by Simon Callow
Laughton used to invite the juvenile lead, Kent Taylor, and Bickford, to his dressing-room, where he would rehearse scenes with them, often suggesting interpretations quite different to those of the director, which were, apparently, adopted. It takes a peculiar force of personality, or at least a peculiarly high professional status, for this to be acceptable to other actors – not to mention the director. Usually it is regarded as a breach of etiquette. Everything, of course, depends on the manner of doing. Very probably, if later reports from other Laughton films are to be believed, he would suggest a mutual examination of the scene in question, but then quickly take the lead – become a teacher. He had certain intentions for his character; he knew it would be impossible for him to achieve them in isolation; so he attempted to ‘guide’ the other actors towards complementing his work. It has never been suggested that he ever imposed reactions, inflexions or gestures on his colleagues.
He was already taking a close interest in the whole film, never simply turning in a performance; and on a film like White Woman, the prevailing cynicism and perfunctoriness of the approach would lead him to more frequent interventions.
It is not necessarily a recipe for becoming liked.
Old Vic
AS LAUGHTON RETURNED from America to begin rehearsing at the Old Vic, he was wired by Korda not to disembark at Plymouth, to carry on to Cherbourg where Elsa would meet him and travel with him to Paris for one of the world premières of The Private Life of Henry VIII.
The morning after, they read the brilliant notices at Le Bourget airport, hopped on the plane, and returned to London to start rehearsing The Cherry Orchard in the Waterloo Road that afternoon.
This breathtaking and rather enviable itinerary – wrapping one movie, attending the glittering première of another, starting rehearsals for an eight-month season of leading classical roles – reveals a small fact of some academic interest; namely, that Laughton was not contracted to the Vic Season, as Guthrie misremembers and most other accounts repeat, because of his success in Henry VIII on account of its not yet having opened. He was none the less already known – and perceived – as a Hollywood actor. Harcourt Williams in Old Vic Saga refers to him as ‘the man from Hollywood’; and on the last night of the Vic Season, the gallery-ites called out ‘Good Old Nero!’
The Cherry Orchard was the second play in the season, which had somewhat unhappily begun with Twelfth Night, featuring the eccentric casting of Lydia Lopokova, Mrs Maynard Keynes, exprima ballerina in the Diaghilev Company. Not only her Russian accent but also her habit of illustrating her emotions with expressive hand gestures had proved baffling; nor had another of Guthrie’s innovations, a permanent setting designed by the distinguished architect, Wells Coates, met with much enthusiasm. It gave the production, in Guthrie’s words, ‘a suggestion, not of Illyria, but a fancy mess ball on a battleship.’ However, it was a strong company, which, minus Mme Lopokova, went on to the Chekhov play: Athene Seyler as Mme Ranyevskaya, Leon Quartermaine as Gayev, Ursula Jeans, Flora Robson, James Mason, Marius Goring in other parts. The translation was by Guthrie’s brother-in-law, Hubert Butler – light, clear, fast-moving; very different, like the production itself, from the twilight Chekhov favoured by the English stage of the period. ‘There must be a translation in manners as well as in language,’ Guthrie wrote in the programme note. ‘I hope we have not so botched the attempt as to substantiate the conception that Chekhov is “morbid” or foster the idea of “Russian gloom.”’
The Laughtons had arrived halfway through rehearsals, and critical comment noted a certain unease in Charles’ first night performance as Lopakhin. Fleet Street, of course, had been baulked of its first night sensation. It wanted Charles to split a gut, raise the roof, whip up a storm or, just as acceptably, fall down a great hole. Agate (who had expected none of those things) observed: ‘Mr Laughton as was to be expected, made more of Lopakhin than has ever been made in this country. But,’ he continued, ‘as was also to be expected, this great artist put no more into the character than Tchekhov intended, thus blasting the hopes of anybody looking to see him gaze out of the window solicitous for bodies interred in the cherry orchard!’ The photographs of the performance suggest a completely real, socially awkward kind of business man (he played the part with a distinct Yorkshire burr) with some emotional depths. Alec Guinness remembers Laughton’s work as deeply impressive: subtle and delicate. In an end-of-season retrospective, Agate writes: ‘His Lopakhin in The Cherry Orchard was a superb study of character in the best sense of that word, and that it was not hailed as the finest piece of acting in town, which it demonstrably was, can only be attributed to the fact that the part is not a spectacular one.’ Realism was at the heart of Laughton’s approach: if his dramatist had written an extravagant character, to whom sensational events occurred, then Laughton sought the reality of situation and character, and it was that, as Marius Goring has pointed out, that so astonished contemporary audiences. Accustomed to Grand Guignol as they were, they were astounded to have it taken seriously. When melodrama is played like Tom and Jerry, that is, nobody’s really hurt, then it’s harmless. If the dreadful events of Maria Marten or The Bells become real, they are deeply distressing to behold. What made Irving great was what made Laughton great. In a sense, it requires greater reserves of passion and imagination to carry those plays off than when you’re supported by a text of distinction with a mature world-view.
