by Simon Callow
These glimpses of the performance give some suggestion that there may have been something more to the performance than occasional moments struggling against huge technical incompetence; that the fruits of Laughton’s thirty years of red-hot searching of the play were worth a little closer consideration than the News Chronicle, for example, was prepared to give it. There are, after all, failures and failures. Beethoven’s last quartets are monumental failures by any criteria that existed before they were written; perhaps even now, they still rate as failures if you insist that the form should perfectly fulfil the content. Certainly if you approached Laughton’s Lear with a fixed expectation, namely that you would be thrilled to the very marrow by the spectacle of a crazy tyrannical king being turned against by his daughters, taking to the wilds where he goes completely mad, and the final dwindling into a sad old man, you would be disappointed. You would have loved the intense physicality of Laurence Olivier’s performance; John Gielgud’s performance lacked that, but his natural nobility would have made the first scenes acceptable, while there were immense dividends to be gained in his heart-breaking lyricism in the play’s second half. In a couple of years, though daunted by the strange, alien world of the settings, you would have recognised the brutish struggle of Paul Scofield, like a prehistoric animal facing extinction.
But if someone told you a completely different story, told you that King Lear was not about a decline, but an ascent, you would probably fail to understand the performance at all. It seems that Laughton’s understanding of the part was just such a breaking of the mould. The performance is lost forever, exists only in memory and a few scattered accounts. It’s a wonderful thing, then, for anyone trying to take Laughton seriously as an actor that a full account of it exists; one of the best accounts of any performance, and it was not written by a critic, or anyone connected with the theatre at all: the young man to whom Laughton wrote that the play was ‘the terrible journey of Lear to his death’, Ken Carter, a teacher. He offers a view of Laughton’s performance that makes sense of all the scattered insights, of what Lanchester has written, and of what seems probable, in the light of Laughton’s preoccupations.
Having seen the play Mr Carter wrote to his father who, unknown to him, sent the letter on to Laughton. Carter had cried intermittently, he said, all the way through. During the interval he could hardly speak.
And even now I am only half in this world. Laughton’s interpretation was muted – Lear was a small, bewildered man, who became terrific because he started as nothing. The storm emphasised the littleness of man, rather than man battling for all he was worth against the elements – a very gentle rain and occasional lightning flashes with the two puny figures in the middle of this. I can’t really explain; only a man with terrific strength and spirituality could dare to play Lear so restrainedly … this cherubic little man with more dignity and beauty of soul than one could have thought of. Un homme ne vaut rien, mais rien ne vaut un homme. Goodness, I wish you could have seen it. I’ve never been in a theatre before and heard people crying all round me. I don’t know how I had the strength to sit through it, it was so beautiful and harrowing.
Laughton and Glen Byam Shaw were both moved to read the letter. Laughton’s reply, written nearly a year later, contained an interesting self-observation: ‘It did not seem that the play King Lear had anything to do with my will. I found myself doing many things which I had not planned to do …’
Later, Ken Carter wrote an analysis of the performance.
The first two and a half acts were making ready for the wonders to come. It was a carefully grounded interpretation, craftsmanlike, with sound, solid preparation (the audience needed patience) … the scale, or arc, of his concept was so great that one could sense the death of this Lear right from the beginning. In the quest for unity, Laughton chose as the under-lying emotion bewilderment: a very curious emotion, little-explored.
Carter traces the bewilderment through the play, from Cordelia’s failure to pander to his wishes, to the Fool’s reproof of him, to the storm’s refusal to come to his aid, to the wonder of Cordelia’s selfless love, to his final bewilderment at her death.
You could say that Laughton achieved an extraordinary technical feat in sustaining this apparently slight emotion, through so many variations, through the entire length of the play. He found unity of character in childishness. In the first part, he was spoilt, petulant, self-centred; in the second he was innocent, with a sense of wonder, freshness of vision, purity.
