waiting for Twelfth Night rehearsals to begin.

  After a week of very good houses in Belfast, Chimes at Midnight opened at the majestic Gaiety Theatre in Dublin the following Monday, 29 February, and again the god descended. The show went brilliantly and the auditorium was in an uproar of enthusiasm. Welles stepped forward to make a speech; he was in a deeply emotional state, having last acted on stage in Dublin nearly thirty years earlier. ‘Thirty years,’ he said, ‘is a good round figure – as I am tonight – but it is one year less than thirty since I first appeared with the Dublin Gate.’ Then, perhaps rashly, he plunged into the fathomless bog of Irish theatre politics, taking up cudgels on behalf of his old colleagues Edwards and MacLiammóir, who were in exile from their own theatre – the victims, their supporters believed, of a coup by the current incumbent, the Earl of Longford. Welles declared that he felt himself to be an honorary Irishman, thanks to his past work with the Gate and his ongoing association with Edwards and MacLiammóir; as such, he wanted to express some criticism: why had Dublin Gate Productions no theatre of its own? This simple question was enough to turn the mood in the auditorium from one of unanimous approval to one of sharply divided partisanship, with insults being hurled from stalls to circle and up into the gods; an entirely satisfactory outcome, Welles felt. ‘There were boos and shouts and cat-calls,’ Keith Baxter recollected. ‘Someone stood up and Orson said “Sit down.” “By Christ, I won’t sit down,” roared back the man.’36 Welles finally returned to the dressing room, moved and excited. But his tribute to his old mentors and current colleagues was not received by them as he had hoped.

  The fracas in Belfast over Welles’s attempt to persuade MacLiammóir to take over the part of the King had not ended with MacLiammóir’s furious departure from Welles’s dressing room. Welles had later added insult to injury by suggesting that if MacLiammóir didn’t want to play the King, perhaps he might take on the role of Chorus; in this he was egged on by Edwards, who thought it deeply regrettable that the production was not availing itself of ‘such a valuable personality as Micheál’. After the first night in Belfast, MacLiammóir had withdrawn to Dublin, whence he sent Welles a carefully meditated letter, which reveals the depth of his hurt and the deep complexities of the relationship between the three men. At the age of sixty, MacLiammóir had not entirely reconciled himself to no longer being the company’s acteur noble; he seems, improbably enough, to have expected to be asked to play the barely post-adolescent Hal. To be asked to play the King at the last moment, and as a substitute for an inadequate actor of no profile, was bad enough; but to then be asked to play Chorus – a part as yet ill-defined in the script, but one that consisted largely of reciting chunks of Holinshed – was wholly inappropriate, MacLiammóir felt, to his position as prima donna assoluta of the Gate Theatre, whose many and storied triumphs, both national and international, were inextricably interlinked with his standing as a Great Actor. He had not much enjoyed recently playing second or even third fiddle to John Gielgud on Broadway, and he certainly hadn’t come home to be further humiliated. MacLiammóir was not to be messed with, and Welles now found himself in the unusual position of being severely and eloquently criticised, as he himself had so severely and eloquently criticised others.

  MacLiammóir’s letter to Welles hovers excitingly between witty banter and a desire to inflict great pain. Edwards had informed MacLiammóir that Welles had been deeply hurt by his rejection of either part, MacLiammóir wrote, ‘and I am astonished by this’. A couple of months earlier Welles had been talking of doing The Duchess of Malfi with MacLiammóir in the role of Ferdinand, only for him to be casually informed that Welles had changed his mind:

  I felt quite honestly that I had not only been let but flung down. But the resulting depression was purely professional. It did not affect my feelings about you at all. And I can’t see why my much more reasoned failure to comply with every wish that flits through the shifting and fantastic caverns of your mind so that at a nod, a whistle, a risen finger, one must drop all other activities and fly to your aid (probably to discover on alighting, that the picture had changed once more and one’s flight had been in vain). I can’t see why, I say, your feelings for me should be
affected. Hilton apparently can. He was in his usual condition of unhappy urgency when he rang me to give me your message and seemed to expect me to say I’d play Hotspur’s wife for you, if necessary. But Hilton is more pliable than I, and probably au fond of sweeter fibre.37

  Welles had persuaded Edwards, much against his instincts, to play Chorus in Dublin. ‘I can’t understand you want to push him to play any part you don’t feel – having presumably cast the show yourself – is being done at the moment as it should be done. In Dublin of all places, the one city on earth where what he and I do is noted and gloated. Why do you?’ MacLiammóir now goes for the jugular: ‘Is it some remote shadow of Oedipus that hangs over us all? Is it that you enjoy putting people in positions impossible to maintain without distress or to complain against without embarrassment? Or is it that your very powerful imagination stops short at these places as British civilisation stops short at the table?’ He believes, he says, that he knows what it is, ‘though wild horses and all the torments of hell wouldn’t drag it from me . . . and that is why I love you still and forgive you, as I hope that in the present case you forgive me.’