But the same realism that had animated those contrived vehicles, when brought to a play of Chekhov’s resulted in the same truth-to-life; the life was simply a less sensational one.
It was the third production of the play in which he’d appeared. He’d done it at RADA (Yasha – the part played at the Vic by James Mason) and at Barnes. Later, in Los Angeles, he played Gayev in his own production. He would seem to have been supremely equipped to play in Chekhov, and any picture of Laughton which takes no account of this virtually unknown side of him is partial. The phrase most often used of Chekhov is also the one which perhaps best describes Laughton’s work: poetic realism. Barnstorming, ‘hamming’, the things of which he’s most often accused, were modes into which he fell at the end of his career when he had transferred his creative aspirations into other media.
His next part was Henry VIII. By this time the film had had its spectacular premiere which Charles had attended with all six wives. On stage it was bound to disappoint, and duly did. Elsa pertinently observes in Charles Laughton and I: ‘after seeing a close-up of a character the ‘flesh’ is bound to be rather a comedown.’ Shakespeare’s character lacks the range even of the character in the film; and Guthrie’s production (the first of several of a play which was to become his party-piece) was full of free-wheeling invention which only served to underline the weaknesses of the play and distract attention from the central figures. Flora Robson scored a success as Queen Katharine; Marius Goring was singled out for his Cardinal Campeius; Robert Farquharson, rumoured black magician and model for Dorian Gray, made a somewhat chilling impression as Wolsey; and the costumes, a mixture of John Armstrong’s from the film for the king, and Charles Ricketts’ from the Casson-Thorndike production of a few years before for everyone else, were acclaimed.
But Laughton disappointed. If Laughton v The Bard was the name of the game, then he still hadn’t quite engaged. He was warming over something he’d done before. ‘I am going to the Old Vic to learn how to speak,’ the world famous film star had announced with touching humility. On the first day of rehearsals Lilian Baylis had said to him referring to an interview he’d given: ‘We’ve all heard you sleep with Shakespeare under your pillow, dear. What we want to know is, can you speak his beautiful words?’ (A successful plea of justifiable homicide could surely have been submitted on less provocation.) But it was what everybody wanted to know. And Henry VIII couldn’t possibly tell them. So it was something of a non-event.
Agate had not liked the film, or Laughton’s performance in it: ‘a bundle of buffooneries,’ he called it. ‘His
performance in the play has a distinction unattempted in the film … given Mr Laughton’s interpretation, his performance must be hailed as virile and lusty and full of animal spirits’ but ‘one regrets Mr Laughton’s choice of reading.’ During the same week, Clifford Bax’s modest play on the same subject, A Rose without a Thorn was revived, with Frank Vosper as Henry. (‘Much the better play … the best Henry the modern stage has seen or is likely to see … if you met him in his nightshift, you would still know him to be King of England.’) The comparison between the two actors (‘I don’t want anyone to run away with the notion that I hold Mr Vosper to be a better actor than Mr Laughton!’) hinged on this question of kingliness. Agate the historicist and Agate the snob may have combined in disapproval of Laughton’s revelation of the tribal chieftain underneath the velvet and gold thread; to us, it seems highly authentic, straight from the pages of Lacey Baldwin.
Agate’s running commentary on Laughton’s development is fascinating and enviable. He seemed passionately to care about the actor’s growth, above all that he should know himself for what he was and cultivate himself within that knowledge. He freely used the word great in these public progress reports, and seemed to challenge Laughton to fulfil the claim. ‘On the whole,’ he says of the film performance, ‘it is no more than what one expected of him, which in the case of a really great actor means that he has failed. For the really great actor always gives you something which you did not anticipate.’
