Orson Welles, Vol I (48 page)

Shortly afterwards, Welles was back, and Houseman was not far behind. Both of them had wounds to lick. It is as if they had had affairs which hadn’t worked out and had rather sheepishly come back to the marriage. Houseman had been directing Leslie Howard in
Hamlet
, and it was a more or less unmitigated
disaster, certainly for him. True to the rules of a clandestine affair, he had managed to avoid letting Welles know anything about it until it was inevitable, ‘since the mention of any theatrical activity except his own provoked in Orson an automatic reaction of ridicule or rage’.
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As if there were a curse on it, everything about the production had gone wrong from the beginning. Leslie Howard
chose his own cast, including some duds, and he hadn’t learned his lines. Virgil Thomson who was writing the music fought incessantly with Agnes de Mille who was responsible for the dances; Stewart Chaney’s huge eleventh-century settings dwarfed Howard and forced him into a heavy-handedness which betrayed his natural gifts. The production and Howard were both critically slaughtered in the wake of
John Gielgud’s triumph in the same role only a month before, which was still running. Houseman retired, hurt. If he had expected sympathy from Orson, none was forthcoming. ‘Orson had chosen to regard my
Hamlet
activity as I had regarded his appearance in the juvenile lead of
Ten Million Ghosts
– as a sort of absurd and shameful interlude of which the least said the better. It was more than two
years before I undertook any new theatrical work of my own. For now, I was completely committed to my partnership with Welles and happier within the creative collaboration of that partnership than I could be, by myself, on the outside.’ He had, as the saying goes, got it out of his system.

Welles had returned to Project 891 chastened, too: but not reconciled. While Houseman now blissfully
proceeded as if their relationship were stronger than ever, Welles was restless. For the time being, however, there was the next play:
Doctor Faustus
. This had been on Welles’s mind for a long time; it was one of the plays
proposed for the Woodstock Festival two and a half years before. It contained two elements that were always close to his heart: magic, and high-flown verse. As far as the verse
is concerned, Welles might have been born to play Marlowe. As a Shakespearean actor, he lacked access to the pressure of the verse, and to its breathtaking variety; intelligent and beautifully spoken though his performances of Shakespeare invariably are, he is inclined to fall into a sonorous, monochromatic mode. He lacks rhythmic flexibility. What he has is superb tone and a wonderful command
of legato, perfect attributes for the rendition of what has been called Marlowe’s ‘mighty line’: great arcs of verse that soar and swoop, arias independent of character or situation. This essentially rhetorical writing suits him perfectly, and he fulfils it as few other actors of our time have been able to do, a notable exception being the late Richard Burton, another rhetorical actor. Both Burton
and Welles when they play Shakespeare attempt to make him rhetorical; it soon becomes dull, as if a singer were to attempt to sing Mozart like Wagner. All the bubbling and varied life becomes subdued in the attempt to make a splendid noise. Marlowe was his man.

There is no doubt, either, that he felt special kindred to the character of Faustus himself. ‘There was a deep personal identification
which, across a gulf of three and a half centuries, led him to the heart of the work and to its vivid re-creation on the American stage,’ wrote Houseman. ‘The truth is that the legend of the man who sells his soul to the Devil in exchange for knowledge and power and who must finally pay … with the agonies of eternal damnation was uncomfortably close to Welles’s own personal myth.’ It might also
be said that Faustus, last of the long line of Marlovian ‘over-reachers’, was, like Welles, driven to achieve ever more, unable to rest content with what he had done, and intolerant of any restriction on him. There is a chilling resonance for Welles in the lines from the Prologue which compare Faust to Icarus:

Till swoll’n with cunning, of a self-conceit,

His waxen wings did mount above
his reach

And melting, heavens conspired his overthrow!

The identification goes even deeper, and darker, according to Houseman: ‘Orson really believed in the Devil … this was not a whimsey but a very real obsession. At twenty-one Orson was sure he was doomed … he was rarely free from a sense of sin and fear of retribution so intense and immediate that it drove him through
long nights of
panic to seek refuge in debauchery or in work.’

And long ere this I should have done the deed

Had not sweet pleasure conquered deep despair.

