by Simon Callow
It has been suggested that Laughton insisted on playing Prospero instead of the Caliban for which he was obviously intended (James Mason says this); Benita Armstrong reports that Charles wanted to play Caliban, but was prevailed upon as the leading man of the season to play ‘the old gentleman’ (Agate again). On balance, it seems likely that Charles might have wanted a rest from monsters, and wanted to tackle the extended and elaborate verse that Prospero speaks. But of all Shakespeare’s great characters, the usurped Duke of Milan is the least flesh-and-blood, the most schematised. There is a way of approaching the play and the character which sees The Tempest as a revenge play; or a working out of Shakespeare’s own bitterness. But Guthrie’s and Laughton’s conception – in so far as they had one – seems to have inclined towards a rather arid sort of pantomime, from which nothing fruitful could come for Laughton. Agate wickedly suggests that, having failed to achieve Pickwick’s benignity, he sought to make up for it as Prospero. ‘Mr Laughton’s failure is, however, more respectworthy than Sarah’s [Bernhardt in Lucrèce Borgia]. She was merely following her stock-line of fascination, while he purposely discards familiar face-pulling, mowing and gibbering in order to extend his range. This is extremely good for Mr Laughton.’
The Tempest was extremely good for Mrs Laughton, too. As well as her biggest part in the season, it was ‘my most serious and important acting relationship with Charles to date … in The Tempest our performances were almost entirely interdependent.’
In Love for Love, Congreve’s Restoration comedy, their marriage saved large sections of the play being cut altogether. Somehow their matrimonial condition rendered the scenes between Tattle and Miss Prue, with their shameless double entendres, acceptable. Really double entendre is the wrong phrase, because their scenes together can only mean one thing. Miss Baylis and the Governors simply had to bite their lips and sit tight, because the production was an enormous success, gleefully staged by Guthrie, with Athene Seyler and Flora Robson as Mrs Frail and Mrs Foresight; three Liveseys, père and deux fils, as Sir Sampson, Ben and Valentine; and ‘a clever performance of the servant Jeremy by Mr James Mason.’
Laughton obviously had a little holiday with Tattle: ‘a delicious figure of fun and under-breeding, a mixture of wiggery and waggery, at once coy and servile, male yet mincing. This Tattle is a Roi Soleil about whom still hangs the barber’s shop of his probable upbringing.’ The photographs show another proto-Wildean figure, bustling with malice, which may have been quite a useful safety valve for him.
His next role, another Laughton-Lanchester number, was genuine Wilde: Chasuble in The Importance of Being Earnest. John Gielgud, in Distinguished Company, retails a fifty-year-old piece of gossip, namely that Guthrie initially cast Laughton in the part of John Worthing, but found him so unpleasant, that he persuaded him to play the Canon. There is no corroborative evidence for this. If it was Guthrie’s feeling, he might have been amused to read in the Daily Telegraph review that ‘there is no crime in the calendar of which I would not believe [Laughton’s Chasuble] capable.’ Agate found him ‘out of the right cruet.’ The revival was well enough liked, until all memories of it were effaced by John Gielgud’s later production with himself, Edith Evans, Peggy Ashcroft and Gwen Ffrangcon-Davies: ‘in my opinion,’ wrote Guthrie, characteristically generous, ‘the highwater mark in the production of artificial comedy in our epoch,’ the only novelty of his own production being that ‘Canon Chasuble appeared to be the leading part: Charles Laughton in a devastating, brilliant and outrageous lampoon.’ It is hard not to suspect a strong element of anticlericalism in the performance, perhaps directed towards the incumbent of the stage-box, surrounded as she was by confessors and clerics of every shade.
Elsa was sharply reprimanded by Agate, feeling that Laughton’s ‘sacerdotal oil could not be said to blend with the vinegar of Miss Elsa Lanchester’s Miss Prism. This young actress was recently said by me to have given one of the most beautiful performances I had ever seen; she now gives very nearly, and I really think quite, the worst!’ ‘On the last night,’ she quite understandably writes, ‘I think I had a good cry when I got to bed.’
