There may be two Londons. After The Visit ’s New York triumph, a tour, and a City Center return for the usual two weeks so that wise New Yorkers could collect this historic farewell one last time, the Lunts took The Visit to the West End after all. The critics were simply amazed. Most of it was because the Lunts really were stupendous. Some of it was because Alfred played Anton Schill (changed from Dürrenmatt’s obviously unsuitable Alfred Ill) in a magnificent arc even as his fortunes fell ever lower. He was the guilty man who denies and resists, then attempts a meticulous little frenzy of an escape. None of the crowd “seeing him off” physically stops him, yet Lunt played the scene as if fearful of rescue and judgment at once: maddened by the destiny he chose. At length Lunt resigned himself to what he came to see as justice, a messy old coot yet huge, Greek, symbolic.
Then, too, some of the fuss was because Lynn softened Dürrenmatt’s Baal of an old lady, an implacable god of destruction. Lynn’s Claire Zachanassian hailed from a combination of Norse saga and fairy tale, less old and inhuman than a beauty in love with Lunt and vengeance at once.
There were many great moments; the company took away a career’s worth of insights from the experience. Perhaps the most arresting of the Luntian touches was that last minute or so of Act One, where, at a banquet before more or less the entire town, the lady makes her evil offer:
CLAIRE: I want the life of Anton Schill … I am willing to pay one billion marks.
(The Burgomaster stands up, very pale and dignified.)
BURGOMASTER: Madame Zachanassian, we are not in the jungle. We are in Europe … In the name of the town of Güllen, I decline your offer. In the name of humanity, we shall never accept.
The town breaks into wild applause, which emphasizes Dürrenmatt’s ironic recollection of Nazism (“We are in Europe”) by growing into an angry clapping fascist unison. The lady rises, thanks the Burgomaster, gives him a long look, and says only
CLAIRE: I can wait.
(She turns and walks off, and the curtain falls.)
At least, so runs the script. The Lunts and Brook decided to make far more of the pause before Claire’s last line and to cut Claire’s exit. Brook had toyed with the unnervingly long pause at Stratford-upon-Avon, in 1949, in Measure For Measure . The director determined to goad the play’s conflicting themes of justice and mercy with what Kenneth Tynan described as “half a dozen long pauses, working up a new miracle of tension Shakespeare knew nothing about.” The last of these pauses, after the Duke asks Isabella if she will plead for the villain, so concentrated attention on Barbara Jefford’s Isabella that, said Tynan, “every heart in the theatre [was] thudding” for, as he counted it, thirty-five seconds.
Brook now decided to top even that, perhaps because The Visit, too, concerns the meting out of justice—this time without mercy. A brilliant actress might have held the pause after thanking the Burgomaster, eventually to turn slowly to her lover and victim, thence to the Burgomaster again, and utter the final line. A genius actress might have found a way to do all this without quite looking at the two men, or at anyone, perhaps treating the audience to a gnomically unfathomable look.
But this actress—Lynn Fontanne—did nothing, and did it for so long a time that the public became as nervous as the citizens of Güllen. Of course, Fontanne’s “nothing” was like Garbo’s in the last shot of Queen Christina . Supposedly, Fontanne varied the length of the pause according to how intently she felt the audience had followed Act One; a truly captivated audience got the longest, most occupied nothing of all time, till even Lunt himself might fear.
Only then did Fontanne channel the stage manager, perhaps by astral projection: ready the curtain . Without moving her head, without even changing any of her two thousand simultaneous and contradictory expressions, she delivered the last line. “I can wait.” She waited, immobile, for another eleven seconds.
