Orson Welles, Volume 3

by Simon Callow

Meanwhile, all was not well within the sacred circle of art. It quickly became apparent that Olivier’s working method was diametrically opposed to Welles’s. Olivier always prepared a production some weeks before rehearsals began, wrote Joan Plowright, ‘moving cardboard characters around on a model of the set and choreographing the entire play, before coming with a completed framework to present to the cast on the first day’. Only when the actors had mastered the structure would he allow them to make a contribution. As she well remembered from Moby-Dick, ‘Orson liked to experiment in a hundred and one ways before making his choices and allowing some order to emerge from chaos.’21 It was, in fact, rather more complex than that: what Welles liked to do was simultaneously change everything and rehearse specifics in obsessive detail. He pushed the cast to high comic stylisation. A great deal of time was spent on the overlapping dialogue, which needed to be very precise if it was to work. Their scripts, recalled Peter Sallis, began to look like orchestral scores. ‘The number of different coloured dots, I start here when he says this, and she starts there when I say that.’ Sallis called it ‘dramatic punishment’, but he ‘loved it, I lapped it up’, doing his damnedest to try to get it right according to what Orson wanted, as did Olivier and Plowright.22 The older actors found it hard, but struggled on until they had mastered it, at which Welles started to rearrange it: a recipe for insanity. Even the stage manager, Paul Stone, trying to keep track of all this, objected: ‘But yesterday you said—’ ‘Yesterday was yesterday,’ growled Welles, menacingly. ‘Today is today.’23

  To compound the difficulty, Olivier was still far from clear how to perform his part. Bérenger, a character who reappears in four of Ionesco’s plays, is (as has often been noted) a sort of Everyman, a bit of a dreamer, a bit of a boozer, a bit of a drifter, a bit sentimental. But when push comes to shove, he proves to be made of sterner stuff than might at first appear. The character is routinely described as a little man, but that is a reduction: he is an ordinary man, un homme moyen sensuel, a much more interesting proposition. He is an archetype, a modern commedia dell’arte character, not unlike Pulcinella – slothful, greedy, lustful, put-upon. He should have the warmth and the sloppiness of a lazy dog. This was very difficult for Olivier, who always sought a very sharply defined outline for his roles, precise and instantly recognisable. His concept of character was highly specific and realistic, always based on a kernel of observed truth, which he then, in a kind of choreography of character, physicalised. He was unable to find this kernel of truth for Bérenger, and thus unable to find the character’s physical life, without which he was lost. Welles was unable to help him. Then one day, as Peter Sallis describes it, Olivier found his Bérenger:

  When we started rehearsing, Olivier just didn’t know how to play it. He just used to turn up at rehearsals and sort of just say it, and then go away. And then there was one magical day when he turned up and all of a sudden, there it was, there was the character. He’d turned a page and there it was, this character. And from that point on he never let it slip. He had as firm a grasp of that character as anybody could ever have on anything.24

  The only question was whether he had found the right character. Olivier’s Bérenger was a little man – or, rather, his idea of a little man – which for him meant funny little man, a Chaplin or a Sid Field (the great music-hall comedian whom Olivier idolised). He reached for a theatrical type rather than a real type drawn from life. And of course he played that type superbly, to the hilt, physicalising it to the last detail and flick of his little finger: he was the little man to end all little men. But it cut against the meaning of the play. In fact, it stepped outside the play, became a source of fascination it itself, a masterly performance. But the character Ionesco wrote is a lazily reactive bloke who finds to his surprise that, because he is so very much himself, he has it in him to resist conformism. Olivier’s performances, brilliant in themselves, often subverted the plays in which he appeared in this way. But he was now happy, because at least he knew what he was doing, which freed him up to observe what everyone else was doing. What he saw all around him was confusion and panic. It was at this point that Welles had started mucking around, as Sallis put it, with the overlapping dialogue, unpicking it, reshaping it. And this Olivier, and the older members of the company, could not endure: not knowing what they were doing. A sense of chaos and uncertainty set in, filling them with dread and anxiety. Alan Webb, Miles Malleson and Hazel Hughes all begged Olivier to take over. And he did, decisively and without hesitation. One morning at the beginning of the last week of rehearsal, he sidled up to Welles. ‘You have to go away, Orson, baby,’ Olivier told him. ‘Not come to rehearsals because you’re upsetting us all.’25