And so to the real stuff. With Macbeth Laughton was decisively stepping into the ring. The haunted history of the play still daunts would-be interpreters. As usual, the superstition is based on practical factors: the play was frequently revived because one of the shortest in the canon; haste leads to accidents. Moreover, the part of Macbeth, due perhaps to the loss of a rumoured missing act in which the actor might have had time to recover himself, is one of the most physically punishing of all the great Shakespearean roles. Exhaustion leads to accidents too. Interpretatively, too, the character’s Patton-like combination of soldierliness and poetic reflectiveness generally leads to the favouring of one element to the detriment of the other.
On every level, Laughton was at a disadvantage. Stamina, both vocal and physical, was his worst problem as an actor. Soldierly decisiveness was not in his scope; and though there was in his temperament a strong streak, in John Gielgud’s phrase, of poetic imagination, the lyric and meditative modes were alien to him. The vein in Macbeth that he might most easily have tapped, the supernatural horror, was denied him by Guthrie, who cut the witches’ scene. His programme note explained: ‘by making the three Weird Sisters open the play, one cannot avoid the implication that they are a governing influence of the tragedy. Surely the grandeur of the tragedy lies in the fact that Macbeth and Lady Macbeth are ruined by precisely those qualities which make them great. All this is undermined by any suggestion that the Weird Sisters are in control of events.’ Clearly Guthrie, notoriously shy of emotion and sensuality in the theatre, was equally uncomfortable with the occult. His production was the very last thing that Laughton’s Macbeth needed to be: rational – or rather, rationalised.
When the play opened Laughton was the victim of one of those ritual outbursts of blood-lust which seems to seize the critical fraternity when, after months of balance and qualification and hesitation, they unanimously sense a sitting-duck, upon which they fall with naked fangs, licensed to kill. There is always something unedifying about the spectacle, even at fifty years’ distance, however bad the performance might have been: the unspeakable in pursuit of the unsuccessful. ‘Alas! he cannot, for the life of him, observe the niceties of the iambic convention. And alas! alas! he cannot, for the life of him, manipulate a trailing robe. He trips! There was an unfortunate moment in his Macbeth. The banquet scene – Banquo’s ghost. Mr Laughton’s squeak and scurry of fear, clutching his showy skirts, would have been more appropriate to the distraction of some Roman magnate of the decadence, a Trimalchi aghast at a rat or a mouse, rather than the superstitious terror of a murderer before the risen spectre of his victim. However, of all Mr Laughton’s performances at the Old Vic this season, his Macbeth is certainly the most interesting … He is not consistently exciting, but neither is he consistently dull. He never bores, though he might irritate, exasperate. He tends to a monotony of gesture and tone (he would be a great actor past question if he could keep his mouth shut).’ (Sketch). Daily Telegraph: ‘I am left in doubt whether Mr Laughton understands Macbeth at all.’ Harcourt Williams: ‘more the Sassenach tradesman.’ Daily Mail: ‘I do not believe that Shakespeare intended Macbeth to be a petulant, sulky schoolboy … nor do I believe that he would have ranted and stamped his foot like a child of ten: he need not, I suggest, always have soliloquised on A flat and allegro vivace at that. I can find no textual evidence to support the idea that he looked in person like the bearded lady at Mitcham Fair.’ Agate: ‘Mr Laughton was never within measurable distance of any kind of grandeur, and his performance beginning on the ground knew no heights from which to topple.’
Agate at least concluded his notice of the performance: ‘if this means that Mr Laughton is not a tragedian, I cannot help it; he remains a great actor.’ To this balm, Laughton might have added: ‘None of the other Shakespeare roles Mr Laughton has played this season has seemed to stir h
is imaginative sympathy so deeply.’ (The Times). Little else.
After a performance, James Bridie wrote to his friend Flora Robson: ‘My dear Flora, I didn’t come back-stage to see you on Wednesday afternoon because I was genuinely heart-broken. It’s no use lying about it, I thought your Lady Macbeth wrong, wrong, wrong; lifeless, inept, even stupid … you acted Lady Macbeth like a schoolgirl in a Dalcroze school in love with her head-mistress. Do read the lines again before you go on, and get the horror of them into your soul … do you know that when you said the Raven itself was hoarse I expected you to follow up by saying when you had got the spare bedroom ready for Duncan you’d go up and rub the bird with Sloan’s liniment … you are an artist of the theatre and a clumsy amateur of philosophy. So is Tony. He is not as clumsy as you but he has it all wrong. He is one of the “planning,” “hard-thinking” brigade …’
Bridie’s extreme and passionate reaction to Robson’s performance was not shared by the critics, who ranged from mild lack of enthusiasm, to outright acclaim: ‘This was the right actress in the right part’; ‘… she took her chance magnificently.’