Carter describes the various manifestations of this, ending with the death of Cordelia:
Laughton’s Lear mourned his dead daughter with all the tragic intensity of a child whose pet rabbit had died – that fresh, stabbing, urgent pain which is only belittled by adults who have forgotten their own childhoods … This Lear did not grow madder and madder. Instead, he became less and less sane. The process was so gradual and natural that the audience was caught by surprise … an added poignancy was that Laughton could never totally hide the power of his mind. He brought out a curious paradox: this Lear was driven to madness by the onset of a new sanity. From within, there arose an unbidden awareness of other people’s suffering, of the condition of humanity, of general principles – in short, an awareness of reality and reason. In Laughton’s performance, the turning point was ‘O! Reason not the need …’ It was delivered as a suddenly perceived deep insight; not as a tit-for-tat in the chop-logic about how many followers he should have … Laughton’s performance of Lear’s humility was outstanding. Not mere absence of pride: humility. All productions show humiliations being heaped upon Lear; all productions stress that Lear has been humbled, broken, made weaker. No other production has shown Lear gaining humility; humility as an asset, as a strength … Laughton’s humility was the foundation of his humanity. Lear became the best the human race could offer in defence of its existence.
Laughton was lucky enough to find in Ken Carter someone to whom his Lear immediately spoke as he had intended it. He had told a young actor in the company: ‘You know why my Lear is the greatest? Because I’m the first actor to play it on a rising graph after the storm.’ The young actor had simply stared at him; somehow Carter saw it, experienced it. One critic came close to understanding the performance – Harold Hobson, often wayward but sometimes seeing clearer than anyone else: ‘Lear is a very grand play; but grandeur soon becomes dull. Now Mr Laughton is never dull. He is not dull even at the beginning, when he looks ridiculous. But this absurdity of appearance is made the foundation of an extraordinary pathos later on. There is something overwhelmingly touching in the thought that the universe should pour so many sorrows, such a multitude of griefs, upon a head that seems, so deliberately seems, so undistinguished … even a sort of magnificence develops from the gigantic disproportion between the punished and the punishment. That the universe should single out so small a figure for its wrath gives a lurid splendour to the performance; it is’ (Hobson finds the exact image) ‘as if an ordinary man were called to crucifixion.’ Of course, Laughton was variable; he did lack stamina, and sometimes, Ian Holm has said, he simply didn’t try to reach the full range of even his own interpretation. His attitude was almost detached; it was almost like a lecture. ‘I know more about Lear than anyone living,’ he’d mock-boasted, and his performance was a kind of instruction. There is one famous incident which is highly significant in this regard. At a certain performance half way through the first scene, he completely forgot his lines, and asked for a prompt. It came. No, no, he said, back to the beginning of the speech. Again came a line. No, no, he said again, further back. You see, ladies and gentlemen, he said, turning to the audience, this is plot. And then he resumed the performance, not at all fazed. The remarkable point, though, is that neither was the audience. He had created a relationship with them where they had placed themselves totally in his hands.