  The shock of this for Welles is impossible to exaggerate – this banishment not just from his natural habitat, but from his kingdom, locked out from the rehearsal room, where for twenty-five years he had been a law unto himself. He had behaved, from an early age, like a classic actor-manager. There can only be one actor-manager in any rehearsal room, and on Rhinoceros that person was Laurence Olivier. Welles had sensed for some time that something was going on. Recently his old friend Pieter Rogers, now general manager of the Royal Court, had been helping him out with small services, among them taking dictation for Welles’s correspondence: in one letter Welles told his correspondent that Olivier was destroying him. He became convinced, perhaps rightly, that Olivier, though accepting the notes Welles gave him ‘like a good soldier’,26 was all the while taking the actors to one side behind his back and subtly (and sometimes not so subtly) modifying their performances. Welles had very little experience of directing Big Beasts like Olivier. Edward G. Robinson had been tricky, but that was on a film, and much more containable. In a rehearsal room, the structure of command is far more open, with all the actors present all the time; the atmosphere in the room – the same room, day in and day out – becomes deeply oppressive when things go wrong between the leading actor and the director. Sacking the troublesome actor is the usual recourse, but in this case, it was not an option; neither the producer nor the theatre would have supported Welles over Olivier. If anyone was going to have to go, it would be Welles.

  Olivier had form in this manoeuvre: only five years before Rhinoceros, when he was playing Malvolio in Twelfth Night at Stratford, he had banished his director from the rehearsal room for being too fertile with ideas; that director happened to be John Gielgud. Welles was outgunned. He could have quit, but that would have incurred public humiliation; instead he beat as dignified a retreat as he could, coming to work every day and sitting in the workshops in Sloane Square for over a week: Orson Welles, world-conqueror, creative powerhouse, lord of misrule, incomparable bravura personality – beached. He was perfectly comfortable being there, with his friends the technicians, all of whom, despite his ever-changing and sometimes outrageous demands, had come to respect and even love him. ‘Somebody with fresh ideas, blowing the dust away from the theatre,’ said William Green, the Court’s hard-bitten technical director. ‘If he’d said to me, doing this production up in Yorkshire or anywhere, “Would you come?” I would have been thrilled to bits to go with him.’27

  Welles now supervised the technical aspect of the production in great detail – more than he would have been able to do, had he been rehearsing with the actors: perhaps a little too much so. When Stallard asked him what they would put on the walls, Welles found a little bit of rhinoceros hide for them to reproduce as the pattern on the wallpaper. ‘He felt that the audience would get this and it would be part of the rhinoceros going all the way round, and even I couldn’t get it, I mean once it’s blown up it’s just an abstract sort of little bit of design.’28 Welles personally dressed the set for John’s bedroom with large ancestral portraits, blow-ups of photographs of Duncan Macrae, into which he painted, transforming Macrae into his grandmother or a general in the family. He personally painted a detailed and beautifully finished reproduction of Albrecht Dürer’s rhinoceros on the front cl
oth. ‘And I can remember a couple of times,’ said Green, ‘coming in to the Court and getting a member of staff to take the iron curtain up, and as the iron curtain went up, there was this big figure sitting at the easel painting. That was eight o’clock in the morning,’29 – Welles the lonely dreamer, dancing again in the moonlight in Grand Detour.

  He and the company were reunited for the technical rehearsals in the theatre. It was not a joyful reunion. Welles sat in the stalls loudly giving notes into a small tape-recorder, a pioneer Dictaphone; then, almost immediately, he and Olivier had a screaming fight over how Olivier should get off his bicycle – a clash of titans that it would have been interesting, if perhaps a little eardrum-threatening, to have witnessed. There were a thousand complex technical effects to achieve; William Green was convinced that Welles deliberately contrived that what was intended as a small release of dust over Olivier’s head turned into an avalanche. But Welles had a more complex revenge up his sleeve, which many years later he confided to Kathleen Tynan:

  Larry came with the last big speech, when the rhinoceroses all come out of this wall, you know. And I said on the loud-speaker, ‘Larry, I’m going to tell you how to play this scene.’ And I knew I had his back up, but I knew what I had for him. ‘As you get to this point in the line, you will suddenly realise that sitting over there in the audience is a rhinoceros. Then you will see another rhinoceros. And then you will realise that the theatre is full of rhinoceroses.’ And I knew it was so good he had to take it, you know?30