The first night was a bitter disappointment for Charles himself. According to Guthrie, he was longing to play the role, and full of interesting ideas. ‘At the dress rehearsal his performance was electrifying. His acting that night bore the unmistakable stamp of genius.’ These words – electrifying, genius – were not frequently in the mouth of Guthrie. He did not use them lightly. Fabia Drake was at that dress rehearsal, and confirms the impression. Dress rehearsals, of course, can be emotional, tired, affairs, in which, in the empty theatre, or just surrounded by a few friends, with the set, the lights and the costumes together probably for the first time, judgements can blur. And indeed, something wonderful can under all those special and peculiar circumstances, take possession; and then disappear the following morning. For whatever reason, ‘alas, he never again, except fitfully, recovered his greatness.’ (Guthrie)
In the unique case of Macbeth, we have a scrap of evidence with which to reconstruct the performance: Laughton and the company recorded for the BBC the end of the play (Act V, scenes 5—7) from ‘The Queen my lord is dead.’ Making allowance for whatever inhibitions the radio studio imposed, it is still a vivid document. The recording is in fact quite ambitious: as well as three or four principals, there’s a substantial group of soldiers, battles are fought, fanfares are sounded. It is reasonable to suppose that what we hear is a fair impression of how it sounded.
The first thing to note is Laughton’s first utterance: significantly, it is non-textual: a deep sigh on hearing of the death of the queen. It is strikingly expressive. ‘She should have died hereafter’ wearily spoken, with a heavy stress on died. ‘Tomorrow and tomorrow …’ is soporific, the darkish brown voice monotonous, the cadences almost ecclesiastical. The messenger tells him that Birnam Wood is on the move: and he springs to life again with ‘Liar and slave!’ overlapping the dialogue, raging wordlessly. The subsequent ‘if thou speaks’t false’ is also lumpily measured. He exits with animation, however. Roger Livesey as Macduff enters, with a radically different manner of speech – the elongated vowels and deliberately struck consonants of an earlier epoch – but spirited. When Macduff and Macbeth meet, Laughton starts to laugh: a laugh which at first seems to be merely melodramatic, but becomes genuinely chilling when it suddenly stops at Macduff’s revelation of his Caesarian birth. In his final speech of defiance, Laughton for the first time uses the upper register of his voice, at the same time, rather engagingly, slipping into broad Yorkshire. The extract concludes with the twenty-one-year-old Marius Goring’s very clearly spoken Malcolm.
There is no question but that Laughton is not skilled at using verse expressively. He alternates between the monotonous and the untextual. On the whole, the performance qua verse-speaking is featureless and flat. He doesn’t take advantage of the medium, doesn’t draw energy or sense from it. For him it’s obviously a strait-jacket, from which he occasionally breaks to connect powerfully with a word: ‘nothing’ in ‘signifying nothing’ is memorably black, for instance.
He simply wasn’t at home in verse. Records from his later years suggest that he never really came to terms with it. Why? Hardly lack of intelligence. Certainly not lack of work; he was obsessed by work, never leaving a problem alone till he was finished with it. No: what he found difficult was adapting his responses to the beauty and power of words, which he so keenly felt, to even as easy and loose a shape as the more-or-less iambic more-or-less pentameter. He had an astonishing command of rhetoric, and, as Charles Higham usefully points out, the tirade: the art of building a speech from climax to climax. In film after film, he would fit a speech, whether it was the Gettysburg address or something from the Bible, into his performance, and it would be spellbinding. He was a master of phrasing, and colour – but he must bring these from within – every pause and hesitation, every change of gear, every new register, from within, in response to a sequence of impulses felt by him. He couldn’t get on the rails, preferring to make his own way down the middle of the tracks. By historical accident, it denied him access to the greatest roles in the English language, which happen to be in verse.
Laughton in verse, as the recording proves, was Laughton muzzled.