‘Quite literally, Orson dared not sleep. No sooner were his eyes closed than, out of the darkness, troupes of demons – the symbols of his sins – surrounded and claimed him … in retribution for crimes of which he could not remember the nature,
but of which he never for a moment doubted he was guilty.’ It is interesting to note that Houseman was himself no stranger to haunted sleep; but he had dismissed his demons. ‘My nightmares grew to such an unbearable pitch of violence that I knew I had to break through them or go mad. When they finally scattered and dissolved, they drained away some of those other, deeper terrors – of rejection, poverty,
death and annihilation – that haunted me for so many years of my life.’ Welles seemed unable to. Perhaps he never tried, for fear of what he would actually discover. Maybe like many another artist, he was convinced that his demons were the source of his art. They were certainly, if we are to believe Houseman, the driving force behind it; perhaps they also destroyed it, finally, by forcing him
ever on and on.

Only Houseman and a very few others saw Welles in this light. To most people he was a conquering hero: Tamburlaine rather than Faustus. He laid into this production with overwhelming energy and intensity. His concept of
Doctor Faustus
was intimately bound up with magic, and he focused his considerable ingenuity and industry on realising that aspect. Magic was not only a theatrical
diversion; it was a metaphor of both power and delusion. The magician has control over nature and the elements, but what he secures for himself is insubstantial. Faustus uses his magic for banal purposes, as much as for exalted ones; similarly Welles used theatrical magic for the crudest low comedy (the Pope’s procession, with meats flying up into the air, a pig dancing an obscene dance, hats
flying off, and then the entire scene disappearing, leaving Faustus alone), and for effects of breathtaking beauty. In
The Cradle Will Rock
screenplay, he describes the scene of Helen’s appearance.

FAUSTUS
opens his arms as though in a gesture of ritual, and out of the murk there appears
HELEN OF TROY,
high in the filmy air, as though riding a cloud. He looks up at her dark form and as he
looks, takes wing and flies up, through the air to
HELEN
’s
side
.)

FAUSTUS

O thou art fairer than the evening air

Clad in the beauty of a thousand stars!

(Now, as Faustus rises to her
,
HELEN
is aglow with new light … we realise that she wears a mask
,
FAUSTUS,
embracing her, raises the mask … Her head falls back, loosening a great fall of reddish-blonde hair. It reaches almost to
the ground above which she floats.)

FAUSTUS

Her lips suck forth my soul – see where it flies!

Come, Helen, come give me my soul again.

(The kiss is obviously real, and held for longer than is customary on the stage. The instant before a first titter might be heard, he drops her head – her body – There is nothing there! Nothing but her cloak
–
FAUSTUS
himself falls down from the
sky. He hits the floor hard. (It is almost like an accident.)

And now, at the sound of a tolling bell, he raises his head and we see he is no longer the young man (nor the mature scholar) – He is suddenly old … This is the last midnight, the hour when
DOCTOR FAUSTUS
must keep his dreadful bargain …)

A bravura description of bravura effects, thrillingly reported from the front line. The
first element in the creation of these effects was light: Feder’s department. Grumpily observing that ‘the performance was run continuously with no intermission, putting the whole burden of changes in tempo and space into the realm of the worker in light’,
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he continues: ‘A very curious phenomenon appeared in this production. In the past, light had been the tool to illuminate what was to be seen;
now light itself was to take the place of the object that was to be illuminated. The stage took on a new freedom, because by means of its very darkness one could light up a scene at the back of the stage, and with nothing intervening, the entire foreground space disappeared.’ So many lights were hung from the grid that it broke under the weight, according to Richard France; the cast had to abandon
the theatre for a week. There was, or appeared to be, no set; the light was the set. In order for this principle to work, the stage was made into a black shell; the floor was painted black, too. Bill Baird, now doing the job for which he was trained – making puppets of the Seven Deadly Sins – described the apparatus required to make the effects work: ‘He had miles of black velvet and tubes of
about five foot maybe twenty foot long on the inside of which he had lekolites – and they made columns
of light … it is one of the first times they used these long tubes with light in them … they just came down and hit the floor – and they wouldn’t be more than five foot wide.’
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The techniques were those of variety magic acts from time immemorial, allied to the new lighting skills that were being
developed day by day.