Moving and stimulating as Ken Carter’s account of the performance is, it is possible that had Charles Laughton stood alone on the stage w
ith a copy of the play in his hand and simply read from it, it might have been just as affecting and compelling. There are many accounts of his readings of the play, the whole play. One is by Peter Hall in Hollywood; another by Enid Bagnold (‘He rehearsed himself for Lear … in the library his voice thundered’); a third by Christopher Isherwood: ‘I used to sit in that little room and watch and when I see the scene now … it’s like sitting all alone in the front row of a gigantic movie theatre where a vast face, dozens of times larger than life, is hanging right over you and saying things like, ‘When we are born we cry but we come to this great stage of fools’ and this kind of thing and I just wept, you know, and I was transfixed’. He had demonstrated to both Peter Hall and Christopher Isherwood how he intended to play the storm scene: ‘I remember,’ wrote Isherwood, ‘his telling me it was very important for him to have in his head the high note of the storm. A characteristic note to which he related the sound of his own voice. In other words he wanted to create the effect of the storm in his own speaking of the verse.’ ‘Of course in a room it was magic because I was sitting in a room being asked to imagine a storm. But in a theatre it didn’t work at all.’ (Peter Hall). To Enid Bagnold, ‘it all seemed so much smaller in the theatre.’ But in a sense, it may have been the whole play that he wanted to do. (Interestingly, Edward Hambleton maintained that Laughton’s performances as Galileo in the theatre paled by comparison with his readings of the whole play.) ‘At every performance,’ wrote Elsa Lanchester, ‘he reached out and stretched to solve the mystery of the crucifixion of Lear, but he never did quite touch on that ecstasy. He saw, he felt, he knew what it was about, but he still was not the transmitter of the mystery of the tragedy.’ Like so many descriptions of Laughton’s failures, her words make one long to have seen it, and yet the final verdict about this Lear is that it was scarcely a performance at all, that it was the unequal struggle that Laughton was offering up, not any definitive result; the spectacle of a great spirit at war with itself and a text. There is something indescribably moving about Glen Byam Shaw’s description of their visits to Stonehenge:
Charles arrived in a large hired car. The rain was coming down hard, but he tied a large woollen scarf round his head which made him look like some strange old woman and we wandered off to Stonehenge. There were a few other people there who all stared at Charles. Whether they recognised him, or just thought he was mad, I don’t know.
Next week they went to Beachy Head:
It was a beast of a day. A very high wind and raining. I parked the car and we struggled to the edge of the cliff. I hate heights and stopped well short of the edge, but Charles staggered on until he was within a few feet of it. Standing there alone battered by the wind and the rain, he looked remarkably like King Lear. When he came back to where I was standing my hands were sweating, but Charles was wonderfully gay and excited.
It is as if this was the experience; as if Charles were himself a character in a play or a novel and that his life was an exemplary life; that his profession, or even his vocation, was Being Charles Laughton On Behalf of Humanity. Actual formal achievements like giving a good performance were almost incidental; the more important task was Being Charles Laughton at deeper and deeper levels. There had never been and there would never be a context in which Charles Laughton would be happy, productive, at one with himself, because deeply imbedded in his temperament was an agitating agent which drove him, like Lear, into the storm at his own centre. In the words of Elsa Lanchester:
With the death of King Lear, Shakespeare not only knew life, but also the welcoming of death. It is almost as if such a scene as the death of Lear was written from the other side of the grave when Kent says, ‘Vex not his ghost, O let him pass, he hates him that would upon the wrack of this tough world stretch him out longer.’ If there is such a thing as heavenly music, it makes itself felt at this point. Charles’ performance made its power felt at this moment. Your sympathy reached back and back for his King Lear. I must mark this moment well, for looking back on Charles’ life I am forced to feel the relief at the end of his self-made burden.
Laughton was a highly intelligent man; he was also a greatly gifted actor. In a sense, however, these attributes are irrelevant to the central fact about him: his great, if, to use the Shakespearean word, vexed, spirit. His progress through acting was an attempt to find a channel for that great spirit. It reached its culmination in the play that was the mirror of its performer’s life; after it, he had little time. His last two years were spent in the shadow of death, while the spirit ebbed.
Last Work
THE SEASON AT Stratford ended with the last performance of Lear. The traditional curtain speech was made by Laurence Olivier. In the course of it, he thanked ‘our American visitors, Mr Robeson and Mr Laughton’. This observation, which distressed Laughton inordinately, though it was, of course, technically correct, symbolised his non-assimilation into the company. One of the younger actors observed that Laughton was too self-absorbed, too beleaguered by his own problems, really to connect with the company, despite individual connections (with Roy Dotrice and his family, for example). Olivier, fully in command of his body and his craft, had taken the trouble to memorise the names of the whole company, and found an approach to everyone; this was quite beyond Laughton, who, however, according to Blakemore, was ‘very, very egalitarian,’ and loathed hierarchies and formal etiquette. He did not, though, lead from the front: we’re all in this together, was his feeling, all struggling with the many-headed hydra that was the play.