So he hadn’t learned to ‘speak’ – though his voice was immeasurably strengthened, and his range of expression enlarged, by the end of the season. In fact, he had done his ‘rep’: a large variety of parts, some within his scope, some not. There wasn’t the remotest possibility of his Prospero being anything other than a sketch; his Henry was neither here nor there; Tattle and Chasuble were fun, both for him and the audience; his Angelo was wonderful; and Macbeth was a disaster. A typical rep season, in fact. Unhappily for him, however, he wasn’t a young actor cutting his teeth in the provinces: he was a world-famous film star, and a phenomenon of the West End stage.
It was an extraordinary thing for him to have done, humble and naïve at once. If he wanted to do a classical play, he could so easily have approached a West End manager: any one of them would have leaped at the chance. He could have had a company of his own; could have gone into management himself. But no, he wanted to go to the Vic. Not for itself, as we have seen. Nor was it glory, in which he was already covered anyway, that motivated him; not for him the reasoning of the young Laurence Olivier, four years later, taking the same route: ‘To me, the Old Vic was the equivalent of the Old Bailey. Here I would be judged for my classical work. Here I would pitch my stand and stake my claim. Here I could ease my way into the skin of the theatrical serpent, the skin that had been worn by Burbage down to Irving and Barrymore. There it was, pressed between the leather binding with the name William Shakespeare on the spine. There it lay, waiting to be moulded, shaped, hurled in the air and back again.’ (On Acting). Laughton wasn’t in competition for ‘the mantle’; he didn’t compare himself with the great dead; his hero was Gerald du Maurier who would no more dream of playing Shakespeare than fly. What he wanted was to do the work, and to do it quickly. He was deeply conscious of his late start, and of his lack of serious background. The Old Vic was his crammer.
‘It is a real pleasure,’ wrote Guthrie in the middle of the season, ‘to work with such a marvellous band of enthusiasts. Several of the company are playing Shakespeare for the first time, and we have to work like niggers rehearsing the next play at the same time as we are playing the current piece. Fourteen hours out of the twenty-four spent in the theatre is an everyday occurrence.’ Rehearsals started at 9.30, they broke at 5 for supper, and the curtain went up at 8. After the show, according to Elsa Lanchester, many of the company would troop back to the Laughtons’ temporary service flat in Jermyn Street, where they would sit and eat sandwiches and drink and discuss the work till two in the morning. (Pure rep, again.)
Laughton didn’t lead the company, as it were, from the front. His attitude in rehearsal was entirely egalitarian. He was quite open about his problems with the work, and was,
Marius Goring admiringly observed, willing to try anything, not caring a fig whether it made him seem foolish. – At a certain point in rehearsals of Macbeth, for example, he came in in a state of great excitement: ‘I’ve got it! I’m so sorry, I see it now: it’s a Scottish play: Macbeth must be played Scots.’ Guthrie: ‘Interesting idea, give it a try.’ After three days: Guthrie: ‘It’s no good Charles, worse than it was without, worth trying out.’ So Charles gave it up. (The problem, Goring added, was that Charles couldn’t do a Scots accent, anyway, it kept coming out Scarborough.)
The young actors were very excited by what they felt to be ‘the new acting’ that Laughton was essaying. Charles mumbled through the read-throughs, which was utterly unheard of, and greatly admired; and he never turned up with a finished performance. He was constantly exploring. Coupled with Guthrie’s approach, brisk and brilliant and irreverent both to the Board and the Bard, the company was heady with excitement. John Allen wrote that it was ‘far and away the most exciting time of my life. Every night we used to walk out of the theatre, and over the bridge, in a state of intense exhilaration. We felt we were making history.’
Flora Robson, as Laughton’s co-star, had a less happy time. Her relationship with Guthrie, formerly so close, seemed to have cooled, and she found Laughton impossibly difficult to act with. According to Kenneth Barrow: ‘Charles was a difficult fellow-player. He was a self-obsessed actor who could only relate to the audience. Flora was exasperated at the way he would always look slightly down stage of her, when the sense of the moment called upon them to be looking fully at each other.’ And she felt that he stole her inventions. He certainly seems to have stolen her thunder, and that may have been at the back of her complaints. His unbuttoned realism must have ill-matched her more restrained, plaintive manner. It must be admitted that Laughton seems not to have been willing to lose himself in another actor. But then few great actors are.