Paula Laurence, who was playing Helen of Troy, reports the use of columns of black velour ‘to produce Living Statues as in the circus’. The stage was mined with trapdoors: ‘The stage manager of that show must have lost his mind. I think they had fifteen trapdoors, with all kinds of effects and smoke pots and everything.’
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So many holes had been cut in the stage that
it had to be reinforced. Further to facilitate the transitions, Welles commissioned Paul Bowles to write linking passages for the unearthly combination of oboe, saxophone, clarinet, trombone, and harp that, in Stark Young’s words, ‘can often float you into the scenes’ Elysium’.
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Sound, as always, was a crucial element in Welles’s production: radio speakers were used to amplify the voices from
hell.

Rehearsals took place at night to allow construction by day, and they had to be onstage, with the lights. ‘Going into the Maxine Elliott during rehearsals was like going into the pit of hell,’
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wrote Hallie Flanagan. ‘Total darkness punctuated by stabs of light, trapdoors opening and closing to reveal bewildered stagehands or actors going up, down and around in circles; explosions;
properties disappearing in a clap of thunder; and onstage Orson, muttering the mighty lines and interspersing them with fierce adjurations to the invisible but omnipresent Feder. The only point of equilibrium in these midnight seances was Jack Carter, quiet, slightly amused, probably the only actor who ever played Mephisto without raising his voice.’ Welles had taken another gamble on Carter; on the
understanding that he would stay with him and Virginia in the duplex on 14th Street for the duration of the run. The rest of the cast were recruited from
Horse Eats Hat
. Chubby Sherman was playing Robin, the principal comic servant; in the role of the clown, Welles cast the ancient vaudevillian Harry McKee. He put Edwin Denby in charge of him.

‘Go across the street and make a dance for him,’
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Welles told Denby. ‘I want him to have a dance.’ ‘And I said, “What kind of a dance? You mean a morris dance?” He said, “Yes, yes, anything you want” … I didn’t know what to do because I realised he was an old man … so I said to him, “What could you do?” and he said, “Well, I have this bauble and I could play golf with it.” And I said, “OK” … one time he spat on the floor and pretended it was
a golf ball. It was really in the spirit of an Elizabethan clown.’ Just as Denby had been roped in to teach an old man how to morris dance, so Paula Laurence and Virginia Welles were sent off to the public libraries research the costumes, tracing out the patterns for Welles to choose from. His costume drawings (based on what they found and straightforwardly Elizabethan) are skilful and witty;
they give, as the best costume designs do, vivid intimations of character, practically useful to the actor. Welles’s adroitness in this area has been little commented on, but it is clear that had he wished to make his living as a designer, he could have done. The industrious wardrobe mistress for Project 891, charged with making up the costumes from these sketches, was Beverly Juno; with her face
‘like a chocolate-box blonde’ she had once been a showgirl. Now she had a bad leg. ‘She liked a drink. I’d go and see her in the wardrobe and she’d say: “Anybody who doesn’t like this life is crazy!” I sure agreed with her.’
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In addition to her ancillary activities as costume researcher, Paula Laurence (the leading lady, after all, however brief her appearances) was told by Welles to make
a mask for her character, shiny down white. She got hold of some plaster of Paris, and duly made a life-mask of herself: a tricky business. Welles then came along and painted it with a faintly green tinge, applying brass clippings to it. ‘Orson designed everything you saw on that stage. Everything originated in Orson’s head; it was the duty of everybody to fill it out – it was presented with such
clarity.’
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‘Hands-on’ is a phrase that might have been invented for Welles; it is part of what gave these rehearsals such excitement, an excitement generally absent from a professional theatre in which each department’s activities are strictly demarcated, and the director is an umpire, adjudicating, occasionally advising, but almost never actively participating. On another occasion he demanded
a thunder drum; none in existence was terrifying enough. He gave instructions for one to be built: ‘Here was one of the goddam biggest bull-skins you can imagine. They stretched it wet over a frame made of four-by-tens. It was so strong that it pulled the corners of the frame apart. But you never heard a thunder drum like it … all you had to do was take a hammer and just touch it, and you get a
sound that went all through the theatre. You could even feel it in your seat.’
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The palpable sense of creativity, not so much striking while the iron is hot, but making the iron hot by striking it, was everywhere, and unforgettable to those involved. No wonder Jack Carter was drawn to it, simply to sit and watch; no cabaret, no mere entertainment could have
been as enthralling as watching the
show being made before his very eyes in the furnace of Welles’s Promethean art. There was no calmly premeditated master-plan; Welles made it up as he went along. This is the source of its validity. It may also have denied it the solidity which only comes from well-laid foundations.