Laughton’s Angelo was something which no one anticipated. Measure for Measure was rarely revived, on the grounds of both structural weakness and scandalous morality. The board of the Old Vic needed some persuading to include it in the season. Baylis didn’t much care for it, either; on the occasion of its last revival she had told the director, Harcourt Williams, ‘if we were doing it to help a clinic, that would be all right, but …’ It was not thought to be particularly rewarding for the actors, either: the Duke a windbag, Isabella a prig, Angelo a cold, unattractive figure, with few lines to boot. ‘The trouble with yer Angelo,’ said Donald Wolfit to Marius Goring, ‘the trouble with yer Angelo … is yer duke.’ All this was transformed after Guthrie’s production.
For this, the dear old Permanent Setting finally came into its own, with its twin columns, its platform and tiring room, and the steps leading down from either side, while curtains billowed all around. It enabled Guthrie to move the action along at great speed, while concentrating the focus for the numerous duologues; its formality was well adapted to his satirical sense of the play’s deus-ex-machina dénouement. ‘Since what obviously sets out to be a tragedy peters out halfway through the evening, the resolution has been wisely taken to turn the rest of it into the best kind of Cochran revue.’ (Agate, of course.) The costumes were largely responsible for the visual dimension of the production, and were universally admired (‘unimaginably lovely’). Roger Livesey manfully tackled the part of the Duke; James Mason didn’t think much of his own performance as Claudio when he wrote his memoirs, but was well enough liked at the time; Elsa Lanchester played Juliet and, as a singing page, sang ‘Take, O take those lips away’. Flora Robson, who played Isabella, wrote Guthrie, ‘suggested an uncompromising and splendid young Scotswoman in difficulties on the Continent.’ But then he thought both Robson and Laughton ‘were oddly and wrongly cast. Laughton,’ he said, ‘was not angelic but a cunning oleaginous monster, whose cruelty and lubricity could have surprised no one, least of all himself.’ But Laughton, with perfect textual justification, chose to play Angelo the other way round, as it were. Instead of playing the traditional cold puritan who is overwhelmed by violent and unprecedented desires, he played a man who has long repressed nameless longings, which now demand expression. One need barely speculate on the source of this interpretation; to which he added contemporary overtones of the rising Fascist dictators. What was remarkable, though, was not the interpretation, but the realisation.
Even now, the photographs of the production have the power to disturb. John Armstrong’s costume for him turns Laughton into a terrible black bird, or, as many observers felt, a bat, while his features are full of dark malignant horror: ‘When the actor shows us Angelo in the scene where he bargains with Isabella, brooding over the girl like a lustful black bat, he gives a glimpse of such murky depths in the man’s nature that we no longer despise him for his sins. Instead we admire him that he fought his temptations so long.’ This acute account – by W. A. Darlington, in the Daily Telegraph – is a masterly description of the Laughton effect. He doesn’t tell you what to think or feel – he neither manipulates nor editorialises – he brings you face to face with the thing itself. That scene, according to Fabia Drake, was so overwhelming ‘that an inner, awful excitement generated itself throughout the audience. When … Isabella says, as she leaves him. ‘Save your honour,’ Angelo replies, in an aside to himself, ‘From thee even from thy virtue.’ All the horror of what we sense may come to pass was encapsulated in those hardly-breathed six words.’ Fabia Drake accounts the performance ‘one of the four truly great performances in a long lifetime of theatre-going.’
Marius Goring watched every performance that Laughton gave during that season: he attributed the overwhelming impact of Angelo to Laughton’s mastery of close-up technique, which he somehow adapted to the theatre. This is what Agate was describing when he wrote: ‘whenever the actor comes to anchor to deliver his soliloquies of torment the house falls into a hush the like of which is rarely heard in our theatre.’ Obviously this performance was, like his William Marble in Payment Deferred, phenomenal. ‘It is a terrifying piece of work,’ said Darlington. The greatest tribute came from Lilian Baylis. She never missed a performance of the Isabella-Angelo scenes. Sitting in her stage-box, frying her sausages, she whispered to Marius Goring as he passed by for an entrance: ‘There are lots of things I don’t like about that man – but I don’t want to miss a minute of this.’