Peter Hall, though, excited by his contact with Laughton, had asked him back to play Falstaff (the part he had told Agate he’d never play because he’d had to deal with ‘too many like that in the hotel’) and there was an informal agreement that he would return in 1962, for what became The Wars of the Roses. It’s a beguiling prospect; but even had he lived, one feels he might have found a way out of it.
Immediately after Lear, there was money to be made. Under Ten Flags was the way to make it: $100,000 of Dino de Laurentiis’ money for an inexplicably dreadful piece of multi-lingual nonsense about the war, with Laughton as a testy admiral, again. (Stand By For Action had been the previous incarnation of this performance – but at least there was a war on, that time.) In early 1960, he made a Holocaust drama, In the Presence of Mine Enemies, for television, in which he played a rabbi trying to keep alive: he read from the Bible, of course, but there is little else about the role that could have attracted him. His accent (very good when it’s good) wavers, and he plays a great deal of the part from under half-closed eyelids, a sure sign with him that he’s uncomfortable, as well he might have been: it went out live. ‘The under-rehearsed, vast, tragic, virtuoso part of a rabbi was not in his range, mentally or physically. Charles would need at least six months to touch a work like that.’ The television age (as he had discovered by a glance at the Stratford sky-line) was upon us, which meant, during his lifetime and beyond, skimped rehearsals and the terrifying ordeal of instant transmission. His performance is muted to the point of catatonia, but when, as occasionally happens, he feels confident enough to let go, the scope and grandeur of his talent suddenly reveals itself, and the other, highly competent, actors (like Arthur Kennedy, for example), look pretty small. The young Nazi officer in love with the rabbi’s daughter is played by Robert Redford (his biggest part to date), and the comparison in the two actors’ styles is instructive. Redford is impeccably ‘truthful’: he follows all the Method prescriptions, his action is clear, his inner life ticking nicely over. Laughton, meanwhile, appears to be asleep for most of their scenes together. Then he talks of the dignity of his people, and of the superiority of love to hate, and a huge ocean of feeling is released, and the whole absurd farrago suddenly matters, because he becomes the voice of his tribe, and love’s advocate. Redford (who is by no means unskilful in the role) seems, at these moments, to be made of cardboard.
The strain of the whole thing took a heavy toll: shortly after finishing it, Charles had a
heart-attack, which was traced to a diseased gall-bladder, for which he was operated on later in 1960. On his recovery, or, strictly speaking, slightly before, he started work on what was to be one of his presents to Elsa Lanchester for her help on King Lear – he would devise and direct a one-woman show for her. (The other present was a Lincoln convertible.) He took the show very seriously, and shaped and refined it with the same sense of detail and form he’d brought to all the other shows he’d created. As she wrote: ‘Elsa Lanchester – Herself had a good, solid continuity to it, like a successful conversation, and Charles really was the one who did it. I know I couldn’t have tied it all together as he did … after almost every single show, people came round and embraced me as if I were an old friend. They really thought they knew me. They’d never met me, they were strangers, but such was the nature of the show that Charles made for me that I was theirs. The title that Charles gave the show was good. Elsa Lanchester – Herself.’ His programme credit read ‘Censored by Charles Laughton.’ The show was a great hit in New York, and Elsa Lanchester continued playing it for the rest of her performing life. A year later, when Laughton was again in hospital, she filled in the dates that he’d been forced to cancel, and, quickly reviving the show, she and her pianist Ray Henderson decided to drop the third partner, Don Dollarhide, and rework the material to accommodate the change. This enraged Laughton, who, from his sickbed forbade the changes. ‘You must not do that! The show is made for three.’ ‘I suppose,’ wrote Lanchester, ‘he did not want to change the mathematics of his production for me. Charles created with precision, like making a watch. Every show he did was precision made. As my show was – after all, Charles had created it.’ They did, nevertheless, play it as a two-hander; but Charles never saw it. It was all too late by then.