  The fact that Hilton and I are so proud to associate your name with ours should prove to you, if you need proof, that I am as anxious as you for the play to be a success wherever it may go: and that if you believed my playing the King would have helped you’d have got me to do it from the start, and that if I believed my doing Chorus would improve things now I would drop all and fly. Now don’t be cross with me. It will only necessitate a reconciliation scene in about ten years’ time, and then I shall be far too feeble to play it.

  This is a letter full of harsh truths. MacLiammóir is, as Welles always maintained, distinctly feline – but he is fair, and rightly aggrieved. His cryptic hint at some sort of deep underlying disturbance in Welles is in the territory of Richard Fleischer’s ‘tragic genetic flaw’ – an odd, if powerful, intuition of what would now no doubt be described as a personality disorder. Unquestionably Welles behaved in ways that were brutal, insensitive and exploitative. Most people either retired hurt, or let it wash over them. Micheál MacLiammóir was not such a person; you crossed him at your peril. The reconciliation scene he so amusingly imagined never came to pass. It was, in effect, the end of their friendship. Ten years later MacLiammóir wrote to Peter Bogdanovich that the fact that he and Welles were not on speaking terms was, ‘alas, no Renoir illusion, but . . . I still love him and hope that one day maybe, tra-la, tra-la, tra-la . . .’38 And so it was that Welles’s genuinely heartfelt and tender speech at the Dublin opening of Chimes at Midnight fell on deaf ears. ‘Afterwards, too long afterwards,’ Ann Rogers noted in her diary:

  Michael Mac Liammóir came to his dressing room and just said ‘Thank you.’ ‘You’re welcome,’ said Orson. ‘You’re welcome? Is that all you have to say?’ says Michael. ‘Yes, that’s all.’ ‘You poor thing.’ After Mac Liammóir left, Welles said ‘I have waited for this and been looking forward to this for thirty years and now it is in, it’s the greatest anti-climax of my life. I wish I was back in Kenosha.39

  Oblivious of course to these backstage dramas, the press in Dublin was even more enthusiastic than it had been in Belfast. The Irish Times noted that the show brought ‘a new actor of very considerable talent to Dublin in Keith Baxter, who conveys the dual and changing character of Hal better than I have ever seen it done’. It also gave Hilton Edwards ‘a chance to use his virtuoso’s magic once more, to create with a bare three-tiered stage, some stools, a table, spotlights and a few banners, a far more vivid illusion than could have been brought about with all the scenery in Irving’s Lyceum’. The rest, the reviewer said, is Welles:

  a great sonorous wheezy ball of blubber . . . when Henry spurns him and there’s nothing left for him but the babbling of green fields, the great besotted bag of wind takes his deflation with the tragic quality of a tawdry Lear. This is a performance and a production that actors will talk about for a long time. It’s the most generous helping of full-blooded, unashamed acting on the grand scale that actors or their patrons out front could wish for, and schoolchildren in Ireland now abed will boast of seeing it, I hope, when Elvis is long forgotten.40

  A sadly inaccurate prediction all round, as it turns out. With entirely characteristic perversity, the Dublin public, having read so much about the show, felt that it had seen it: they stayed away in droves. Nonetheless, Welles set about improving the production, if in somewhat erratic fashion: he would call the company, then not show up, or show up and find no one there because he had neglected to call them. Eventually Alistair James took to summoning the company at ten every day. When Welles discovered what he’d done, he erupted: ‘This is cruel!’ ‘And I said, “Well, they’re in digs, they’ve got no telephones, the landladies don’t want them hanging around, they’d come in anyway to see if there’s any mail.” “No, no,” insisted Welles, “that’s cruel, they have to stay in their digs.”’41 If they weren’t summoned by midday, then they knew they weren’t on call; and if they were on call, then the assistant stage managers had to go out in taxis and collect them. ‘Orson really took over unashamedly after we opened,’ Thelma Ruby recollects. ‘He had in mind that he was going to make a film and he wanted to experiment and make cuts and changes.’42 Without even token consultations with Edwards, he constantly shifted the position of the great scene from King Henry V in which Falstaff’s death is described by Quickly to Bardolph and Nym:

  A’ made a finer end and went away an it had been any christom child; a’ parted even just between twelve and one, even at the turning o’ the tide: for after I saw him fumble with the sheets and play with flowers and smile upon his fingers’ ends, I knew there was but one way; for his nose was as sharp as a pen, and a’ babbled of green fields.