A number of factors were involved in the achievement of this tour-de-force. Firstly, without doubt, he discovered a deep identification with Angelo: repression, hidden desires, cruelty. ‘In moiling and toiling over the conflicting forces in Angelo, Charles actually seemed to clear up a kind of hangover that he had within himself, probably caused by religious upbringing and the war,’ wrote Miss Lanchester in 1938. (In 1982, in her autobiography, repeating the sentence, she deleted the last clause.) Secondly, the part is a relatively short one. He was able to concentrate his energies and sustain the massive emotional intensity without having to drive the play. Agate wrote: ‘Continuing his backdoor attacks upon the Shakespearean drama, Mr Laughton has now promoted himself to that side-entrance which is Angelo.’ Thirdly – and I am inclined to rate this very highly – he had time for preparation. Elsa Lanchester notes that he and John Armstrong had been talking about ideas for a production of the play for a long time, even down to cuts in the text and design possibilities. It had been germinating in his mind for nearly three years, in fact, and he had filled out every corner of the role with intense feeling. The tasks he set himself as an actor were enormous; he needed time for the imaginative connection to possess him completely.
And how did he speak ‘the beautiful words’? ‘Mr Laughton’s voice has not yet acquired the full resonance for blank verse’ said Agate; but it’s more than simple resonance that blank verse needs – it’s a sense of pulse, an ability to sustain line-endings, an awareness of alliteration and assonance. As it happens, however, Angelo’s utterances are so tortured and tortuous, the line – and the syntax – is so broken up by emotional and mental twistings and turnings, that it is sometimes hardly verse at all.
So the great Laughton v Bard match was still unfought.
Agate concluded his account of Charles’ Angelo thus: ‘This performance whets the appetite which, after once more tantalising it with that dreary codger, Prospero, Mr Laughton promises presently to satisfy with his first attack on the real stuff – Macbeth.’
The dreary old codger – ‘that endless chunn
erer’ – Agate was a thesaurus of abuse when it came to Prospero – ‘that enchanting bore’ – his exasperated dismissal of The Tempest and its central character was more common then than now – was played by Laughton as ‘deriving snowily from Blake, Devrient’s Lear, Michelangelo’s Noah, M. Boverio’s Noe, possibly Noah himself, and certainly Father Christmas. But alas, he made the old boy perform his hocus-pocus with a naughty little twinkle in his eye …’
Quite clearly, Laughton, and Guthrie, and just about everyone connected with the production, were all at sea. The Permanent Setting was off into the dock again, being replaced by a decidedly arid landscape, devised, James Mason darkly suggests, by Laughton himself and John Armstrong, who had imposed his surrealist tendencies on the set, at the expense of either atmosphere or reality. (Agate: ‘an almost bare stage sparsely furnished with logs constructed out of pink Edinburgh rock, an igloo or wigwam made out of raffia as used by Miss Cicely Courtneidge for her production numbers, and three screens similarly fringed.’) The Ariel songs were ‘steel-furniture ditties’. The costumes, also by John Armstrong, ‘succeeded in making the handsome actors look ugly and the ugly actors look funny,’ according to Guthrie: his own direction, he admitted, was ‘at once feeble and confused’.
The only positive comments about the production from any quarter are for Roger Livesey’s Caliban (‘a delicious monster compounded of Frankenstein and Petroushka’) and Elsa Lanchester’s Ariel. ‘May I be forgiven for saying that until Miss Elsa Lanchester the part of Ariel has never been acted? … So impalpable to sight is this Ariel that his body seems to offer nothing to human glances. You see through him … in short, it is a lovely performance of exquisite invention.’ The flying rig by means of which she was to have entered and left the stage was cut, but the performance still survived. And yet, during rehearsal she had been completely mystified by the part: ‘I sat with Guthrie for hours, trying to interpret one great long speech that was very confusing. It was a little like learning ten alphabets in Greek backwards. Guthrie simply said he didn’t know what the speech meant either.’ Guthrie wrote: ‘The only good thing was Elsa Lanchester’s Ariel, weird and lyrical in a balletic style which was at odds with everything else in the production and which better direction would never have allowed.’