  And he did; every review drew attention to it. The lighting was of immense complexity, but that was as nothing compared to the sound. For this, Welles had summoned young Martin Tickner, his assistant stage manager from Chimes at Midnight, just before technical rehearsals began:

  I got a call from Ann Rogers on a Sunday saying ‘Mr Welles wants you to come to the Star Sound Recording Studios straight away.’ So I said, ‘What, now?’ and she said ‘Yes, have your lunch or whatever and then come, can you meet him there for about three o’clock.’ So I said, ‘Well, what’s this all about?’ and she said ‘He wants you to do the sound for Rhinoceros because he doesn’t like any of the sound people at the Royal Court.’ So I said, ‘Ann, I’ve never been allowed to do sound,’ and she said ‘Orson says you would know how and you’re to be his expert.’ And I thought ‘Oh my god, what have I been landed with?’31

  Welles had assembled an extraordinary array of jazz drum-tracks, from his comprehensive knowledge of the territory: Art Blakey’s Drum Thunder Suite; Louis Bellson’s Concerto for Drums; Alibi for Drums by Thurston Knudson. They were originally recorded at 7½ rpm, then re-recorded at 3¾ rpm; sometimes he played them backwards. In addition there were recordings of actual rhinoceroses grunting, lavatory chains being pulled, crowds roaring:

  Orson greeted me warmly and said he was pleased that I was going to do this and I said, ‘Well, hang on a minute, I don’t know how to do this.’ And he said, ‘you’ll just have to find out, won’t you? I’ve told them that I’m bringing in my expert.’ So, I rang a couple of friends and said how do I do this and how do I do that and got a vague sort of idea.

  The following day the shy nineteen-year-old was introduced to the Royal Court Theatre’s sound department as Welles’s expert. ‘I was in the very invidious position of being the expert who didn’t know what the fuck he was doing.’ He learned soon enough.32

  That was Monday; the first night was on Thursday, with a dress rehearsal for the Friends of the English Stage Society the day before. When the tapes arrived from Star Sound, the cues – all 300 of them – were in the wrong order. They were still in the wrong order at the public dress rehearsal on the Wednesday. ‘Just play anything,’ said Welles, ‘when there’s a tape cue just play whatever’s on the machine and hope for the best because at least it will give you an idea of where the cues come even if they’re the wrong cues.’ Which is what Tickner and his assistant did. ‘I mean, it was chaos that evening and there were lavatory chains being pulled while rhinoceroses were running around and everything.’33 They reconvened at 6 a.m. the following morning – the day of the press night – and finally, in the quiet and empty theatre, managed to get it into some semblance of what Welles wanted, though they didn’t get round to setting the sound levels. A great deal of Welles’s creative energy went into the sound: not only did it emerge from all over the auditorium, but one of the stage crew was on stage during the show, dressed in black, as in the Chinese theatre, holding a pole with a small speaker on the end of it, adding an extra rhinocerotic grace note to the soundscape.

  The pressure on the first night was extreme. The company was insecure and overworked, the technical issues had scarcely been resolved, the stage manager had more or less reached a state of collapse through exhaustion. ‘The only reason he got through the first night,’ recollected the production photographer, John Timbers, ‘was that he was one of the first people to pop pills in the sixties, amphetamines, I suppose, to keep him going.’34 Out front, the audience was strictly monitored for possible press infiltration: despite vigilant scrutiny of first-night ticket applicants, wrote Virginia Fairweather, the Royal Court’s press rep, ‘the little theatre seemed to be stiff with narky journalists’.35 Welles himself had been getting increasingly nervous over the days leading up to the first night: Mrs Rogers reported that he was drinking a great deal of coffee. ‘I had relays of people taking four or five Thermos flasks over to an Italian Espresso café in a little alley off Sloane Square where they had real, very strong Espresso. How his heart stood it, I don’t know, every day, and up to a bottle and a half to two bottles of good brandy, really good brandy.’ Welles stood in the foyer prowling around before the curtain went up, as Noël Coward, the Earl of Harewood and Ionesco himself hurried into their seats. ‘Don’t leave me, don’t leave me, stay with me,’ he said to Rogers. She had a dozen small hand-towels in her holdall. ‘He would wipe his face, which was sweating all over, and give it to me again wet and I would give him a dry one. That’s how nervous he was.’36 He had a job to do: the sound levels had not been set at the dress rehearsal. Welles duly went up to the dress circle, where, seated behind a black curtain, he had a microphone connected to a speaker in the room where Tickner was sitting off stage, Tickner recalled, ‘saying up a bit, down a bit, and so on all the way through the show’.37 This bizarre counterpoint to the action did not go unnoticed: ‘SHH! DIRECTOR WELLES WHISPERS HIS WAY THROUGH THE PLAY’S OPENING NIGHT,’ said a large headline in the Daily Express the following morning. ‘He was whispering from the darkness: “More rhino roars. More! That’s it.”’38