  One night Welles placed it at the beginning of the play, so that, like many another Wellesian saga – Kane, Othello, Mr Arkadin – it began with a death. Only for a night: the following night it was the epilogue, ending the play with Bardolph’s wonderfully earthy, deeply Shakespearean question: ‘Shall we shog?’ Chorus was another moveable feast: one night Hilton Edwards played the part in some sort of Jacobean robe with a ruff; another night he was in a dinner jacket, like the Chorus in Jean Anouilh’s Antigone. Other nights, Rory MacDermot was back in harness; once, Welles himself played the part, nipping smartly back to his dressing room to pad up and make up as Falstaff.

  At first Welles enjoyed himself, the whole rackety madness of it: Terence Greenidge missing virtually every entrance – ‘I thought you said the Lord Chief Justice cometh?’ busked Welles/Falstaff. ‘Yes,’ said Henry Woolf, as Nym, ‘I said he cometh, but he cometh not’ – and the soused extras lurching back from Naomi’s pub across the road just in time for the coronation, grabbing their coronets and treading on Keith Baxter’s cloak as he processed down the aisle. He loved sitting on the built-out apron of the stage, as the Daily Mail reported, delivering some of his soliloquies, ‘as if he were a music hall comedian . . . chatting to the audience like Danny Kaye’.43 But these pleasures began to pall as audiences dwindled and Welles started to move on in his mind. From a theatrical point of view, the demise of the stage version of Chimes at Midnight is another instance in Welles’s life of a great missed opportunity. The fact that it clearly fed into the making of the film that, for many people, is Welles’s masterpiece, is a consolation. But if the reviews – and the judgement of his fellow-actors – are anything to go by, it could have been an exceptional piece of theatre. Nearly a decade later, John Barton devised a piece for the RSC that he called When Thou Art King, which similarly charted the relationship between Falstaff and Hal; it was rich and funny and good. But though it had, in Brewster Mason, a splendidly vigorous and tender Falstaff, it didn’t have Welles. This, it seems right to record, and with the qualification that he only gave the part his full attention intermittently, was the best of Welles on stage. It was Falstaff, not Othello or King Lear, that was truly his pa
rt of parts, and he seems to have brought his directorial imagination to bear on certain scenes to extraordinary effect.

  ‘He had,’ said Alexis Kanner of the great scene in Justice Shallow’s orchard in Gloucestershire, ‘the two tiniest actors in the world to play Shallow and Silence. And between them he looked like four people and they looked like two. And the three of them faced straight out, straight out front as he said it. “We have heard the chimes at midnight, Master Shallow”. He had a way of saying it sometimes that it was like the tolling of a clock. Or the sound from a church tower, you know. It was the tolling of a bell. It had a kind of awful resonance like mortality.’44 He suggested to Aubrey Morris that Silence should get totally drunk. ‘Sobbing – singing – sobbing at his knees. It was a brilliantly directed scene,’ said Morris. ‘He would almost sob with Shallow and Silence at the line “We have heard the chimes at midnight.”’ Then Silence and Falstaff danced a minuet: ‘he finally lifted me off my feet and danced with me as though I were a rag doll.’45 It is the accepted view that Welles was depressed by the quality of the acting in the company, but many of the actors – Thelma Ruby, Leonard Fenton, Shirley Cameron, Anne Cunningham – went on to national fame; not much later Alexis Kanner played Hamlet for Peter Brook and gained a bit of a cult following in Patrick McGoohan’s The Prisoner; Paddy Bedford became a Broadway star and Keith Baxter had a spectacular career on stage and film on both sides of the Atlantic. So why was Welles so restless during the production? One can only conclude that acting in the theatre, which he so often dreamed of, had limited charms for him in reality; it could scarcely compare with the orgasmic joy of making a film. He never acted on stage again.