  Perhaps on account of this constant rumbling from the dress circle, things started to go wrong on stage – cues missed, overlapping dialogue out of kilter, lines forgotten – and at the interval Welles rushed backstage. Peter Sallis was sharing a dressing room with Miles Malleson, Duncan Macrae and Alan Webb. The door burst open, Sallis recalls. It was Welles. ‘What the fuck,’ he said, ‘is going on here? There are only three people in the cast who are doing what I’ve asked them to do, and that is Laurence Olivier, Joan Plowright, and Peter Sallis.’ Then he slammed the door and went back to the auditorium.39

  Act Two continued in comparable chaos, till the end when Bérenger, the last human being not to succumb to rhinoceritis, is left alone. Olivier spoke his famous last lines (amended by Welles): ‘People who try to hang on to their individuality always come to a bad end. Don’t they? Don’t they? Alright. Alright. I’ll put up a fight, anyway.’ Then he turned, looking out to the audience, who became very still, as Welles had predicted they would. Bérenger seemed suddenly to realise that the audience had become rhinoceroses too. ‘Yes, I’ll take on the whole lot of them – the whole lot of you! You! Oh God.’ Blackout. The applause was only moderate. Back in the Sallis/Malleson/Webb dressing room, there was another knock on the door. This time it was Noël Coward. ‘What a perfectly bloody play,’ he said, turning to a very small man who had come in with him
. ‘This is the author. He doesn’t speak a word of English.’ They departed, Ionesco beaming.40 The cast eventually trailed away. Olivier had left by a private exit; Plowright from the front of house, unnoticed. What happened to Orson Welles is unrecorded. There was no party. There seemed very little to celebrate.

  They were all in for a pleasant surprise the following morning: ‘IONESCO PLAY ALL EASILY COMPREHENSIBLE,’ said the headline of the Times review, palpably relieved.41 Elsewhere – in the Daily Mail and the Daily Express – both play and production were ecstatically received: ‘The chemistry of Sir Laurence Olivier’s performance and Orson Welles’s production explodes into a unique theatrical experience,’ said the Daily Mail’s Robert Muller. ‘The final closing-in of the herd is beautifully managed, the fireworks mount to a stupendous climax. The scene in which John turns into a rhinoceros must be one of the greatest coups of 20th century drama, and Mr Welles has squeezed it of every last drop of horror.’42 Muller ended his review by demanding that Olivier extend the season. For Bernard Levin, in the Daily Express, the production was ‘manifestly sharper, tighter, more inventive and more coherent than M. Jean-Louis Barrault’s slack and careless Paris version . . . the truth is that Mr Welles and Sir Laurence have divined that Rhinoceros is not a comedy at all.’43

  Elsewhere, there were cavils: Olivier was sometimes felt to be overcast for the role, which did not, many felt, ask enough of him. Welles’s production was, in some quarters, denounced for its over-insistence: ‘Sir Laurence Olivier plays with delicacy and strength,’ said J. W. Lambert of the Sunday Times, who had seen and deeply admired Barrault’s production and was having no truck with Welles’s work: only Olivier, he thought, had resisted what he called ‘the dreadful pressures of a production – by Orson Welles – which is throughout heavy-handed, careless and vulgar . . . [he] must take the blame for loss of effect in passage after passage. Ionesco’s farcical counterpoint, in which the dialogue darts from character to character and group to group with ludicrous congruity, aspires to the condition of music but at present, in this production, rather resembles erratic small-arms fire. And the important sound effects are coarsely handled, deafening us from the start and spoiling the gradual swell of menace.’44